Facebook at 15: Grow Up

Mark Zuckerberg makes the rest of us look like slackers. In 15 years he has industrialized friendship and misinformation worldwide. The next 15 years could be spent, you know, actually bringing the world together. Maybe supporting global cooperation based on shared, fact-based worldviews. Just a few ideas. You’re welcome, Mark.

Happy Birthday Facebook! We love you!

When I say “we”, I mean over half of the world’s four billion consumers. And when I say “love”, I mean what started as mutual infatuation has turned into an abusive relationship based on extraction. Facebook is the face of a new form of colonialism: colonialism of the heart, soul and mind.

Facebook turns 15 today. In this time, the social media behemoth has somehow industrialised friendship (without empathy) and the spread of misinformation on Earth. For his next trick, Mark Zuckerberg — now more Sorcerer’s Apprentice than CEO — will attempt to not destroy democracy as we know it.

Facebook’s extraordinary growth and influence is based on its modus operandi Move Fast and Break Things and two insights. First, people are happy to literally share everything about themselves, even when we know we are being exploited — it’s the 21st century’s Stockholm Syndrome. Second, consumer and citizen data is now the most valuable commodity on Earth — like mining and drilling for oil, Facebook is an extractive industry. Like these industries, at a small scale its impact is negligible. But above a threshold, its impacts affect Earth’s life support system. More on this later.

Instead of excavators and shovels, Facebook deploys algorithms based on psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and every other trick in the academic textbook to keep the dopamine hits flowing through peer-group validation (like my post!), social reciprocity, and variable reward — turn off your push notifications now (see tech ethicist Tristan Harris). These algorithms keep us hooked, scrolling and hemorrhaging data.

The next layer of algorithms serves up content designed with pinpoint precision to extract our cash. Almost half of the world’s marketing and advertising budget is now in digital — much of this flowing into Facebook’s coffers.

In her new book Shoshana Zuboff describes this process as a new type of capitalism: surveillance capitalism.

It is the scale of Facebook that is truly difficult to comprehend. On Earth there are 7.6 billion people. Facebook is banned in China, the world’s most populous country. Yet, Facebook reports 2.2 billion active monthly users. Zuckerberg’s astonishing vision “to bring the world closer together” is close to realisation. Even as scandal after scandal plague the platform, user numbers keep growing. But while he may have brought us together, it is more in a Fortnite fight-to-the-death sort of way, than John and Yoko’s imagine-all-the-people.

The first casualty of social media is truth

Before Facebook, social media did not really exist on any scale. Now, two thirds of Americans (67%) report they receive at least some of their news from social media. Just over half of those who recall seeing fake news stories report that they believed them. Social networks reduce tolerance for alternative viewpoints, increase exposure to ideologically aligned viewpoints and create echo chambers reinforcing viewpoints. We love our tribe more than we love facts and believe information that supports the worldview of their tribe over other information, even scientific knowledge, that challenges this worldview. In 2016, as the US presidential election campaigns gathered momentum, trust in mass media collapsed to historic lows. In 2018, researchers showed that lies and fake news travels faster than facts and reaches ten times more people.

But at the same time, social media is generating more interest in politics. This is an explosive mix capitalized on by bored teenagers and hostile nations. They are creating armies of bots to spread alarmist, extremist and polarizing messages targeting our unconscious fears and flicking our anger switches. By some estimates, 60 million bots trawl Facebook and 9–15% of Twitter accounts are automated. But don’t blame the bots for everything: real people are the ones most likely to share fake news on social media.

Hyper-connectivity causes collapse

The remarkable growth in connectivity has meant the flow of information in the world has profoundly changed. It has turned from a trickle to a torrent, as and traditional bottlenecks like the mainstream media have been bypassed or crushed. Social media has driven social and political change with unprecedented scale and speed, think #metoo and the Arab Spring. But think, too, of #americafirst and the Islamic State. Could any of this been possible without social media? Not in the same way.

If it feels like we are living in a period of unprecedented turmoil and chaos in the world, well, we are. None of this is surprising to complex-systems geeks. In highly connected networks, from ecosystems to the internet, abrupt change is more likely when interactions grow stronger. The global financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by sub-prime mortgages in the US, it was caused by hyper-connectivity of a small number of banks. By fundamentally changing the volume and flow of information in the world, Facebook and other social media platforms have made social disruption more likely and when it happens its impact is far greater.

But, not content with rewiring the world, social media is systematically annihilating the mainstream media’s business model without a care, it would seem, for the role of the media in holding governments and businesses accountable through daily, now hourly, reality checks.

The alarm bells should be now so loud that inaction is impossible. Yet, few really know what to do. In Davos recently, Japan’s prime minister Shinzō Abe called for global rules and oversight of tech, a sentiment shared by Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel. Abe said he would use Japan’s presidency of the G20 to kickstart worldwide data governance. Good luck with that. There is zero consensus on what will work and the political climate for cooperation is tepid, a situation caused in no small part by social media.

Fake news costs lives

Social media has created a toxic brown cloud of confusion. People find it difficult to know what information to trust and what to discard. The spread of anti-vaccine propaganda online is killing children. Viral videos and social media memes can dissuade parents from protecting their children from preventable illnesses like measles. Up to 50% of tweets about vaccination contain anti-vaccine beliefs skewing the debate. IFLScience reports that children are now asking the internet how to get vaccinated without their parents’ consent.

Zuckerberg argues that Facebook is just a platform that has been exploited by malevolent organisations with nefarious intentions. Now this has been exposed, he is doing everything in his power to protect citizens and support democracy. Others disagree. Given the company’s forensic approach to addiction and mercenary approach to monetizing our data it is perhaps no surprise Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, a fact-checking site that had partnered with Facebook, told the Guardian last year, “I strongly believe that they are spreading fake news on behalf of hostile foreign powers and authoritarian governments as part of their business model.” Snopes has now severed its relationship with Facebook.

Perhaps Zuckerberg is sincere but he is also naïve and ruthless. The constant drip of data-breach stories in the media erode trust in everything he says.

Facebook, it’s time to grow up

In the vast arc of the Anthropocene, as the world grapples with ending poverty, eradicating disease, climate change and ecological crises, social media was once viewed as gossip, noise, an irritant, an idle distraction, like a fly buzzing around an elephant’s arse. Now, a little surprisingly, it has somehow morphed into the elephant’s prefrontal cortex: the bit of the brain that does the planning, decision-making and moderating behaviour. Perhaps this deeper connectivity of social media and the markets is pushing the world towards a proto-global consciousness — though with limited consciousness of the state of Earth’s life support system.

At 15, it is time for Facebook to grow up. But we all need to grow up with it. A site designed originally to rank womens’ appearance has changed the world forever. As Philip Ball says in his remarkable 2011 essay The New History in Nature, social media did not cause the Arab Spring (nor, #MeToo or America First) but its existence can alter the speed, scale and way things happen.

My work is about global sustainability. The emergency is here. As Greta Thunberg points out, “Our house is on fire”. There is a mountain of evidence that in the next 15 years we need the biggest transformation in human history — the world must halve emissions of greenhouse gases (the Carbon Law), stabilize stores of carbon on land and in the ocean and turn agriculture from a source to a sink of polluting gases. This will require behavioral change on a grand scale — we need to change our diets, how we work, how we live, how we consume and how we produce. Yet, beyond listing the transformation needed few have any big ideas on how to catalyze this shift. But those calling for disruption often forget we are living through disruption. Events in the last 15 years show societies are not rigid or static. Rather, rapid transformations should be expected.

Algorithms will dictate our future. But who is writing the script?

Who is the “we” in all of this? It is not clear who will decide. In the absence of a plan it is likely to be a handful of people (predominantly young white men) in Silicon Valley. Cooperation between tech giants is unlikely given the low levels of trust and fierce competition. Alternatively, will we see heavy-handed oversight by politicians comically out of their depth.

Here’s an exchange at Zuckerberg’s Congress hearing.

“How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” asked Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.

Zuckerberg: “Senator, we run ads.”

“I see. That’s great,” said Hatch.

Top-down actions to restrain social media, or kneejerk reactions to control data, come with great risks.

If we are not careful we will end up where we are headed

Tech business academic Scott Galloway calls Facebook one of the Four Horsemen, alongside Amazon, Apple and Google. These companies, he argues, are bringing the apocalypse to existing businesses and entire industrial sectors. Transport and food: you are next. Be very scared. The Four Horsemen have their wannabes like Lyft, AirBnB or Uber, and plenty of unicorns galloping after them.

These companies influence the behaviour of four billion consumers every day. While every single one of these companies has a vision for world domination (Amazon: Earth’s most customer-centric company. Google: make the world’s information universally accessible), none accounts for their planetary influence. As Hemant Taneja says in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, we need to move from Minimum Viable Products to Minimum Virtuous Products.

The clear and present danger is not cybersecurity and data breaches, nor is it climate change or biodiversity loss. The biggest threat we now face as a civilisation is our shocking inability as societies to distinguish between fact and fiction and to make decisions as societies based on fact. This is shocking because we have the tools at scale — social media and search — to solve this. Yet these tools have driven a collapse of trust, in turn leading to less cooperation, and weakened decision-making processes. The biggest opportunity for humanity from the digital revolution is not the internet of things, biotech or artificial intelligence, it is the tools to distinguish fact from fiction — to build greater trust and global cooperation founded on fact-based worldviews to allow for the essential actions.

The urgent priority is to examine the algorithms controlling the flow of information and explore how these can help people arrive at shared views of reality based on reliable information. Concerned by this lack of oversight, in 2015 a group of researchers and innovators led by the Stockholm Resilience Centre published the Biosphere Code, a manifesto listing 10 principles for algorithm design. But this needs to go much further.

Researchers need to start focusing more energy on how this complex system, and the algorithms and weak artificial intelligences that shape it, is evolving.

Navigating the next 15 years

A lot can happen in 15 years — in one future, Facebook actually gathers the world together to create more shared values bringing us towards some sort of common human identity. Let’s imagine how that might happen.

In 2019, Facebook announces it will open its data for researchers exploring sustainability transformations and conduct global surveys (including China) on attitudes and values. These are done to find out how people make sense of the world, their hopes for the future and their feelings about global cooperation.

Facebook works with other social media giants, Twitter, WeChat, LinkedIn and more to explore ways to support worldviews based on more accurate information on the state of the world without compromising freedom of speech, for example serving up news packages providing more grounded interpretations of rolling news events.

In 2020, social media giants begin rolling out global programmes to improve media literacy and global literacy in the digital age. In the same year, tech giants support an Apollo-scale research project to explore how technology can support societal goals, for example based around the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. This leads to the launch a raft of innovative products to incentivise sustainable work and lifestyles like Ant Financial’s Ant Forest which has an estimated 300 million users who gain points as they lower their emission.

How to get this going? A good starting point is just to meet and discuss — face to Facebook. Even starting this conversation with people like Zuckerberg is difficult. With former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres we tried several times to bring together the Four Horsemen and their ilk, but there is little appetite for cooperation. It is time to grow up.

You can find me on Facebook and Twitter @owengaffney.