it is obvious that Facebook will never do a good enough job of keeping our democracy safe. The question is: what are we going to do about it?
A new book that has hit the bestseller lists like a thunderclap comes with a spooky photo of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the cover and a very effective summary on the back cover of Something Good better than blurbs: a timeline of Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg’s wacky apologies.
The back cover of “An Ugly Truth,” by New York Times writers Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel, might save you a lot of reading time: “Calm down. To breathe. We hear you, ”Zuckerberg condescended in September 2006.“ We never meant to upset you, ”Sandberg said in July 2014. The list goes on with similar expressions of sincerity in 2017, 2018, 2019, none of them convincing, all undermined by evidence of the company’s actions or lack thereof, culminating in Zuckerberg’s May 2020: “We have to do a better job. ”
Sure. But it’s pretty obvious that Facebook will never do a good enough job of keeping our democracy safe by reigning over disinformation, blocking hate speech, verifying paid political lies, and replacing the newspaper business model that it does. he destroyed.
Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel (CNBC / CNN)
Instead, the social media giant appears poised to continue on its current path of achieving gigantic revenue and profit with advertising fueled by its bottomless data pit and an offense-oriented strategy against its detractors backed by Oxbridge-accented flacks, a large army of DC lobbyists, and an ownership structure that means only Zuckerberg’s opinion really matters.
The thing about this new book, which has put the authors on just about every talk show and news platform over the past two weeks, is that it further confirms everything we already knew about. Facebook and what has been exposed previously by investigative journalists (including Kang and Frenkel) and the harsh criticism of early co-founders, investors or executives who left frustrated.
“You won’t find anyone more ruthless in business than Mark,” says a former executive of the boss and his priorities, in the book.
And on Sandberg: “Arrogance is its weakness, its blind spot. She thinks there is no one she cannot charm or convince, ”said another former executive.
The book provides details on chapters and verses with many Facebook elders, who are most aware of the fact that Facebook has not made its way into the role of national villain that it currently inhabits. He did it through a series of deliberate decisions.
One of those decisions was to put less emphasis on security when Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos sounded the alarm bells about Russian hacking and troll farms in the 2016 election. Stamos ultimately resigned and is now one of the company’s most vocal critics.
Another was to ignore repeated pleas from human rights activists to suppress hate messages against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar in 2015 (Facebook assigned a single Burmese speaker to monitor thousands of messages.) A Rohingya genocide took place in 2016. and 2017, when a million people were forced to flee.
Another was to hire and then quickly shut down CIA veteran Yael Eisenstat in 2018 to lead the company’s efforts to combat election interference. But Eisenstat was ordered not to attend meetings on electoral integrity. When she warned that allowing paid political ads to go unverified could poison the electoral process, she was pointedly ignored; instead, the company announced that it would not do so. Then she created a tool to block efforts to mislead voters on election day. They brutally fired her. “None of this made sense,” she told the authors.
The book exposes from start to finish the impressive number of high-level departures of talented executives frustrated by Zuckerberg’s broken promises, or his refusal to change his dogmatic views on pure free expression, and more generally the consequences of failing to keep. not take responsibility for the impact of Facebook on society.
To only cite a few :
* Product manager Chris Cox
* Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos
* Director of Online Security Rita Rabi
* Responsible for the operations of the Sandy Parakilas platform
* Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger
* Co-founder Chris Hughes
The inevitable conclusion is that Facebook can’t do it right. When the company tries to act as a good corporate citizen, it is too little too late. But there’s an equally compelling argument that no business could meet the challenge of controlling the content of 2.85 billion global users.
That is, Facebook is just too big. Too powerful. Too heavy. And, again, totally irresponsible.
The question is: what are we going to do about it?
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