Monday, September 7, 2020

Facebook or freedom, Part 2: Interlude, If I were Facebook, I’d be thinking…you will comply

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Don’t Delete Facebook. Do Something About It. NYtimes, March 24, 2018.

But even if tens of thousands of Americans quit Facebook tomorrow, the company would barely feel it. Facebook has more than 2.1 billion users worldwide. Its growth has plateaued in the United States, but the service is gaining millions of new users outside North America every week. Like most global companies, Facebook focuses its attention on markets like India, Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil and Mexico. At current rates of growth, it could reach three billion users by 2020.

People in those countries are getting value out of Facebook; in some places, it’s one of the few reliable ways to keep in touch. In much of the developing world, Facebook is also the only news source that matters. This should horrify us. But it’s not a problem that will be solved by indignant Americans leaving the service. [...]

Hope lies, instead, with our power as citizens. We must demand that legislators and regulators get tougher. They should go after Facebook on antitrust grounds. Facebook is by far the dominant social platform in the United States, with 68 percent of American adults using it, according to the Pew Research Center. That means Facebook can gobble up potential competitors, as it already has with Instagram, and crowd out upstarts in fields such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality.




I certainly don’t know how Facebook thinks about these things – I’m thinking particularly about the current face-lift – but surely they must put their business front and center. And their business is delivering eyeballs and tracking data to advertising. That means they’ve got to keep as many users on the platform as possible.

Thus, to the extent that hate speech, bat-shit crazy conspiracy theories, political scamming, and so forth, drive up audience numbers without, at the same time, driving (too many) others away, that’s all good for business. Some employees and executives may know that this kind of stuff is not healthy for society, but, hey! business is business, amirite?

In THAT context, what about unilaterally changing the user interface? It’s tricky. The number of people who are really angry about it, as I am, is probably rather small. But they’ve been through this before and they know that some people won’t like it. So they give you the option of temporarily going back to the old interface, just to show you that they too feel your pain. And of course it is easy for them to frame the change as something they are doing for you, for us, the users. They’re making Facebook a better place.

The happier we are, the more eyeballs and tracking data they can deliver to advertisers.

The idea is to demonstrate that they own and can control this space, this commons, and that you will comply because, what choice do you have?

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See  Facebook or freedom, Part 1: Who gave you permission to mess with my mind?
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