Blaming the messenger

Facebook, the social platform that was supposed to help us share pictures of kittens with family members living far, has transformed itself into a global behemoth that can arguably affect the outcome of elections, give voice to all manner of conspiracy theorists, and provide a mechanism by which the most dastardly content can be widely shared.

In his book, whose title leaves no doubt which way his sympathies lie, Roger McNamee, an old Silicon Valley hand and early Facebook evangelist, lays the blame for this state of affairs squarely at the door of the company’s leadership. Having worked with both Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, and Sheryl Sandberg, its chief operating officer, Mr McNamee presents their strategy as one of “delay, deny, and deflect”.

Like many others, Mr McNamee was first alerted to Facebook’s “dangers” after Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Though the conclusions of the report from Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller investigating Mr Trump’s possible electoral collusion with Russia does not appear to offer definitive conclusions, Mr McNamee is certain that the Russians hacked Facebook and definitively changed the outcome of the election.

He describes this hacking as sophisticated, brought about by the loose standards Facebook set on sharing data with third parties. Mr McNamee describes Facebook’s algorithm, in what is now widely known, as one that generates filter bubbles, echo chambers where users find their political and social views supported and magnified by other members. By using user data and running hundreds of such groups, Mr McNamee argues, Russians used the platform to swing the election. 

His criticism in this respect is well-founded, as multiple events, most notably the Cambridge Analytica scandal, have shown how porous Facebook’s privacy standards are. For too long, Facebook unmitigatedly allowed what is called data harvesting to build detailed profiles of users that were then made available to advertisers at attractive rates.  

Yet, to claim that Facebook affected the election outcome is to give the platform an agency that it does not deserve. Mr McNamee’s assumption that the outcome of the 2016 election was a foregone conclusion until the toxic cocktail of Russians and Facebook altered it is flawed. Facebook may have amplified and provided an outlet for resentments that a number of voters felt about the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. It did not create those resentments. 

By refusing to acknowledge the problems of the white working class and, worse, pooh-poohing their concerns by calling them such egregious terms as “basket of deplorables”, Hillary Clinton had set herself up for defeat long before the Russians could achieve anything with Facebook.

Belatedly, the company has begun taking action. A famous example is shutting down Infowars, the conspiracy website run by Alex Jones, which was a fount of fake assertions and disinformation. Along with other social media platforms, Facebook is now increasingly willing to work with content providers to remove hate speech from the site.

As for a long-term solution, Mr McNamee is of the view, recently propounded by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, that companies like Facebook and Google should be viewed as public utilities, and should be regulated as such. This line of thinking emerges from the fact that they provide a service — news in Facebook’s case, search in Google’s — that is closer to a public good than a business. More importantly, it stems from the realisation that their advertising-based revenue model forces these platforms to build algorithms that cause public harm.

While there is merit to this claim, Mr McNamee and others need to avoid putting the cart before the horse, as they did with their analysis of the Democratic defeat in 2016. While some sort of regulation is perhaps called for, the unarticulated hope beneath that claim — that shutting down or regulating social platforms will make people shift to liberal pieties—is quixotic. 

In the appendix at the end, Mr McNamee includes a discussion on how to reverse nationalism, which, in his view, is responsible for the string of political surprises unleashed in the West over the past few years. Until the liberal elites recognise that there are genuine issues with the global order they celebrate, and until the mainstream media is more willing to air unpopular — rather, popular — views, there will always be a demand for online communities that challenge received wisdom.

Mr McNamee is right that a 15-year-old company got this powerful because it learnt how to get under the skin of its users. But the rise of Facebook and other social media platforms reflects a political, social and cultural schism whose roots go well deeper than anything these sites could engender.

Source: Amazon.com

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook catastrophe

Roger McNamee

HarperCollins; Rs 599, 336 pages