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I.
The contributions of Chris Hughes are perhaps the most unusual for a start-up employee. Unlike Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, he did not write any code. Unlike Eduardo Saverin, he did not contribute to business development or sales. As Ellen McGirt told in a 2009 profile, Hughes was rather known internally for what might be called her general skills:
Hughes was the poet among teens who created Facebook; unlike Zuckerberg and his co-founder and co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, he did not write software code and did not want it. Instead, he tried to find ways to connect people to each other and share content more easily. (His nickname among Facebook insiders is "The Empath.") Hughes began making product suggestions, "messing with the site," as he puts it. When they decided to open Facebook to students outside of Harvard, he claimed that different schools should have their own networks, in order to preserve the site's sense of security and privacy. He became the official Facebook Exploder: anthropologist, customer service representative and media spokesperson.
Even though he was on Facebook, Hughes was a heretic. While the other founders wanted to create a unified network, Hughes argued that every college should have its own network, in order to maintain a sense of belonging to a close-knit community. He has lost the argument for the moment, although the recent Facebook group association suggests he was on the right track.
Hughes was seduced by Facebook in 2007, three years after the founding of the company, by another leading empathist: Barack Obama. He pursued a difficult career in politics and magazine ownership. But today, Hughes has reappeared, with an editorial in The New York Timesto give up the society he helped to build. Facebook should be broken, he says – it's just too big and too powerful for one person to run it:
Mark is a good and kind person. But I am sorry that his concentration on growth has led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I am disappointed in myself and the first Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence the elections and hold nationalist leaders accountable. And I'm worried Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.
The government has to hold Mark to account.
More than 6000 words, Hughes makes his case. Readers of this newsletter are familiar with the topics it covers: Facebook's anti-competitive behavior with rivals; its steady progress towards almost total market dominance; its rapid consumption of our data and our attention; its almost uncontrolled power to trace and maintain the lines of a politically acceptable speech around the world; and its negative externalities on the army of subcontractors that supports its work. (Hughes quotes my recent article on Facebook moderators in Phoenix.)
Like many detractors of Facebook favorable to the regulation, the remedies proposed by Hughes consist in forcing the company to dissociate WhatsApp and Instagram. He also (problematically) called for the creation of a new government agency dedicated to protecting consumer privacy and regulating speech on the Internet.
In some circles, Hughes has been praised for his courage. Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, called the brave op-ed. Anand Giridharadas, a prominent critic of Big Tech, called her "morally importantSenator Elizabeth Warren said:Chris Hughes is right. "
Others saw in this editorial a good opportunity and acted accordingly. Many tweets were in the vein of "oh watched here, the man who was made incredibly rich by Facebook belatedly found the courage to criticize him." one of these.) Gabe Rivera, from Techmeme, watched the editorial an opportunistic effort to recast Hughes' personal narrative far from failure.
Hughes' specific motivations can be a mystery. But leave them for a moment. What is most important here is the consensus that is now reflected in Hughes' op-ed.
Think of the number of top Facebook executives who have now opposed the existence of Facebook in its current form:
- Moskovitz is one of the main donors to Color of Change, which is campaigning for Zuckerberg to be fired. (On Twitter, Moskovitz told me I had misunderstood this gift, saying that he was only meant to help the Democrats. When I asked what his argument was for a breakup, he said, "If the goal is to improve democracy, we should crack Fox and Sinclair first." He then deleted the tweet.)
- Justin Rosenstein, head of development of the Facebook-type button, warned of the negative effects of social networks on individual psychology. (Rosenstein co-founded the Asana Collaboration with Moskovitz.)
- Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, said he was "conscientious objector" of the social network. "It probably hurts productivity in a strange way," he said. "God only knows what it does to our children's brains."
- Chamath Palihapitiya, who led Facebook's very important growth team in its infancy, told an audience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business of "taking a break" in social media. "I think we have created tools that tear apart the social fabric of its operation," he said. He added that he felt "enormously guilty" after spending many years with the company before going back on those comments after receiving an angry call from Sheryl Sandberg.
- Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, was not one of Facebook's top leaders. But he especially told people to delete Facebook after leaving the company.
Individual criticism of leaders varies in nature and vehemence. But collectively, they present a point of view that corresponds to that of Hughes: society is too big, too powerful and too harmful to the health of our individual psyche and our society.
It is worth noting once again how extraordinary it is to see so many leaders of a large technology group expressing such concerns about its consequences for the world. Admittedly, employees of Google, Apple and Amazon have left and complained about specific aspects of the work of these companies. But no senior leader left and called for their separation – let alone their parade.
Seen in this light, Hughes' specific arguments regarding the dismantling of Facebook are less significant than the new consensus they reflect. Many Facebook co-founders are now in favor of a radical change in society, as well as maintaining the status quo. And anti-Facebook sentiment is now a dominant vision one of the founding members of Facebook's founding team.
II.
Of course, Facebook's current management team had a different view of the platform. Nick Clegg, the company's new policy and communications officer, has published this: do not worry, we have:
"Facebook accepts that success implies responsibility. But you are not imposing liability by calling for the dissolution of a successful American company, "said Nick Clegg, vice president of Global Affairs and Communication for Facebook. statement given to The edge. "The responsibility of technology companies can only be realized by the laborious introduction of new rules for the Internet. That's exactly what [CEO] Mark Zuckerberg claimed. Indeed, he meets with the heads of government this week to advance this work. "
It was up to the journalists Olivia Solon and Steve Rhodes to point out that Clegg had been for enforce accountability by demanding the dissolution of successful US companies before he opposes them.
There is a legitimate criticism of the Hughes editorial, that is, it includes a fairly radical anti-speech sentiment. This is part of his idea of creating a kind of federal online parole monitor. "This idea may seem non-American," he writes. "We would never defend a censorship speech from a government agency. But we already have limits to shout "fire" in a crowded theater, child pornography, speech intended to provoke the violence and false statements to manipulate the stock prices. We will need to create similar standards that technology companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to court review, just like any other limit on speech. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or use live violence. "
Adi Robertson explores the problem with this type of thinking here:
Hughes is simply asking the police to enforce existing laws online. Police services do not always understand web platforms well and the size of the Internet facilitates the dissemination of harmful information and makes it difficult for people to be held accountable. But in the United States, we do not need new news agencies or guidelines to better investigate violent hate groups or stop perpetrators. The criminal justice system faces enormous problems, but it can not be solved by delegating private companies, particularly because harassment and extremism on the Internet occur at independent sites or through private channels such as the Internet. email.
Internet is an ugly place, and discussing how to make it less ugly is a legitimate and urgent task. But simply calling "creating guidelines" to turn websites into content cops – while hinting that existing laws do not already apply to the Internet – is a sign of goodwill that is not worthy of Hughes' more general manifesto.
See also this interesting Stanford thread Daphne Keller.
III.
A criticism of this editorial that I find less convincing is that Facebook should not have to give up WhatsApp and Instagram because that would not solve all the problems in which Facebook had been involved, nor would it represent a kind of excessive government outreach. Among those who support the first are Benedict Evans, Mike Masnick, Shira Ovid and Kevin Kelly. For the latter, see Matt Rosoff. The taking of Ovid is representative:
I do not have the answers. But I'm afraid that "breaking Facebook" has become a catch-all, a soothing solution to the feeling that Facebook is bad and something should be done about it. A break may be the right approach. But I want defenders to start by uniting people around fundamental issues and to look for possible solutions before we all support Standard Oil dismantling.
There is surely the truth in this – the "someone" make Something! ", The feeling is real and can have terrible consequences in politics, as we have seen with FOSTA (endorsed by Facebook) and SESTA. But the arguments put forward by Hughes and others seem quite clear to me: the creation of multiple large and economically viable social networks introduces valuable friction and competition into the economy. These frictions will probably make the ideas slower and a little more difficult to propagate, which will give humanity a little more time to think before reacting to the indignation of the day. And the competition will further encourage new networks to solve the thorny problems of political discourse, content moderation, platform integrity, and so on.
If you think that the United States has generally been well served by 50 democracy labs, you could expect to see similar benefits by having seven separate US social networks, representing several hundred million people. Each of them will have to deal with many of the problems with which Facebook's conglomerate is currently struggling – but they will also have new compelling reasons to innovate and many new rivals that they can copy shamelessly.
Whether you support breaking Facebook (or Google, Amazon or Apple) depends largely on what you think of the problem. If you think the main issue here is anonymous coordination between terrorists on WhatsApp, then you're right: breaking Facebook will not solve your pet's problem.
But if you believe that monopolies are inherently bad and that serving a customer base of several billion people creates problems that no one or company can solve competently, it seems to me that you are probably supportive of the dissolution of Big Tech. And if you work for the US government and think about it, it seems worth noting that so many of those who built Facebook almost begged for it.
A small handful of bonus links
Instagram will start blocking hashtags returning erroneous anti-vaccination information
I have written about the welcome changes made today by Instagram to reduce the spread of anti-vaccination hoaxes.
Hugo Barra leaves the Oculus team for an initiative of Facebook's Global AR / VR partner & # 39;
Facebook's Oculus division is officially no more than a Facebook team and does not have a leader. I can not say if that bodes well for the company's virtual reality initiatives.
Facebook automatically generates videos celebrating images of extremists
Here's a big downside and one thing to think about whenever Facebook welcomes the work done by its automated systems:
Another Facebook self-generating feature, which goes awry, removes job information from the user's pages to create business pages. The feature is supposed to produce pages intended to help businesses create a network, but in many cases they serve as a branded landing space for extremist groups. This feature allows Facebook users to enjoy the pages of extremist organizations, including Al-Qaida, the Islamic State group and Al-Shabab, based in Somalia, thus providing a list of supporters to recruiters.
At the top of a page automatically generated by Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the AP uncovered a photo of the damaged hull of the USS Cole, which had been bombed by Al-Qaida during one of the attacks. attack in 2000 off the coast of Yemen. 17 US Navy sailors. This is the image that defines AQAP's propaganda. The page includes the Wikipedia entry for the group and was appreciated by 277 people during its last access this week.
Now on sale on Facebook: Looted Antiquities from the Middle East
And another downside of Karen Zraick:
According to researchers, ancient treasures looted in conflict zones in the Middle East are being offered for sale on Facebook, including items that could have been looted by Islamic State militants.
Amr Al-Azm, professor of history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio, said Amr Al-Azm, professor of history and anthropology at Middle East at Shawnee State University in Ohio. official in Syria. He has overseen the trade for years with his Athar project colleagues, named after the Arabic word for antiquities.
And finally …
Ben Grosser, to whom I wrote when he created the "Demetricator" software to remove the "likes" and other numbers of engagement for social networks, is back with a supercut agitprop.
"I watched every video appearance of his film from 2004 to 2018 seize every time he talked about" more "," growth / growth ", or when he spoke in metrics (for example," one billion ") Grosser told me. "The result is a nearly 50-minute film that examines what Zuckerberg is focusing on most and what he hopes to achieve."
Talk to me
Send me tips, comments, questions and explain to me how you could divide Facebook so that it directly solves your personal problem with the social network and no one else: casey @ theverge. com.
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