I didn’t want to write my last editor’s letter of 2019 about Facebook. Honestly. For a while it looked as if WeWork founder Adam Neumann would be a good lens through which to examine the year in tech.
Yet, somehow, Facebook managed to trump even one of the most calamitous corporate refinancing events of all time, brilliantly upping the ante by demonstrating mendacity in its corporate policy and an unparalleled tin ear when it comes to communications.
Yes, it’s hard to ignore a company with such unmatched market power so consistently plummeting to new lows in corporate demeanour. In January this year, I sat in the audience at the DLD conference watching Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg give a talk entitled. “What kind of internet do we want?”, aimed at persuading us that Facebook was definitely turning over a new leaf.
“We have acknowledged our mistakes,” she said. “We are listening and we are learning.” There was laughter in the audience – it didn’t help that the previous speaker had talked about trust.
A few months on from Sandberg’s mea culpa, Zuckerberg misguidedly evoked civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and abolitionist Frederick Douglass while giving testimony before Congress regarding Facebook’s digital currency.
He justified Libra by wrapping himself in the US flag and warning that, if the US doesn’t do it, China will. It’s great to know that the company responsible for disseminating Russian propaganda in the US general election of 2016 and the Brexit referendum has such high standards when it comes to protecting liberal democracy. Indeed, Zuck views Libra as extending “our democratic values and oversight across the world.” In case you missed it, this was just a few days after he made a speech at Georgetown University in which he announced that Facebook was happy to continue to publish political advertising that was demonstrably untrue.
Shortly after that, Sandberg appeared on *Bloomberg’*s TicToc (now QuickTake) and said, “we believe in free expression, we believe in political speech and ads can be an important part of that… we’ve now announced a presidential-ads tracker, which means you can see any ad anyone is running who’s a political candidate, anywhere in the US, anywhere in the world even, if it’s not targeted at you.”
WAIT. Let’s back up a and review the words: “if it’s not targeted at you”. Translation: Sandberg is justifying targeted, political propaganda by tying it up in a talking point with a transparency bow. This gives license to manipulators to use the Facebook platform in the full knowledge that the very people that they are targeting will have no idea that they have been targeted.
Transparency might not be a talking point that Nick Clegg should be pushing too hard. Aside from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook’s consent model is a masterpiece of opacity. Research by Transparency International in December 2018 revealed that 42.5 per cent of apps on the Google Play store share data with Facebook. Trackers even build profiles of non-Facebook users.
Facebook’s policy and communications in these areas is gobbledigook, doublethink and gaslighting. There is a lot of talking about listening, doing better and building trust, but the real challenge is that Facebook’s business model is to optimise the compilation of details of its users’ lives for corporate enrichment. And it’s very good at that.
Facebook’s stock started 2019 at around $135 per share; as I write it’s closing in on $200, and shareholders won’t want a root and branch reform of a company that is delivering such returns. Using any objective financial measure, Facebook is highly successful.
Yet 2019 was the year that, despite its professed efforts, the weight of evidence is that Facebook – in its current form and with its current corporate governance – is doing more harm than good in the world. 2020 should be the year when the rest of us ask the question: “What kind of internet do we want?”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
