Facebook is immoral. It is also doomed
“Humankind has got itself into a fine pickle. We are being exploited by companies that paradoxically deliver services we crave, and at the same time our lives depend on many software –enabled systems that are open to attack. Getting out of this mess will be a long-term project. It will involve engineering, legislation and, most important, moral leadership. Moral leadership is the first and biggest challenge. “
Rodney Brooks, professor emeritus, MIT
As the largest and most pervasive of social media platforms Facebook faces an urgent test of moral leadership. So far it is failing and dangerously so. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that Facebook’s recalcitrance in the face of a swelling chorus of calls for changing the way it does business — in authenticating the identity of its advertisers and genuinely controlling the privacy of its users — now poses an existential threat to the structures of society.
Here’s why:
In providing an addictive platform for connectedness — a primal human need — Facebook is no different than cigarette or opioid manufacturers who have manipulated human weaknesses for monetary gain. Just as every cigarette and every pill supply the “hit” that perpetuate the craving, Facebook’s insidious algorithms find and feed to unsuspecting humans the content that reinforces their deepest beliefs. Nicotine and opioids provide an exogenous “rush” of chemicals; reading or watching something that either reinforces cherished ideas, or stirs latent fears, may provide an equally powerful, endorphin rush to Facebook’s users. Once hooked, they can never leave; helpless as Facebook maps their minds in exquisite detail and helpless as Facebook sells this information to anyone willing to pay for it.
Particularly egregious is that Facebook has stood by as bad actors have used its engine to target users’ fears for political ends, with surgical precision. It has worked beautifully: The 2016 American presidential elections, Brexit and a host of other examples of successful disinformation campaigns around the world are evidence that Facebook is ruthlessly efficient at shaping human minds; so efficient, in fact, that Facebook can legitimately be accused of having broken democracy. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy — disorder, chaos, and unpredictability — increases over time in any closed system. It could be said that Facebook has been a major accelerant of entropy in society, responsible for dismantling a hundred years of electoral laws, and, as a result, playing handmaiden to authoritarianism.
Facebook’s scant regard for the privacy and protection of its users reflects the prevailing ethos on its home turf. Moral leadership is, at best, an alien concept to the swaggering sultans of Silicon Valley; at worst they wantonly flout it. They believe, viscerally, that technology and morality have an orthogonal relationship; one does not impinge on the other. The core of the argument is that the flow of electrons recognizes no borders — not geographical, nor moral. At the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence (AI), such beliefs are frightening.
In his 1954 paper, “The Question Concerning Technology,” the philosopher Martin Heidegger posited that technology is “not an instrument”, rather it is a way of understanding society and also that technology is “the highest danger,” because it lures us into seeing the world only through the lens of technological thinking.
[Heidegger also warned that technology is “not (purely) a human activity,” but develops beyond human control; a warning that bears heeding in the context of AI].
Heidegger’s observations are relevant here because society is best understood through a study of its messages and the communications technologies that facilitate them. From that perspective, Facebook lays bare both the messages and the mechanisms of messaging in today’s society. The lesson of Facebook is that while there is ugliness in society (and always will be), it is the messaging mechanism — the technology — that exacerbates and propagates that ugliness.
Heidegger’s concern about experiencing the world only through a technological lens is that we constrict our view of nature, and increasingly of human beings too; we see nature and humans only as raw material for technical operations. In the case of Facebook, those technical operations are the matching of users, based on their attributes, with advertiser objectives. Facebook treats its users as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled, set up and set aside. To Facebook, its users are simply aggregates of attributes, cogs and levers and tie rods in the great machine that prints money. This is an inhuman use of human beings, the very definition of immorality.
Can Facebook be stopped? The answer is yes. Legislation and the arc of technology are threatening its business model.
On January 1, 2020, California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) goes into effect, imposing severe restrictions on what information companies can gather on users. Like Europe’s GDPR it gives consumers that right to know what information companies like Facebook have on them, the right to have that deleted and the right to opt-out of the sale of that information. That strikes at the heart of Facebook’s business model.
The bigger challenge is resisting the weight of history; it is an indubitable fact of business that leaders in one generation of technology, or product category, are never the leaders in the next. The arc of computing, for example, is traced from mainframes to minicomputers to personal computers to smartphones, but each generation begat new leaders. Call it the first law of the technology business.
Facebook’s perfect storm is that while it adapts to regulatory influence, the next generation of communications technology is looming. The 5G wireless network portends a major discontinuity. It promises, at the very least, the advent of the video generation of social media.
Today’s streaming mobile video frustrates with slow load times, random stops and stutters and has trouble with higher-resolution formats. 5G offers more than just incremental enhancements over 4G. It promises, among other things, data speeds as much as 100 times faster than 4G, 50 times lower latency, 100 times more network capacity, and significantly more reliable connections.
In other words, 5G will revolutionize mobile video. In addition to UHD for live and on demand streaming, 5G will enable 360-degree video, 3D holograms, live personal 3D broadcasting from mobile devices and so-called immersive experiences like virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR).
This generational technology shift is already spawning early opportunities for video-focused platforms. Enter TikTok, the social media app that allows users to create and share 15-second video clips. TikTok has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity since entering the U.S. market last year. It boasts 1.2 billion global installs and 500 million active users, surpassing Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat. TikTok’s ability to capture the attention of Gen-Z — the biggest consumer cohort globally — has made it the world’s most valuable startup ($75 billion at last count).
That TikTok has the youngest user base out of all popular social media networks should worry Facebook mightily. After all, Facebook started as the social network for college students before it toppled MySpace, and Snapchat began life as the platform of choice for teenagers. Thus, the second law of the technology business: New technology is embraced first by young people — long before it achieves critical mass.
Facebook’s reaction to emerging, “vertical” competitors is to buy them, or to copy their most important features. What’s App (messaging), Instagram (photo and video sharing) and Occulus (virtual reality) are the most visible examples of focused apps that Facebook acquired. It tried to buy Snapchat (“ephemeral” messaging) but was rebuffed. Ever since, Facebook’s been desperately trying to put its erstwhile prey out of business by blatantly copying its features. Despite this onslaught Snapchat keeps growing its vitally important youth demographic.
Going forward it’s going to be harder for Facebook to vacuum up potential competitors. The FTC probably realizes that its biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, those newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone (a next generation technology), where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction.
As Facebook finds itself under intense scrutiny domestically, the FTC is going to be much warier. In the case of Tiktok, a China-based company, there’s virtually no way that Facebook would be able to acquire the upstart especially as geopolitical tensions are on the rise.
It’s obviously too early to anoint a giant killer. Better mobile video is only a small step toward a future of social media — or any kind of communications mechanism — that is beyond conception today. For the sake of humankind, one can only hope that such a future is guided by a strong moral compass.
