Category: Digital Culture

Wrangling With the Facebook Problem

With Mark Zuckerberg set to testify today on Capitol Hill, and revelations last week that the Cambridge Analytica data breach is now estimated to have affected nearly 90-million users (up from around 50 million), there seems to be no shortage of theories as to how to solve the “Facebook problem.” Congress will ask Zuckerberg what Facebook’s leadership knew about the abuse of its data, when they knew it, and what the company plans to do going forward to protect consumers. Regulatory solutions have their limits, of course, and may even exacerbate a problem if legislators fail to properly grasp the underlying issues. Still, the conversation is long overdue on themes like how much data is being gathered, by which corporations, and for what purposes.

For the past few weeks, Zuckerberg has been contrite, even self-flagellating, which is admittedly a refreshing change from the standard arrogance of Silicon Valley executives. But that’s mostly theater. At best, Congress can do what Congress does, which is to tell Facebook to clean up its act, or they’ll clean it up for them. Meanwhile, there seems to be general consensus among experienced technologists and tech writers that there are limits to how much Facebook can be repaired. “We cannot have regulators trim a beast as if they were barbers and call that change,” writes Jaron Lanier in an editorial advocating the wisdom of those willing to delete Facebook from their lives.

Many responses and proposals to the Facebook fallout have been variations on the theme that the internet (as if it were a conscious being) must return to some idealized, pre-commercial set of values people seem to believe were present 20+ years ago. One might even say that these voices insisting we “make the internet great again” are guilty of a related, ahistorical folly that cannot sensibly answer what again quite means in that sentiment. For instance, a recent article by Tim Wu for The New York Times manages to criticize Facebook while alluding to a familiar refrain of cybernetic idealism at the same time. He writes …

“From the day it first sought revenue, Facebook prioritized growth over any other possible goal, maximizing the harvest of data and human attention. Its promises to investors have demanded an ever-improving ability to spy on and manipulate large populations of people. Facebook, at its core, is a surveillance machine, and to expect that to change is misplaced optimism.”

It’s not that I disagree with that description—it’s irrefutable—so much as it is perplexing to imagine that anyone ever believed there might have been another “possible goal” Facebook was going to pursue. While Zuckerberg was still in middle school, I was in meetings where major ad execs were counting on exactly the kind of consumer-specific targeting that was finally made possible when Google and Facebook figured out how to get us to share gigabytes worth of personal information without minding. The “surveillance machine” was the golden goose investors were banking on from the moment the internet became publicly accessible.

Wu’s answer to the problem is good old-fashioned competition. Asserting that the web’s tendency to foster monopolies is not a matter fate, he states …

“…the real challenge is gaining a critical mass of users. Facebook, with its 2.2 billion users, will not disappear, and it has a track record of buying or diminishing its rivals (see Instagram and Foursquare). But as Lyft is proving by stealing market share from Uber, and as Snapchat proved by taking younger audiences from Facebook, ‘network effects’ are not destiny.”

While I think Wu is right to say that a competitor could theoretically do Facebook better (e.g. be better stewards of our data), I remain skeptical that “network effects” are not inevitable when it comes to certain types of platforms. Because if New Facebook came along offering the same features, plus new consumer-protection benefits, we’re all—I mean all of us—migrating to the new platform, leaving Old Facebook to go drink with MySpace.

Of course, with 2.2 billion users and a market cap of nearly $460 billion, the company in the best position to become New Facebook is Facebook. Regardless, most of us only need one time-sucking, data-gathering, cyber-water-cooler in our lives—if we really need any at all—so I still believe certain internet monopolies are inevitable.

If mitigating data abuse by means of competition is what Wu is truly advocating, his references to Lyft and Snapchat seem to sidestep some very tough questions. For instance, a ride-hailing app/service is not remotely comparable to a social media platform. Lyft and Uber are transaction facilitators, and the consumer only benefits by having multiple players compete to provide one service—a ride—on an as-needed basis. That model is simply not analogous to the reasons users spend time and effort contributing all of the content on a social platform.

As for Snapchat, it’s true that my teenager tells me she and her friends are there because “Facebook is for old people,” but at 150 million users, the platform is hardly proof that Facebook’s network effect is not inevitable. Meanwhile, I personally think it’s anybody’s guess what this next generation of users is going to expect or want from social media as they become young adults. This includes growing bored with the whole enterprise and bailing.

Competition is a good thing, but Wu’s generalized appeal to market forces as a response to the “Facebook problem” echoes rhetorical allusions that have been made at various times in the context of copyright enforcement online. For instance in mid-2016, during hearings about the DMCA, critics of any proposal to introduce a “takedown/staydown” provision insisted that the cost of implementation would be so high that it would entrench, for instance, YouTube as the monopolistic social video platform.

This line of reasoning has always lacked integrity for completely ignoring the various market forces, including the network effect, that sustain YouTube’s dominance. I suspect Wu is making a similar error in this case, perhaps oversimplifying the challenge. As just one prosaic example, I am very much drawn to Lanier’s sentiment when he writes, “…those who have had accounts and then deleted them are true pioneers. They will see things and learn things that are new in the world.” Indeed. But if I’m being honest, I discovered his article because a friend shared it on Facebook.

A Low-Tech Solution to the Russian Hack Problem

So, here’s my non-technological, non-regulatory, short-term solution for what we’ll generally call the Russian hack problem:  Share less. A lot less.

If 100 million or so citizens shared just a little less noise, this would substantially mitigate the intended effects of Russian meddlers and other manipulators who stand to gain from Americans hating each other and, by extension, hating democratic principles. And just maybe such a dramatic shift in user behavior would also provide Facebook with useful information for redesigning the platform. Here’s a recent post a friend put up …

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/nras-dana-loesch-says-mlk-might-alive-today-carrying-concealed-weapon/

This a perfect example of a story that  I will not “Like” or share despite my gut instinct to believe that Dana Loesch might be crazy enough to say something that stupid. But here’s a rough calculus as to why I won’t promote this post:

Is it likely that the headline accurately reflects what she said? Maybe.

Is RawStory a serious, investigative news organization? No.

Is this story addressing the gun-control issue in a substantive way? No.

Is it satire (because satire has value)?  No.

Are my friends and I already broadly disgusted by Loesch and the NRA?  Yes.

Even if she said this, does it really change the broader narrative? No.

By sharing, would I add to the level of noise and outrage? Yes.

By sharing, would I feed the data-harvesting machine for no good reason?  Yes!

By sharing, would I be aiding the efforts of foreign manipulators?  Yes!!!!!

I’m not suggesting that my personal approach represents a universal rationale. But if a large percentage of users were to adopt some rationale for simply not promoting the least-substantive and most sensational posts (unless they’re legit funny), this would probably have a mitigating effect on the current problem before either Facebook or Congress does anything. At the very least, it would be interesting to see what happens.  Not that I’m holding my breath.

Whatever the Response to the Facebook Fallout, Don’t Blame Copyright

Attorney and journalist Charles J. Glasser published an editorial  in The Daily Caller titled: Mind Manipulation? No, Censorship By Copyright is The REAL Threat to Elections.

The irony of that misleading headline, which does not truly reflect the substance of Glasser’s article, is that it reinforces a general bias about copyright (i.e. that it is censorship) for the simple reason that many people will not read past the headline itself. Thus, even before we get to the article, Glasser has, ironically enough, proven that the “mind manipulation” issue (though I wouldn’t call it that) is a legitimate problem.  He believes otherwise, stating …

“I have serious doubts about the veracity about “mind control” conspiracies favored by the progressive left that assumes Americans are not autonomous actors or are in fact stupid, gullible hicks who simply can’t be trusted to think for themselves.”

I’ve expressed a similar sentiment on this blog but take a different view that people across the political spectrum are both autonomous actors and stupid, gullible, hicks who can’t be trusted to think for themselves because everybody is, to some degree, susceptible to impressions made by words and pictures. If this were not the case, advertising simply would not work. But it does.

This susceptibility has nothing to do with intelligence, but it is a more relevant subject now that we acquire news and commentary via social media. We simply cannot read every article shared by every one of our friends, or we would never do anything else. Nevertheless, all those headlines and photos do leave impressions—even subconscious ones that function exactly like advertising. This is one reason why I think Glasser is wrong to outright dismiss the conversation finally being had about “manipulation” via social media—even if there were no party actively seeking to manipulate.

Meanwhile, his headline, feeding the false narrative–perhaps inadvertently–that copyright equals censorship, is a bit overwrought given the article’s central complaint. Glasser asserts that various parties are abusing the DMCA takedown provision for the purpose of censorship, and, in turn, this censorship is skewing the democratic process. Not helping the article’s credibility is the quote from Elliot Harmon of the EFF as stating, “…without fair use protections, people and companies in the public eye could use copyright law to ban coverage that’s critical of them.”

That’s overstating the relationship between criticism and fair use just a tad since a whole universe of criticism exists without appropriating copyrighted works.  In fact, I would argue the most important political criticism — thoughtful, researched editorials about candidates or policies — often don’t rely on fair use at all.  What does rely on fair use are the political ads to which Glasser refers in his article; and while it is perhaps inappropriate that these were removed, political ads are hardly the thinking American’s medium of choice.

Without unpacking each of the examples to which Glasser alludes, we can stipulate that various parties do use, or try to use, DMCA takedown as a means to silence opposition or criticism; and he fairly calls the practice a “pox on both houses,” meaning the left and the right. But I would offer a few caveats about this article.

First, because DMCA is an extra-judicial, sometimes automated, process, it’s going to be misused—either purposely or by accident—by rights holders, by non-rights holders, by users, and by platform owners. It is a 1998 remedy for copyright infringement and OSP liability that, at best, cannot truly respond to the scope of the contemporary internet. It is a unique sub-category of copyright law with its own complex narrative, and Glasser seems to be cherry-picking a small portion of that narrative to justify an article that lodges various unrelated complaints.  He also fails to mention the DMCA counter-notice procedure for restoring material and the fact that there is a path of legal remedy for abuse of DMCA.

Next, Glasser seems to have a personal or political beef with the current response to these data-mining revelations that, whether he’s right or wrong, should not be misdirected as an attack on copyright law. He writes …

“The panic about data-mining is driven largely by the paternalistic, if not authoritarian view that ‘only the right people’ should determine what is read and heard, because after all, those ‘bitter clingers’ are too stupid to have a voice.”

Responding as someone who criticizes ‘bitter clingers’ on the left and the right, I fail to see how this accusation does not imply a much bigger debate that has nothing to do with copyright. It seems that DMCA is being made into a  scapegoat in this regard, which brings me to the most substantive point.

In a society now brimming with equal parts journalism and gibberish, we would need a much larger data set than a few anecdotes to conclude that censorship by DMCA is both rampant and measurably effective in what I will generously call our current “political process.” In fact, Glasser’s own skepticism about data-mining manipulation should also serve to mollify his stated concerns about censorship via DMCA because I strongly suspect that incidents of abuse represent a drop in the bucket among the trillions of information exchanges occurring every day. And if Americans are indeed autonomous actors who can think for themselves, this should counterbalance the silence of a few deleted political ads as easily as Glasser suggests it would counterbalance the alleged “mind control.”  So, whatever he’s truly criticizing, I don’t think it’s copyright.