The Impotence of Zuckerberg
Or, Facebook needs to end. Let’s work on ending facebook.
Facebook is a battleground in an information war. Rather than preventing the worst of the abuses, facebook sells abusers access.
“Okay,” you say, “but, they’ll stop them now that they know about it!”
Really?
Facebook has teams of people studying us: how we interact (to drive more interactions); what we care about (to drive more ad-clicks); and what we share (to model our interests to drive more ad-clicks). The “racist shit my racist aunt/uncle/high school teacher shares from fake news” experience is near-universal.
They’ve known for a while.
The problem, persists.
“Well, you don’t understand, it’s a very hard technological problem!”
Really?
I mean, sure, it is. But, you know what organization is really good at text classification and user modeling?
Fucking Facebook.
Facebook filtering out the manufactured bullshit isn’t a technological problem.
The problem is The Zuckerborg. He may have super-voting power with respect to controlling facebook but he’ll act as a predictable automaton. He’s impotent because he is captive to something else.
Fake news ads are just a tiny part of the problem. Even if you blocked 100% of them with zero-percent false-positives, you still have the legion of facebook groups that act as fake news content distribution engines. Users visit and share them, without ads as a prompt. Boundaries start to get real fuzzy, real fast. Inevitably, you’d have to clearly signal to a large number of facebook users that the content they like to share and read on facebook — an organization with state-level power — is bullshit.
The Zuckerborg can’t send that signal to users.
He needs them to stay on facebook so they can receive more ads!
That’s the core social problem.
The idea of a COMMUNITY that is simultaneously for-profit and for everyone is a contradiction.
