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We are now back in one of those recurrent waves of bad publicity for Facebook. It deserves every bit of it. Facebook is the prime online, global incubator of racist, quasi-fascist propaganda, conspiracy theories, state-run psyops and agit-prop operations, even in at least one case actual state-backed programs of population transfer and arguable genocide. But to really understand the problem with Facebook we need to understand the structural roots of that problem, how much of it is baked into the core architecture of the site and its very business model. Indeed much of it is inherent in the core strategies of the post-2000, second wave Internet tech companies that now dominate our information space and economy.
Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation. Good old fashioned advertising does that to a degree. But Facebook is much more powerful, adaptive and efficient. That’s what all the algorithms do. That’s why it makes so much money. This is the error with people who say the fact that people do bad things with Facebook is no different from people doing bad things with phones. Facebook isn’t just a ‘dumb’ communications system. It’s not really a platform in the original sense of the word. (The analogy for that is web hosting.) Facebook is designed to do specific things. It’s an engine to understand people’s minds and then manipulate their thinking. Those tools are refined for revenue making but can be used for many other purposes. That makes it ripe for misuse and bad acting.
The core of all second wave Internet commerce operations was finding network models where costs grow mathematically and revenues grow exponentially. The network and its dominance is the product and once it takes hold the cost inputs remained constrained while the revenues grow almost without limit. With the possible exception of Apple, which is still driven mostly by the production of physical products, that’s the core feature of all the big tech Goliaths.
That’s why there’s no phone support for Google or Facebook or Twitter. If half the people on the planet are ‘customers’ or users that’s not remotely possible. That’s why these companies employ so few people relative to scale and profitability.
Even if we set aside genuinely substantive questions about what does and doesn’t constitute abuse or the line between persuasion and manipulation, managing or distinguishing between legitimate and bad-acting uses of the powerful Facebook engine is one that would require huge, huge investments of money and armies of workers to manage. That scale of monetary investment and involvement is wholly beyond the business model. This is why we routinely see these comical stories about journalists covering white supremacists themselves being banned for white supremacist content or activists battling pedophiles themselves being banned as pedophiles. The core economic model requires doing all of it on the cheap. Indeed, what Zuckerberg et al. have created with Facebook is so vast that the money required not to do it on the cheap almost defies imagination.
This is critical. Facebook’s core model and concept requires not taking responsibility for what others do with the engine created to drive revenue.
It all amounts to a grand exercise in socializing the externalities and keeping all the revenues for the owners. Here’s a way to think about it. Nuclear power is actually incredibly cheap. The fuel is fairly plentiful and easy to pull out of the ground. You set up a little engine and it generates energy almost without limit. What makes it ruinously expensive is managing the externalities – all the risks and dangers, the radiation, accidents, the constant production of radioactive waste. Facebook is best understood as a fantastically profitable nuclear energy company whose profitability is based on dumping the waste on the side of the road and accepting frequent accidents and explosions as inherent to the enterprise. (This is in many ways what fossil fuel producers do over a longer time horizon – pocket the money for selling oil and gas and let society at large absorb the externalities of climate devastation.)
But back to Facebook. The point is that they’ve created a hugely powerful and potentially very dangerous machine. The core business model is based on harvesting the profits from the commercial uses of the machine and using algorithms and very, very limited personnel (relative to scale) to try to get a handle on the most outrageous and shocking abuses which the engine makes possible.
Zuckerberg may be a jerk and there really is a culture of bad acting within the organization. But it’s not about him being a jerk. Replace him and his team with non-jerks and you’d still have a similar core problem. It’s built into the very foundation of the operation. It derives from the core economic goals of most second wave Internet companies. To manage the potential negative externalities, to take some responsibility for all the dangerous uses the engine makes possible would require money the owners are totally unwilling and in some ways are unable to spend.