Why I’m Leaving Facebook*
(And why we should all at least put good thought into how you use it and how it uses you.)
For as long as I can remember I have suffered from occasional insomnia. Typically once a week, I find myself up at 2 or 3 in the morning, unable to will myself back to sleep. Before the Fall of 2016, I would use this time to deep dive into the intriguing, but inconsequential: 10 year old Vanity Fair interviews, New Yorker artist profiles, etc. But, since just before the election, one topic has come to dominate these late nights- Russian interference in the U.S. election.
Saying this in March of 2018 — after all those indictments- sounds much less “conspiracy theorist” than it did on election night 2016. When, through tears, I said “I know that Russia had something to do with this.” I was met with a collective eye roll (which my friends have since apologized for). Why I felt this strongly about it so early on is a good story for over drinks or coffee, but I make mention of all of this to say that I have been following this story very, very closely for the past year and a half, with one super suspicious eyebrow raised at a small company called Cambridge Analytica that I first read about just before the election in the Washington Post.
The gist of that article was that, the company behind Trump’s campaign data operation was developing and utilizing Facebook quizzes like “What City Should You Be Living In?”,and using the info to put together psychographic information about Americans in order to micro-target campaign messaging and play on our fears/interests. (This, btw, has come to be revealed as largely the same strategy that the Russian Troll farms used, but whatever, this post is about Facebook…). So, fine, I vow to not take any more of those Facebook quizzes, which are probably a waste of my time anyway.
Except that, of course, there is so much more to the story that has come to light. Because most of you, I hope, do *not* have insomnia and don’t have time to get through ALL the articles, I will briefly summarize. It turns out that Cambridge Analytica- a company funded by major GOP donor Robert Mercer and at one point, helmed by Steve Bannon- actually built it’s entire data operation off of a massive data set it essentially scammed off of Facebook. And Facebook did nothing about it until two years later when a named whistleblower was going to come forward. But wait, it gets more intriguing.
Cambridge Analytica hired a U.K. based firm owned by two guys- Kogan and Chancellor- to create a U.S. Data set to use for their election work. Both pyschology PHD students, they developed a quiz App for Facebook and posed, to Facebook as “researchers”. They paid people to take a quiz, which gave them access to that users Facebook data, but also, gave them access to their friends Facebook data. So for each paid quiz taker they yielded 1 + about 340 peoples user information. This violated Facebooks’ terms of service. Kogan and Chancellor then took that data and sold it to a 3rd party- Cambridge Analytica. This also violated Facebook’s terms of service.
Yet Facebook not only knew- as it was reported in the Guardian in December of 2015 and Facebook sent a letter to Cambridge Analytica about the violation- they then did nothing about it. Wait, that isn’t true. They actually hired one of the data scammers- Chancellor- to come and work for Facebook as a data psychologist! (Kogan, it turns out, wouldn’t need a job, as he is already extraordinarily busy. In addition to owning this small data firm and being a professor at Cambridge is also a guest lecturer at University of St. Petersberg. Oh, and Cambridge Analytica gave presentations on how to micro-target US voters to a Russian oil company… You can’t make this up.)
Before I go on with the litany of questions that this raises, I want to first return to Facebook. First, in learning about all of this, I discovered that Facebook conducts lots of psychological experiments of their own, which made me grossly uncomfortable, largely because unlike the “quizzes”, you can’t opt “in or out” of that… they just happen to you. Second, Facebook took zero steps to notify users about this breach. Third and most importantly, they finally kicked Cambridge Analytica, and Kogan off of their platform….ONLY WHEN the Guardian was set to publish the expose by the Whistle Blower and only after threatening to sue the paper and having their executives indignantly defend the breach on Twitter. (Incidentally, they kicked the Whistle Blower off Facebook immediately.)
So, it’s all egregious corporate negligence on Facebook’s part. And that egregiousness is enough reason to want to close my account, but I feel that it’s even more important than that. I keep thinking about how Facebook responded to inquiries about the Russian Trolls. How nonchalant and dismissive they were about it, only to slowly and steadily leak how actually giant the problem really was.
And the question I keep thinking to myself is- Wait? If the FBI came to me and said “Look, we’re worried there has been a disinformation campaign, funded by a foreign government using Russian Trolls to sew dissent and micro-target voters on behalf of the Trump campaign.” and I, as a Facebook Exec knew that “Oh wait, didn’t we have a big breach of info by this firm, Cambridge Analytica who was working for Ted Cruz who was then hired by the Trump Campaign to micro-target voters on our platform?” WHY ON EARTH would I think to downplay the possibility the use of Russian Trolls and disinformation campaigns?
Facebook is a company that, in many ways, is the embodiment of the American dream. An idea so audaciously wild and so original and so based on the notion of we can do and say whatever we want- that I think I’m super grossed out by how uninterested in protecting American democratic institutions the platform is. Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t even be bothered to testify before Congress, and when he sent the Facebook G.C., they had no answers. Yet, when the Russian Government asked Facebook to take down a video by a Putin opposition candidate alleging corruption by the Putin Government, Facebook complied within a day. Something about that doesn’t feel right.
It’s legally Robert Mercer’s right to do whatever he wants with his money and back whatever political agendas he wants to. Facebook is free, and in exchange for being able to keep up with the goings on of so many of my friends from various stratas of my life, I knew I was giving up some of my privacy. But, I’m not comfortable being a pawn. t’s not just taking some stupid quiz… I’ve come to realize we really don’t know what they are measuring.
We have few means of being truly patriotic- minus being informed and participatory voters. My data is gasoline in the engine of a company that seems indifferent to having become a tool in disinformation wars against democracy. Since I can’t pull my financial support, I can pull my participation out. And so I will see you offline!
*Coda: much like when I was a vegetarian and was criticized for not giving up leather, I have not totally figured out how to quit Instagram. I rationalized the leather thing by saying “someone ate the animal, so I may as well wear the shoes!”. I am rationalizing this half- quiting thing by saying that it’s a much less politicized platform that, for me, I don’t spend too much time on and when I do it’s all Giant Pandas and Fashion-Nova ads. Its not totally right… but I will eventually quit you too Instagram.
