I think all Facebook users should be informed if they have liked, shared or reposted any fake news created by Russians or any entity. Also, if they were targeted for any of the fake news stories because of their profile - though many probably already know.
It’s not just Facebook, it’s not just Russians: our fellow Americans bought and swallowed the garbage and they need to know it was garbage. That will go a long way to making us think twice about where we get our information.
14
Why would anyone want to save Facebook? It's not at the top of my list of things that are better off ghosted (Fox News is), but it's not far from the top.
2
Zuckerberg may be one of the creators but there is plenty of blame to go around at Facebook so let us add Sheryl Sandberg the COO. Isn't it the responsibility of the COO to oversee the company, as a whole? Well Sheryl, you failed us (the public) BUT not the investor. All for the love of $$$$! Geez.....
3
Some of the commenters have expressed the opinion that we chose to sacrifice all privacy to the internet and social networks. We have not.
Everything turned to automation. Without agreeing to onerous terms, you are not allowed to use the website and blocked out of commerce.
Brick and mortar are closing left and right and getting an actual person on the telephone is so time consuming and sometimes impossible. Oftentimes we have no choice with resgistrations, tuition payments, etc but to use automation and give up our information.
I, and I assume many others, don’t particularly like being stalker by these companies and now some weirdo billionaire who steals information.
Why aren’t we going after Mercer and his daughter and Bannon for knowing CA was stealing our information.
It’s a mess and nobody seems to know how to fix it. This should be at least 1/2 of military spending. This is a serious domestic and foreign threat to our democracy.
6
Your solution falls flat. Zuckerberg will only do what he is forced to do, either by regulation or by consumer (product) revolt. I am a senior citizen with extremely limited tech skills, and I was able to figure out the dangers in Facebook's business model several years ago. The idea that the intelligent and very tech savvy Zuckerberg could not does not pass the smell test. Just another greedy capitalist with no social conscience. He needs to be treated as such.
4
Thought the igloo example was tongue in cheek-ish but you can indeed rent igloos in Alaska!
1
What is truly scary is the apparent ability of Facebook to access my data through my friends page regardless of my privacy settings. At a very minimum this has to be stopped; the link from one page to any other. They claim we have control over our own data when in actually we don't.
3
The same technology that empowers us all, provides lone individuals and small groups with incredible abilities to inflict large scale harm. I am a big proponent of technology. I am also a big proponent of figuring out ways for our lawmakers to get a better handle on things than they currently have. Keeping up with technologies perils has never been harder, especially when you have almost no scientists or engineers in congress. The integration and operation of incredible hardware and software previously only available to the world's most advanced militaries is now taught in high school. We have allot to look forward to. We also have allot more than most people realize to worry about.
3
"Moral leadership" requires founding our political-economic system in ways that subvert what we have now: profit seeking at all costs--at the expense of humans, animals, and nature.
5
When Facebook was born, all time was spent to develop its marketing strategies. Considering there was this great idea to help people to communicate with each other, the emphasis was to expand on it - generate the revenues and continue doing just that. Revenues and Profits was more important to the organization, rather than looking at the privacy side of its users.
Did FB have any system of internal controls in place? Did FB have an external auditor conducting periodical audits? If they did, did they have questions to determine what the organization was doing; were there questions on users' privacy controls?
FB is technology, and is part of today's technology, that has brought the world closer.
Growing up, far away from this country, my family did not have a radio, a TV, telephone, refrigerator, a computer and everything else in today's world. We are all very proud of the change and the advancement, technology has contributed. However, with all the advantages, there is the down side to it. It is the latter where people exploit, that has led to FB's predicament today.
While we speak of privacy issues, it is not just the social media who are to be blamed, there are other players who are exploiting the people. In your daily mail, you are guaranteed to see mail from various financial institutions and other businesses. How do they have our names and addresses? It is the system, and time to change all that, and stop making the people the scapegoats.
1
The "Internet" brought unimaginable convenience and we humans are always looking for shortcuts.
"The Internet" also brought a host of mostly unintended consequences.
Facebook founder Zuckerberg has run far with his ever-evolving Facebook idea...any of us would have acted on the business opportunity had we been in his shoes. Funny how we humans change when there is a pile of money to be made.
2
Shut the whole thing down!
To think that Facebook will make a moral choice seems very unlikely. We should remember that Zuckerberg has Peter Thiel on his corporate board. Thiel runs a company heavily involved with Cambridge Analytica, and recent stories link these companies with Facebook in the stolen private files of Facebook users. Thiel is close to Trump. Conspiracy all around. To force moral choices with these characters will require legal action and regulation.
4
The problem here is that we all gave away some information on ourselves to readily connect with family, friends and old classmates. With that data, in aggregate, an entity can target their market segment to sell or influence an idea. The basis of Facebook is to sell that information for "advertising". The only way to fix being sold an objectionable product or idea is to go to a subscription model and have no advertising. There is no moral judge software in the world that can sort individual's ideas of good and bad. The only way to save us from Facebook is for them to go to a subscription model.
1
I'm so glad I repeatedly refused to get on Facebook or use Alexa. But, as an older person, I have to admit I want a self-driving car, not now but after they are safer.
4
Don't wait for Zuckerberg to save us. He won't. Capitalism is utterly amoral. Don't wait for government regulation to save us. It won't. Corporate power has already surpassed the power of mere nation states.
We are in the midst of a communication revolution, and revolutions are always destructive. When the means of communication changes, its changes society, human interaction, the very way we understand "reality." I have no idea how it will shake out, but I think I'd better read Marshall McLuhan again. The media truly is the message.
3
Nice thoughts, Great longings. But all wishful thinking. Dreaming of Utopia in the age of Trump. What did Tom and his teacher Dov had in their coffee?
The Hindu mythology, or religious philosophy, if you will, says Cosmos goes through seven Eras, - Yugs of time each lasting 8.4 million years. At the bottom of the wheel of time are Kalyug where falsehood, dishonesty, cheating, scamming and all the other baser traits of mankind rule. On top is Satyayug where Truth, Honesty, and Integrity lead and rule.
I hope the inventors and innovators of new mass technologies pay heed to Tom's teacher's sage advice. But the installation of a man like Trump at the top in the US and Putin in Russia, just to mention only these two among a crowded host of others, leave me with little hope. In fact, I kind of think Kalyug is now upon us in full fury. Our only hope out of this maize is the promise that the Divine Power made to mankind that IT would come to its rescue when its own efforts come to a dead-end. Maybe that's the Second Coming, we pray for.
4
My problem with Mark Zuckerberg is that he -- like Tim Cook of Apple -- has no qualms whatsoever about stashing billions of dollars in overseas accounts in order to avoid paying taxes on same.
Zuckerberg, Cook.... these are not American citizens. They are "citizens of the globe."
Thus, they should be suspected and assumed to not working for the best interests of the country where they live.
4
Is he a shareholder? In an era of transparency, opinion writers should be forced to disclose their shareholdings in companies they comment about. FB was founded upon the exploitation of a psychological weakness (their founder's words not mine) and exploited the ignorance of the American public concerning their "business model." What if FB had disclosed their business model to users in big print prior to people agreeing to accept their terms of use: "WE WILL CHARGE YOU NOTHING TO USE OUR PLATFORM THAT COLLECTS INFORMATION AND SELLS IT TO THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WHO WILL USE IT TO SELL YOU THINGS AND MANIPULATE YOU." Do you think it would still be a Unicorn? Do you think we'd be questioning the morality of it's founders?
1
Zuckerberg like Trump is in it for the money, neither has a moral compass.
3
from the first inning to the 3rd inning to the last inning the game being played is still Moneyball because it's all about money.
it would be great to change the rules of the game but I wouldn't expect those have benefited the most to do that very quickly.
2
Much more disappointing than the scraping of Facebook's data was the reality that Facebook knew it and didn't tell us. We might never know who was affected or how. The only answer to any of this is transparency, and if that can't happen, we'll need to opt out of all the awesomeness of convenience or connection and reset this very dangerous world.
3
" We need to start by pausing..."
There's the rub; technology is like a runaway train and we have to find a way to make the tools more sensitive to decent human values and resistant to the hackers and malware people who seek to bring us down as a nation. Surely there are enough people left in the U.S. to try to do better. They just need to step up and not stay home when it is time to vote, for example.
Didn’t like the last one? Try this one backstage crew:
Zuckerberg is a self-serving “corporatist” like any other who will do what’s required to mitigate the damages to his bottom line, which he'll soon prove when he goes before Congress. Facebook is nothing more than a monstrous data-vacuum for e-commerce that uses self-delusion as its means. The fools who use Facebook deserve Zuckerberg--he is their Chanticleer mirror.
4
Nothing will “save” us from selfish selves. Only 18 years into the 21st century and we all already nuking up for the big one. Supine Dems agree to $60 billion added to what is already a stupendous and bloated military/industrial lobby. At home 13,000+ shot dead each year by other Americans and 50,000+ wounded. Meanwhile 1/3 of Americans cannot afford dental care. Our society based on guns and god guaranteed nationalism can only take ourselves into disaster this century.
4
Backstage crew, how about putting one of your little gold flags on this one--the truth:
Zuckerberg is a self-serving “corporatist” like any other who will do what’s required to mitigate the damages to his bottom line, which he'll soon prove when he goes before Congress.
Facebook is nothing more than a monstrous data-vacuum for e-commerce that uses networked self-delusion as its means. The fools who use Facebook deserve Zuckerberg--he is their Chanticleer mirror.
3
The same could be (and as) said about the printing press. Balance and ethics are the cure and there’s no reason they can’t prevail - with the right leadership.
2
Privacy, Mr. Friedman,is a joke. It's gone. Get with it. Isn't that what you told us, you and your boy Dov, after Snowden.? No big deal then. Of course, for as you and Dov say, nothing wrong with a little psychological profiling and manipulation in the service of commerce, to make us buy things we don't need, to become social media addicts, to enhance, as you say, the "shopping experience." Forget the adolescent metaphors, data mining has been baked in since the beginning and is at heart of the business model. Without that and enormous tax breaks, these Titans would be as poor as Pundits. It's been known, and if Mr. Friedman ever talked to anyone but Dov Seidman, he might have known that. But then sychophants are rarely good critics,
1
Facebook claims that every American subscriber, in terms of the value of his/her data, is worth something in the range of $14.00/yr.
My view is that the deal as offered, a "free" social network in return for access to more information about me than my relatives have, is bad. It's like buying a T-shirt for a rock group and becoming a "free" billboard.
You want me to advertise your product? You want to sell my data? Pay me.
I want half of that $14.00 and change.
Mark, call me when you're ready to write a check.
1
Hey baby brother:
I'm going to stand by this headline now let's make it happen.
A commenter posts,"...Zuckerberg is possibly utterly unable to grasp that his carelessness, bordering on amorality, has had a gigantic role in the destruction of democracy in this country..."
One could as easily substitute Trump for Zuckerberg in the comment.
2
Here’s all you need to know - The Facebook started on a college campus, rating the relative attractiveness of female students. What could possibly go wrong with those core values rolled out on global scale & almost no human oversight ??
20,000 Facebook employees serving 2 billion users....sure, no problem
4
"The business of business is now society."
--------
Some of us have been saying that for many, many years—not just in the "second inning."
2
Speaking of halcyon visions, how is that Lexus and olive tree thing working out for average Americans?
2
Zuckerman does not need to do a thing. People should be aware of what happens when they post their personal information on any social media platform. It's out there and available for anybody to find and exploit. Voluntarily posting information it's an act of free speech. Any action by the government or even subtle coercion by Mr. Friedman to interfere in this ability to voluntarily post information, or to cull through it and block suspect information, is suppression of free speech.
1
Can the Zuckerberg oligarchy throw away their business model and stop using users as their product ? Facebook sells you ,the user, to the highest bidder . Can a multi billion business be forced to stop hauling their cash flow in ? That’s the only way out of this.
1
Facebook is fundamentally unfixable —because when privacy goes up, profits must come down. Their business model is selling our data to advertisers. Less data to sell, less money for Facebook.
The Upton Sinclair quote is perfect. Facebook execs are not bad people - they are just cogs in a system driven by profits. The free market algorithm controls all, guided by an amoral and blind invisible hand.
2
"Don't be evil". We are seeing how effective that ethos turns out to be.
More like "Enabling evil 24/7 by enemies of democracy." Let's see genuine transparency from these corporate data grabbers. How about real punitive action when data breaches are allowed. Band aid PR solutions and full page ads aren't gonna cut it.
A reset will only happen if there is stringent legislation. Self policing is the 'fox watching the henhouse'. The only way any decent legislation is going to come about is if / when Republican control of our government is ended.
I don't know how to accomplish it, but Citizens United has got to go. Wishful thinking don't I know.
Somehow the rest of US must do everything we can to ensure that a massive national voter turnout VOTEs Democrats in and Republicans OUT in the Midterms and afterwards.
We can't rely on inept leadership nor can we fall prey to extreme candidates promises. Time for a REALITY check. Wasting your vote on third party candidates IS counterproductive! NOTE: Jill Stein and Gary Johnson voters HELPED give Trump his electoral college victory. Thanks for that.
Wake up. Write your Congress people. Get involved locally. Whatever it takes... VOTE Them OUT.
1
My fear is not that we are in the second inning, but rather in sudden-death overtime. We have a leader who can't pick a winning team, who can't maintain any high moral ground and is deregulating us into more polluted rivers and air. We have Putin censoring and detaining those who would threatened to win an election against him all while he and his old guard poison and kill agents who defected. And our stock market surges and falls with irrational behavior reflecting sometime I find troublesome at the very least. Second inning? This is no way to play any game.
1
A bit unfortunate to use the self driving car accident as a lead for this story. I'd wager self driving cars are stillb at least an order of magnitude safer than human operated cars. Feeds in to the same fear mongering as train safety.
To fully understand the driverless care technology, you have to be a mechanic, programmer, and very familiar with radar and sensors. It is going to be decades if ever before a driverless car is even as safe. There are physical limitations that are not likely to be exceeded, handling heavy precipitation and fog just to name a few.
1
There are some very smart and ambitious people who feel otherwise. Although the problems are complex, humans don't exactly set an exceedingly high bar, as many are downright distracted. With cautious and specific programming, I tend to think that a car with a multitude of redundant sensors should be able to do a magnitude better than humans in the not too distant future -- within 3 years, I would bet.
Facebook doesn't need to be saved - it is dying at an accelerating rate - it is an app for middle aged women. Know any teens or college students on Facebook? Most wouldn't be caught dead on it.
And don't look for saviors tomorrow among those who rob you today.
3
One solution to maintain privacy - and it doesn't involve tech 'getting a conscience' because that's absurd - is for social media companies to offer users an alternative to data-collection as their primary income source: monthly usage fees structured the way gas, electricity and water are.
AOL Online and Compuserve ring a bell? Pay per service social networking is cold in the grave.
Yes, thanks. But "...offer users an alternative..." means it's an option for privacy freaks, like me. (I also recall that when FB gave Team Obama data for targeting voters, the NYT called the Dems "Digital Masterminds." https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaigns-digital-...
1
What has Zuckerberg ever done to put society first? He's known he's running a grand social experiment in dopamine addiction for years. He's known Facebook's data was leaking all over the place for years. Why change now?
2
The word "privacy" appears just once in the article, and nowhere are the words (or variants) "agree," "approve," or "opt-in" found. The fundamental issue is the degree that an individual can control his/her privacy in the electronic realm.
1
Rather than relying on Mark Zuckerberg's sudden transition to moral leader, what about some reasonable data privacy regulations like the Europeans have instituted?
Will Facebook actually be hit with the $40,000 per violation fine that they accepted in the consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission? Even with 50 million instances, that's still "just" a fine of $2 billion for a company whose net income in 2017 was $16 billion based on $40 billion in revenue
While I mostly agree with Friedman I don't believe that fatal self driving car accidents should be part of "the second inning". Automated driving will revolutionize transport by for example 1) safer, yes safer, traffic envionment and 2) significantly reduced envionmental load because of reduced fuel consumption. There have been 2 fatal accidents involving the technology lately. How many humans have been killed or injured because human drivers during that period? 50.000 ?
We must remember that the technology is in it's infancy and it's necessary to try it out in the real world...
1
Facebook's social media and Uber's self-driving technology have nothing in common. The problem with Uber is immature technology. We've seen that problem before. We know how to deal with it.
The problem with Facebook is that users don't like the fact that they are being sold to advertisers -- but it's been that way from the beginning. As one engineer put it years ago, the best minds of his generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. Facebook's customers are not its users. That's the problem.
We've seen Facebook's problem before with television. The answer will be the same. Do the consumers of a service want to pay for it by being subject to ads? Or not?
All this talk about first inning and second inning and morality musses up some clear questions. That doesn't help find answers.
1
I like your commercial television analogy. Using the pain threshold of saturation advertising is what we endure. Public broadcasting anyone?
1
There are so many problems with this article I don't know where to begin. You say:
"which helps companies and leaders build ethical cultures, ..."
COMPANIES AND ETHICS is an oxymoron.
you further say:
"It all depends on how the tools are designed and how we choose to use them..."
even a useful tool like a hammer can be turned into a bludgeon.
technology and the USERS have gotten out of hand and FACEBOOOK needs to be killed.
Mr. Friedman et al seems to advocate for businesses to just get more of a conscience. To act more like regular people (after all, "corporations are people, my friend," right?) The fact is, the business of business is...wait for it....business. They provide services and products for an exchange of value. Trying to wedge morality into capitalism is a fools errand. Perhaps we need to change the paradigm of who owns people's personal data? If people were paid by businesses for the use of their data, perhaps we wouldn't be faced with this conundrum.
It's hard to "listen" to your moral compass and contribute to the greater good when your platform is built to generate profits through selling stuff and in some cases false narratives to it's users. I deleted my Facebook account.
2
@ Bruce Ronzenblit: "Why not set up a parallel fee for service Facebook and see how the public responds?"
Because Zuckerberg would be billions poorer with that business model. It is all about his greed.
2
Mr. Friedman, Upton Sinclair said it best :
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
Rest assured, FB executives will not get the message.
2
Mr. Z is a successful, intelligent businessman who makes decisions for his massive, public company using data points, not personal opinions or even social mores. He always has. Asking him now to change his own deep-seated instinct to trust data more than fallible people - and potentially diminish his company’s share value more than has already happened - asks a lot of him.
1
The Tom Friedman–Dov Seidman first inning–second inning construct is born-yesterday thinking. Shortly before their "first inning" there was a prehistory of immensely important computer-based invention and development.
It also was an era in which technology leaders heeded Murphy's Law (anything that can fail *will* fail). It was an era whose luminaries tended to be in awe of the technologies and their expanding possibilities, rather than in awe of expansive egos. And it was an era in which information technologies were admired, but not yet blindly worshipped.
In that era, computer privacy and security issues were raised (notably by a 1967 book by Alan Westin) but not disdainfully brushed aside.
It was, indeed, a different era.
The world would do well if it would try to recapture many of the qualities that characterized that techno-prehistory.
3
How did all of these tech giants become so rich, so quickly?
I always suspect at least two things played a role:
1) Most people don't know how much public money we spent on the basic science and engineering that made the technology possible, and how long it took to develop. So we are too credulous when told over and over that the tech giants are some sorts of superhuman wizards.
2) People don't realize how much one billion dollars is. It is enough to generate about $25 million per year, just invested in Treasuries and other public debt. And that's over $2800 an hour -- 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
A billion dollars is enough to set 100 descendants up for life.
In the meantime, we learn teachers are struggling, finding themselves suddenly in debt for what they believed was a $4000 scholarship, and are forced to go to court to rectify the type of error that basic fairness and modern computers were supposed to prevent.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/03/28/596162853/dept-of-education-f...
It is about what we value, all right.
8
The Facebook creation of magnified 1000's of times media societal gossip and violating users privacy was a moral horror from the beginning - which I refused to join. Because I remembered a grade school demonstration of how destructive gossip could be when the teacher whispered something to a student at one end of the room, this was whisper passed it on, and what emerged at the other end of the room was as a completely false statement or malicious slander. It is inherently destructive for many to have unlimited access to much of what others think or say.
Does our future necessarily require more control by large corporations? Is it a foregone conclusion that the way forward is via business which is now, according to Mr. Seidman and Mr. Krugman, effectively the equivalent of society? Can we have a democracy if we can only "elect" our governance via what technology we "purchase" (better said, the companies submit our personal data to)? People often mistakenly declare that the internet and technology has democratized society, when in fact it further consolidated money and power into a select few people all the while stripping entire industries of their value and utility. Instead of demanding or hoping that these huge corporations, some of which are monopolies, act as moral guardians of democracy and the people, I prefer instead that power and control is returned in earnest to the people. We need a government that is not so corrupted by big money that we can safely elect them to be the guardians of our democracy.
1
I would gladly trade targeted advertisong to have a free platform not controlled by government. Are you not suspicious in the least that politicians in Washington are only now concerned with Facebooks business model when bulk data is being sold to Steve Bannon and other to market political ads?? I say so what! It is a trade off totally worthwhile because I have free access to unfiltered information among my "friends" amd others all over the world. By using the Facebook platform I consent. I particularly like advertising and news feeds targeted towards me...often I find amusing never do I find manipulative. Unencumbered free speech is bukwark of li erty...speech is a two way communication...often I have to listen.
Mark Zuckerberg may run Facebook, but he can not save me or "us" and the idea that he can is ridiculous and even offensive. I am not going to be saved by the CEO of Coca Cola, so why suggest otherwise?
6
Technology is dangerous. We shouldn't do things just because we can.We are now all subject to the operations of systems and machines and weapons that we don't understand or control. It makes for an anxious nation and lots of crises after the fact which may or may not be factors in the end of our species in the long term. Perhaps it's because we are a young country, no shared history or shared relationship to our ecosystems and environment, with a fast buck economy, but in any case what we have devised technologically presents problems more deeply rooted and dangerous and more difficult to manage than Russian hackers or the ethics of corporate leaders.
2
Our White House is on fire, smoke getting into my eyes, seeing what is really happening is difficult. Is our nation observant enough, wise enough, strong enough to put this fire out ? Can you, and I, save the Union ?
This happened about a year ago.
Two female colleagues who happen to be also friends outside of work are talking with their phones on the table. Let's call them Miss A and Miss B. The topic was another common friend, Miss C, who has just given birth to her first born child.
The moment the conversation was over over between Miss A and Miss B, they grabbed their things to go home. On the way out, they checked their respective FB feeds on their phones.
Miss A who is single and is currently not dating, got an ad for IVF Clinic.
Miss B who is single but is in a long time relationship, got an ad for honeymoon destination.
Both Miss A and Miss B swore that their FB apps weren't opened during the conversation and they got the news about Miss C and her newborn over a phone call.
Who needs Big Brother when we have facebook?
Try deleting your facebook account today. You'll have the chance to download your data. You'll see that every single call and text on your phone, yes phone, and not just those via the facebook app, is logged. This means that this data is parsed, parceled, and purveyed to advertisers.
But hey, it's free, right?
What's also free? Deleting facebook.
10
Thank you so much for this information. I had no idea the technology had gone this far.
I thought it might be of interest to see how the UK treats privacy rights, and plan to read this report:
https://www.inbrief.co.uk/human-rights/surveillance-of-private-individuals/
You will notice privacy is classified under the rubric of human rights.
4
Why rely at all on Zuckerberg, who essentially happened upon the power of the social network that is Facebook, entirely by chance? He has proven that he does not have the capacity to be any sort of moral leader. The qualities that Seidman calls for, "promoting civility and decency... being truly bold," are not qualities that are beyond Zuckerberg's understanding but are clearly beyond his ability to deliver. Trust and truth cannot be simply expected of these companies or of one so-called leader. Instead, we must call on every single participant in Technology 2.0, 3.0 (and so on) to be responsible for ourselves and the actions we take. Unless you plan on checking out of the internet or somehow removing your entire web presence, it is YOUR responsibility to be aware of your data and how it's used. Be aware of the information you put out and consume, and what content or services are being delivered. Work together to make technology a unifier instead of a divider. Mark Zuckerberg can't save us or Facebook if we intend to be idle users ready to be serve ourselves up for the sake of connection. The value of technology is in each of us, and accordingly, the responsibility and morality to move forward to its next positive iteration is on us as well.
5
By the second inning, it's apparent the ball is juiced, the bat is corked, and the umpires are on the take while the fans in the stands drink $30 poisoned koolaids and are conditioned to love the whole spectacle.
7
Dear Thomas Friedman, This is not the second inning of "the world's great technological leaps". The game is over. This is another example of Virgil's story of the "Trojan Horse" written over 2000 years ago. To their credit the very smart Russians won the cold war in November 2016 by getting their lapdog Trump elected who will destroy the country from within. They spent pennies to our billions during the battle. Facebook, the media, a gullible electorate and many other accomplices were ready and willing to help their cause. God help us
2
Facebook overall is a bulwark of liberty. Trading my likes and dislakes for access to a free and uncensored communication platform is a bargain. When politicians or authoritarians condemn a communications platform beware....they have been doing this since the invention of the printing press. China is a great example of Facebooks revelence. For me I say target me with advertising and liberty or give me death...to Bannon and minions manipulate me please...make my day.
“the cool Facebook platform enabled Russian troll farms to divide us and inject fake news into our public life”
When did a minor non-state Russian troll farm do anything of the sort? Fake news wasn’t a new thing in 2016, nor was fake news on the internet new then either.
Also not at all clear that Facebook was ever cool, even when it was just a college kid thing, it was kinda creepy.
3
Uh, the umpire was selected by hacking in the first inning. The platforms still want to make their billions in the next inning. Who exactly is going fix this?
Social media is fundamentally based on deceit and trickery by duping users into allowing their personal information to be surreptitiously tapped in return for "free" (time-wasting) "services" (engineered addiction to trivia). Just say no. And if you cannot say no, pay an annual tax to compensate society from the tremendous damage social media does to actual social relations, economic productivity, public safety, children's education, democracy, international relations and national security.
48
This might apply to the entire internet.
Absurd analysis. Facebook and free speech platforms are a bulwark of liberty. Free speech protections mean I will be subjected to things I do not agree with...and if that means I am being targeted with advertising please by all means target me...Just no censorship...the individual is his or her censor. Republican vs Democrat is immaterial to totalitarianism...what they are interested in is the systematic withdrawal of our universal values from their shores...that value is Free Speech. Targeted ads is a small price to pay for this platform. NO ONE GIVES UP FREEDOMS WILLINGLY IT OFTEN COMES UNDER THE GUISE OF "PROTECTING" SOCIETY.
Thomas,
I regard you as one of the best, if not the best, op-ed analysts in
the business. Your analyses are clear and true.
There is a 'however', as regards this particular column. What, to
me, is missing is a treatment encompassing the overall problem of
internet technology and of the social media.
Having been retired from the sciences, I've long felt that technology
has run away from man's ability to fully understand and to control it,
with dire consequences. As, for example, Uber's tragic autonomous
car fatality.
Further, you seem to place too much faith in those responsible to be
so altruistic as to overlook their original purpose, and that is to
reap the monetary benefits as fast as they can. It is in this endeavor
that they cut corners, and not necessarily fully comprehend the
consequences of their output.
The fault is not with them, but with either non or poor regulation. The
internet is a dangerous place comparable to that of driving, smoking,
drugs ingestion, etc. The public internet, with all of its
ramifications, including the social media, must be strongly government
regulated.
Mr Friedman says that we ourselves are responsible for the correctness of our actions when viewed from a central point of view. This is a beautiful idea tried in the past and rests on the believe that humans are "good".But in nature there is no good or bad as a precondition for being.We just are.That is enough. The problem to Me is always how power is distributed and how and who sets the standards. Democracy was so beautiful because it never assumed the goodness of man but allowed him to be, and man created a government to insure that their own behavior and actions staid within acceptable limits. Man the individual and man the social being are one and the same in a democracy. If you now say " I do not trust my government" you are saying that you have lost trust in yourself and since nothing informs the government things begin to collapse There is no Democracy any more and that could explain the appearance of a Donald Trump here and other Trumps all over the world. Mr Friedman suggests that we as individuals have to assume the role of government does not look possible to me. It is of course the next generation that will have to reveal to us how change will develop and that will become apparent in due time.
1
Technology, like money, are mere tools for good or evil, are not in themselves good or evil. Arguably, even the technology of war such are AR 15 we want to ban for civilian use can be useful in the face of well armed terrorists.
Goodness is what lie in our hearts, our intentions. If Zuckerberg intents to foster common good, and not just build company, make name and wealth for himself, he would not have resisted that Facebook might have been compromised by nefarious foreign elements. If his intention to do good was pure, he would not have hesitated to investigate.
It was not his fault that Facebook was co-opted by Russians and "fake-newster", but it is definitely his fault their infiltration took so long to be uncovered and are still allowed to go on.
It should be clear to us now most technology is like razor's edge, it can cut both ways. The only safeguard is our goodness. This goodness I would argue can be best nurtured in a democratic system.
As such, I think we are a superpower, and exceptional, because our economic and military power are backed by the power of goodness. The superpower status of U.S. is irreplaceable by countries like China because their undemocratic system does not foster a free person, and genuine goodness can only come from a free person.
Some rich countries have universal health care because they want to. The goodness in them dictate so. Why haven't we?
Yes, Mr. Friedman, until we freely choose the welfare of the people, we can't be protected.
1
As far as privacy goes the starting point should be that everything, everywhere is "opt in". In other words it should be illegal to use people's information without their explicit permission, except for the purpose of their relationship with the entity seeking their permission. Exactly what information is being used for what purposes should also be documented; otherwise how can anyone make the decision to opt in? In most cases privacy practices just contain legalese like "We may...", which tells you nothing and is why hardly anyone ever reads them. This will impact the business model of things like Facebook who depend on selling information in order to provide a "free" service but what's the alternative?
Controlling extreme propaganda is more complicated because it runs into the first amendment. That does have legally accepted exceptions like hate speech, which is a good place to start, but where do you draw the line?
1
One of the few times, I think you have almost entirely missed the point. Sure, we can argue for individual moral courage and greater transparency —all good—but it's our institutions that ensure when individuals and companies go astray. Greater transparency will not save Facebook. As others have said, it's core business model is based on their users being the product and the advertisers, Facebook's (true) customers. No amount of transparency will in itself reverse the impact of how they share data nor be able to clamp down effectively (beyond a whack-a-mole approach) the spread of fake news. As individual users, we should control the use of our own data. By default, it (our social graph) should not be able to be used without our prior consent. Of course, that means we may have to9 start paying for the use of these apps and social platforms. And that, most likely would upset the apple cart by profoundly changing the ad supported business model. Moral courage is worthy to strive for but without strict regulations (protections) and strong enforcing institutions, you may as well construct a swimming pool without walls. Good luck with that!
2
I'll believe Zuckerberg when he makes it easy for
customers to Delete their accounts. It is a cyber-hassle,
as is. Anyone else tried?
1
Took me five minutes. Wait 14 days, don't sign in to FB, and you're done. I recommend it to everyone.
1
"In the fused world, the business of business is no longer just business. The business of business is now society."
When was this ever not true? Friedman proclaimed the pros and neglected the cons of a so-called "flat world," so now he invents an imperiled "fused world" to save face. And tries to pass it off with a ridiculous baseball metaphor. There are no innings. Nothing has changed fundamentally.
Digital technology has advanced but social relations and ethics have been with us through every technological advance since tribal nomadism, at least. When the British government granted the first corporate charter, the business of business was most certainly a social issue. As it was when merchants and landowners, some of them reliant on slave labor, challenged the taxes imposed by that British government. As it was in the Gilded Age when monopolists and financiers excused wealth inequalities derived from new technologies like railroads and oil refining by appealing to "social Darwinism." As it was in the early twentieth century when "scientific management" led to assembly lines and bureaucracies. As it was in the 1970s and 80s when US policy empowered the financial sector and incentivized investment in digital networks as a response to macroeconomic stagnation.
It's not the second inning. I'm tempted to point to our imperiled ecosystem and say it's more like the bottom of the ninth, but that would only perpetuate Mr. Friedman's blithe foolishness. It's not a game at all.
2
Any article on Internet privacy that makes no mention of PRISM, XKeyscore, or the Five Eyes strikes me as strange, somehow.
If governments can do it, of course private actors can and will. We were warned, many times.
We are going back to the future- golly gee Virginia morals and ethics and the bill of rights are all very important and fundamental to our lives. No technology is going to find new morals and a new ethic towards humans and the planet we live on. we have all we need - all we have to do is apply them. We have to be engaged in our civic and religious life. The price of truth and freedom is eternal vigilance and participation. If we don't participate we get the horror show we have now in the White House- an amoral unethical bully.
I can make one suggestion for the on line world- have a built in fact checker that brings in other statements on the same issue or content. So a post from former General Flynn that Clinton was kidnapping children in a McDonalds in DC would have in red below it a statement saying - "there are no police reports of such activity and Mc Donalds has no such information.""
Seidman: “Once you see that your technologies are having unintended consequences, you cannot maintain your neutrality — especially when you’ve become so central to the lives of billions of people.”
Me: And if you don't act, we. the People, have an obligation to enact the legal means necessary to rein you in.
1
Sadly, Friedman doesn't understand what by now should be obvious to anyone not vested in self-delusion. The business model of Facebook (and the commercial internet in general) entirely depends on selling your personal information. Period. If they cannot sell you, they do not exist. More fundamentally, however, what he doesn't get is that the internet cannot be made secure from "being hacked and weaponized." While he rightly understands the basic issue is one of values, Friedman is not willing to accept the fact that, when it comes to technology (and other things), the bad guys are as smart as the good guys and, arguably, more motivated. How is it, does he think, that drugs make it up and guns make it down through our southern border?
Friedman also writes, "At the height of the Cold War, when the world was threatened by spreading Communism and rising walls, President John F. Kennedy vowed to 'pay any price and bear any burden' to ensure the success of liberty." Is Friedman, are Americans in general, prepared to pay the price and bear the burden, giving up their internet phones and 500-channel TVs to "ensure the success of liberty", for that is what it would take to even begin the necessary conversation on values and ethics, to wean ourselves from an environment where no longer would we be able 24/7 to immerse ourselves in nothing but reinforcement of what we already believe and think?
Can Friedman take the first step and say "Hi, my name is Tom. I'm a junkie."?
3
Moral leadership in the second inning from Big Tech? Oh, we are in trouble. Moral leadership from an industry whose business model is to always increase "average time spent" through the "dopamine feedback loop" to the detriment of our children and society as a whole. Moral leadership from an industry that vacuums up our data and lies about it later. (see Zuckerberg BBC 2009) Moral leadership from an industry who legally avoids paying the bulk of their taxes and then hires temp workers to maintain their gleaming campuses to avoid paying their benefits. This industry whose, not exactly aspirational motto, was "Don't be Evil." Oops - too late
1
Censorship! Thomas Friedman...you are espousing censorship. You want to take a democratic platform and marry it with elitism. The best censors are the individual users. Since the invention of the printing press elites and authoritarians have waged a campaign against free speech and free if unwittingly. When has "truth" been the standard for free speech. Whose truth? If the Russians want to communicate their preference for a candidate on a public platform...why not? I personally would like to hear their viewpoint unfiltered by government. Bullying...close your account..get your parents involved. Global democratization of speech is overall a fantastic enterprise for justice and peace....It is impossible to cure societal ills through policing a platform like Facebook. Of course common sense would dictate that Facebook quickly shut down pornography and psychopathic murderers using the platform among other instances...but death to the platdorm from 1000 cuts is not worth being immune from discomfort. If it is too much for some I suggest close the browser and read a book.
“the cool Facebook platform enabled Russian troll farms to divide us and inject fake news into our public life”
When did a minor non-state Russian troll farm do anything of the sort? Fake news wasn’t a new thing in 2016, nor was fake news on the internet new then either.
Barn Door, meet close.
5
Another example of Freidman pouring the same spoiled wine into a differently shaped bottle - gosh...this is all just a ball game with innings. How precociously clever like the earth is 'flat' and all that rubbish. A pseudo intellectual splashing around in the shallow end of the pool.
Corporations will never do the moral (whatever that is) thing. They're all amoral. Not immoral but essentially oblivious to anything that doesn't maximize profit.
Good lord, Zukerberg stole the idea for FB in the first place and FB employees have stated his distain for the idiot end users of his crappy product. All you FB addicts are being played for fools.
8
This must have been what the debate/discussion about television looked or sounded like when it first became widely available. Or maybe it was when radio was invented.
One thing that hasn't changed over the decades is the tendency of people to prefer others whose opinions mirror theirs. Since the days of writing letters and posting broadsheets, we've had people who say or write horribly offensive things, lies, and try to stir up unrest. In the opinion of this reader what is missing is the teaching of critical thinking skills to our young people. Our education system prefers students who don't stray from the "party line" and penalizes those who do. Such preferences can and do leave people unable or unwilling to see different sides of an issue. From there we move on to intolerance. Of course it doesn't help that our current president is running the country via Twitter and that our current GOP majority is incapable of governing unless their campaign coffers are filled by their donors.
As long as enough Americans refuse to consider that other Americans have a right to their opinions (not their own private facts) and respect that, we will continue to see the polarization and intolerance play itself out on every media platform available. And we'll continue to have an ungovernable nation.
2
Sitting aside the (passionate) opinions and pontificates for a moment perhaps we can back up (pun intended) to the self-driving incident for one moment of empirical reflection. Horrifying and tragic as the fatal incident is, lets statistically compare miles traveled self driving vs. historical human driving (sometimes under influence of alcohol) and consider the statistical likelihood of a pedestrian fatality from self driving vs. human driving. I don't have access to the data. I suspect that fatalities to pedestrians per mile traveled is much higher for human operated vehicles than self driving vehicles.
Let's say, as a thought experiment, my guess is correct. Lets say a pedestrian is killed by self driving vehicles once per 3 million miles of vehicle travel vs., say (just pulling numbers out of the air) that a pedestrian is killed once per 1 million miles of current human driving.
Are we willing to let reason and rational empirical evidence be esteemed and given reasonable weight in the midst of opinion, feelings, reactions, broad sensationalism (all good things for the journalism and social media industries)?
I trust professional journalism, like the NY Times, to be more likely to include a dose of empirical skepticism than public social media (sensational and opinion driven). Maybe I am biased but my interpretation is that this is somewhat valid trust. For the health and power of free press I hope so.
1
The outrage of political/economic establishment, traditional news media such as the NYTimes, about manipulation of public, fake news, foreign intervention, invasion of privacy, data mining on platforms such as Facebook?
What hypocrisy. What is a news organization other than reporters snooping about? What is news, pundits, other than an organization which arrogates itself the right to declare what about reality is worth making public, what views people should take as to politics and economy? I certainly have never been served by traditional media in any better sense than on Facebook or any other platform of internet. In all cases I have had to deal with snooping about, testing, put downs, censorship.
There is no doubt the NYTimes is a rigged game. Plenty of times I have offered great insights backed by years of genuine study and thought and only received what I more than suspect to be co-opting of my ideas, censorship, control of myself (marginalization so I will have no influence except among those who study me often as curiosity or how best to leverage me to their advantage).
All round on internet, no matter how established, respected the site, there is jealous guarding of prerogative, control over conversation, assertiveness that "My truth is the real and only truth of today". I place no stock in anybody anymore. Nobody deserves it. Life for any worthwhile philosopher today is just wandering through a big con delivered from all sides. There is no truth but own truth.
Two things:
1) humans will always forget the fact that utopia only exists in science fiction, never in reality; &
2) Zuckerberg will forever be that gawky college nerd forever idealistic in his pursuit of "friends"
1
Zuckerberg was a moderately talented computer geek who took a really good idea from the Winkelvoi (as he calls them), and improved it. He then showed he had a great feel for getting investment backing, and screwing those who'd helped him. His adolescent notion of what it means to be a "friend" is pathetic--although more than 2 billion people are in thrall to it, and he does indeed share the Gate-Paige/Brin-Jobs notion that the world was a sad thing until they arrived. (Paige some time ago announced his discovery that there were actually some interesting things in books. Duh.)
The problem for "fixing" Facebook is very simple: to do the right things--whatever they may be exactly--is likely to cut into the bottom line. Guess what will happen....
6
There's only one difference between Zuck and the Mercers, the Kochs, the Waltons, Thiel, et. al.: he's younger. The only thing he's interested in saving is his fortune and his power.
4
Ok, I read about lots of woo woo ideas in this wordy piece - but most emphatically did not hear "How Mark Zuckerberg Can Save Facebook — and Us" - mostly because Thomas never mentioned the fact all of this moralizing directly contradicts Facebook's raison d'être: making money. All else falls before the great god of greed, and by such failure is our democracy imperiled and our republic being slowly destroyed.
1
Zuckerberg never had a grand vision nor was he motivated by altruism...like Steve Jobs....he was just trying to get a date. This mess is far beyond his limited capabilities....like a kid who starts a fire that gets out of control and destroys thousands of acres and buildings. Limited imagination and taking lots of profits but very little personal responsibility. What is he going to do about it? Very little I expect.....we all pay the price while he sits on his fortune.
2
I have great sympathy for a moral stance. BUT much misgiving as I observe the institutional violence of western history where without exception all parties to the most horrendous conflicts routinely prayed before battle to the same (Christian) god. My conclusion: no one ever enters conflict asserting that they are taking the side of evil. No, no, everybody is always on the side of right.
I believe that American democracy is not based on the “goodness” of the founding fathers; not as an attempt at fairness. No, I think the democratic system was an attempt to use “technology”, I.e., the system of government, to transcend the inevitable discord that conflicting interests would produce, and not rely on people “doing the right thing”. It is very clear right now that the opposing sides to our political divide each are convinced of their own righteousness. And that’s fine, as long as they don’t take sticks and stones to assert their “goodness”.
As for the Facebook issue more directly, it seems to me exactly like the gun issue, a technology issue which is being muddled into a morality issue. And so we inherit the wild wind.
Zuckerberg and his like are no different than Rockefeller and other power hungry and rapacious capitalists of history. The Facebooks, Googles
Amazons,etc. love to claim altruism, but we see how they have used their power.
Technology always promises more than it delivers and seldom looks forward to any problems or misuses.
Convenience is continually oversold with the latest app or gadget.
Is it really that difficult to walk over to your thermostat or turn on a light switch or give the people you care about a phone call?
As with our history of industry, regulation becomes necessary because of greed and power.
As Camus said "Integrity has no need of rules".
1
Congrats on writing an interesting article about everything around the problem, including lots of pining about 'values' etc., without really understanding anything. Thus the use once again of wretched sports analogies, the most popular one being of course, baseball.
Its very, very simple. The business model of Facebook is: Collect personal info and SELL it.
It was NEVER about 'connecting' the people of the world. That is simply the bait.
Unless the business model changes then personal data will be used and misused for every purpose imaginable. Period. Full Stop.
7
The "innings" metaphor falsely suggests both play and a competitive game, but this hasn't been especially fun, and the playing field doesn't feel anything like level. Swing and a miss.
This is a case of Tom Friedman's fondness for "new paradigms" getting the better of him.
There is no need for a new rule here, made especially for the benefit of Facebook, Google and Twitter. For-profit corporations are nether qualified, nor entitled, to assume a role of moral or ethical stewardship.
However, the old paradigm still holds: they must be expected, and required, to conduct business in an ethical fashion, which covers quite a lot of ground, including refraining from misrepresenting how they use personal information.
In the case of Facebook, this might include providing on request a complete audit of every third-party with whom personal information was shared, its current status, and how much was paid for it. This may sound onerous, but in the rest of the business world, it is pretty standard procedure for suppliers (i.e. Facebook users) to know what they were paid.
Of course, if Facebook were to be this direct with its users, including clarifying which third-parties still had access to their information, its business model might be in trouble.
Alternatively, they could just charge users a few dollars a month, stop selling advertising, and be a smaller, but more admirable company.
We have no need for Facebook or its servers. Devices that use peer to peer communications involve no indiscreet big brother.
1
How about this little fact? We are responsible for our own behavior. on social media. What we say, and what we share can be attributed to no one, but ourselves. We are not even required to participate.
2
Dear Thomas Friedman- would you please consider running for public office? You would be a phenomenal senator! And eventually...!
Tom you leave out the all important reason for the lack of morality, leadership, a recognition of people not as just users or as clicks but as citizens, greed. From the very top , the POTUS on down, business has been overwhelmed with greed.
2
The problems with tech and the internet are larger than Zuckerberg and Facebook. You need to start with a discussion of the porosity of digital networks. How many players and contributors are there in the hardware? There are no "national" network servers. "Privacy" is a fiction.
In the face of this, at the user end, you need to recognize that radical transparency is what moves politics.
1
Why use the word "tragically" to modify "killed" in your first paragraph? Would not the sentence be stronger without the adverb? And the power of the adverb not further weakened by this use? (Otherwise I'm in the Amen corner with you.)
1
Sadly, none of this will happen because...greed.
1
Given how horrid the second inning is, maybe it’s time to step away from the fantasy of how glorious inning one was. Further this column could easily be reduced to: read Seidman’s book.
2
Did Facebook users, ever bother to read the Terms & Condition they agreed to before they checked the box for a FB account? Did Facebook users ever bother to read the up-teem changes and amendments to F.B. Terms & Conditions. I doubt it. I had a professor who warned us, we should be sceptical when someone tells you, " the next best thing" is going make life easier and/or simpler. We live in a capitalistic society, nothings free.
We can save ourselves if many of use would stop being sheep... critical thinking and being knowledgeable of how you us Tech has its advantages. Long before Cambridge Analytica, there was the "Patriot Act, whistle-blower Edward Snowden and Facebook and the DoD (U.S. Department of Defense) conducting experiments attempting to see if F.B. users could be emotionally manipulated --It appears Cambridge Analytica beat FB and our DoD to the punch.
Three days ago F.B. and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the logging people’s call and SMS (text) history without their permission. You know who F.B blamed, Facebook users, read their statement in the link. https://betanews.com/2018/03/25/facebook-blames-you/
Could we survive without having a Facebook account? Of course we can. Could Facebook survive without users? Nope. That's how I deem a want verses a necessity. :)
3
Such a naive column. Zuckerberg and Sandberg are incapable of showing any understanding or empathy for what they have done to their users. Watching their performance during recent interviews, they looked like programmed robots and showed little human emotions. Zuckerberg has continually lied about not selling user data and has made it difficult to understand and use the privacy settings. That was done for a reason, to obfuscate. The tools they created for advertisers can be used by those with evil motives and Facebook has no way to distinguish. Yesterday it was reported how scammers thanked Facebook for making their job easier and allowing them to find their marks thanks to Facebook's tools. The only solution is to offer their services for a fee and eliminate their model of harvesting our data.
2
Just read that an employee of a Facebook board member's company was helping Cambridge Analytica, advising them how to harvest data. Frankly, I think it's time to start investigating Facebook. What did they know before the election? What did they do about it?
Well, Mr. Friedman, Americans may well have been willing to "bear any burden, and pay any price, in defense of Liberty", but if you think I (or anyone else) will do the same in defense of a slimy, out-of-control industry like social media, you are going to be sorely disappointed.
Facebook is just the beginning--the worm is turning, and people worldwide are finally beginning to question the profound stupidity of continuing to give up self-evident rights so that a handful of billionaires can travel a smooth path to trillionaires, and beyond...
1
‘You will know that the good guys are winning when you see big tech companies rise to Kennedy’s challenge — to pay any price and bear any burden to protect us from the downsides of the technologies they’ve created.’
Sarcasm?
I just don’t find his opinions stimulating .
Americans have finally come to the realization that Facebook and Social Media
are not their friend but an adversary who cryptically undermines their lives.
The consumer of this media has become the product to be sold to
advertisers. Moral and ethical considerations are non-existent and are used as
talking points in their quest to hide.
The clear indication of Facebook and the rest is that they are mining minds
for money.
I'm currently reading "Hamilton", the biography about the founding father which inspired "Hamilton" the hit musical.
Part of what strikes me in reading this book is the political rancor that existed then as it does now, and much of this rancor, which included newspaper publishing (the social media of the time) consisted of fake news and non-existent facts.
As long as these platforms continue to let fake information from being propagated, the potential will always exist for misuse. I'm all for free speech, but that free speech must be grounded in fact, and it will likely take a degree of regulation to enforce it. Absent that regulation, this second inning -- and the inevitable unknown but more risky innings to come -- will be ripe with bad actors full of greedy intentions taking advantage of these platforms to advance their greedy agendas. I believe that we need regulation such that the source of content on these platforms is transparent, and that there are strong enforcement mechanisms to help prevent the spread of false content. We can't leave it to these actors to self-regulate. Greed has and will always pervert transparency and honesty.
The second inning? Friedman has long been a cheerleader for the glories of the digital revolution, convinced, like legions of techno utopians before him, that it would deliver economic, social and human PROGRESS! Now he says "we’re just beginning to understand" the implications of that revolution, and his expert interlocutor suggests we need to pause to ponder "the kind of values and leadership we will need" to realize its promise. Good advice, though obvious, and more than a little late. Some of us who have studied the history of technology know that the power of new techniques consistently brings a rush of enthusiasm followed by a host of unexpected consequences, many of them unpleasant, and that consequently the wise move would be to view those utopian expectations with skepticism and act accordingly. Many thinkers have sounded warnings to that effect, for centuries -- I quote plenty of them in my book "Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology." Unfortunately, for centuries the hosannas of the enthusiasts have drowned them out. And so here we are, in the "second inning," when we've reconfigured our culture to conform to the digital revolution's demands. Thanks a lot.
1
With all due respect, this isn't a game. Scientists have well understood that new technology always brings new social and moral challenges. The problem here is the profit motive and the privacy (thank you "Citizens United") of what are supposed to be public corporations versus the better interests of the country and humanity; all in a time warp that doesn't give us time to reconcile.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Jobs, et al., were all created in the instant billionaire mode without a moral infrastructure. Yet, we leave it to them in a faulty corporate structure to protect our rights and our democracy. They own the government because of the corrupt campaign finance system. We're way past the any second inning, Tom. We may be in extra inning and it's almost game over.
1
"Values are more vital now than ever, Seidman insisted".
Seidman is right. Shareholder VALUE and the optimization and maximization of shareholder values is paramount as we have learned from Facebook, Wells Fargo and the various other company operations. Nothing new here folks.
6
When Zuckerberg stops behaving like an entitled juvenile and takes full responsibility for the repercussions of producing an incredibly fortunate, and timely, piece of software, maybe people might start to cut him some slack. But as it stands now, he's not doing anything but paying lip service, while soaking up billions from using other peoples' data.
The remedy in all this would be for the government to admit that people's individual data belongs to the people (private or not) and it is the people who should receive royalties for its use and decide if and to who it gets sold.
3
Social media is set up so that if you use it, what you voluntarily post ceases to be your property in ways that could allow you to claim royalties or prevent its sale. I've seen that not just in the fine print, but written bold, for at least twenty years.
That's how they became billionaires in a matter of a few years.
And in the second inning hubris was invented and a platform created so we could all validate our existence.
2
Remember the Harmonic convergence in 1987, when all the planets lined up and it was predicted that a "major energy shift" was about to occur, powerful enough to change the global perspective of man from one of conflict to one of co-operation? That was right before Friedman's "first inning." Now we're fused. "Only connect!" - E.M. Forster, Howard's End
The only reason that people are upset about the Facebook information gathering is that it was used by the political right in a more effective way than the left. There is no neutrality in Big Tech. It's all on the political left. When it figures out that it can manipulate search results, and put certain videos on restricted lists, and push information toward us to meet its social vision ends, we're really going to be in trouble.
2
O'Brien Airstrip One — Time to deploy your landing gear!
"Values" is an empty phrase, just like "trust." Trustworthiness is what we need. Despite the cheerleading here, the platform and money makers who have indeed changed our lives haven't shown much if at all. Friedman's value-set is mere platitudes. What we need is laws that protect.
3
I just doubt it is Zuckerberg's responsability to fix and correct ignorant or stupid humans. Neither to protect us from ourselves. The good of Facebook far outway evil and manipulative content. As citizens we must find a way to become better informed and responsible. The Kids, ie: next generations, are going about this the correct way with regards to recent marches and demands for action on gun violence.
1
Zuckerberg has zero responsibility to be the mora compass of anything. He has prvided a remarkably useful tool that mist people use responsibly
There are individuals who mususe the tool. We need laws and enforcement mechanisms. Thise are the responsibilities of government. Asking Zuckerberg to do this is unreasonable and won’t work
This is like the gun control debate which sadly government refused to handle. Sadly the issue here will likely end up in the Supreme Court. Worse it will decided by the radically activist Robert’s Court which as Trump has said is and must remain a Republican Court. Just a question of whch republican jurist must be bought
But it should instead be the legislature’s job
1
"How you take or don’t take responsibility for what your technology enables or for what happens on your platforms is inescapable." Others think that government (new laws) will solve some of the ethical problems of new technology. On the other hand, it does seem that Ted Kaczynski was more correct when he said, "Tech advances will eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy."
If are looking for people like Zuckerberg, or any other Silicon Valley, virtual signaling hypocrite, to “save” us, then we are truly doomed.
6
Another case of Progressives 'eating their young'. In search of the phantom Russian, that fiendishly denied Mother Earth her destiny, lib's are bashing one of their biggest proponents. That is where it is; that is what it has become. A psychological term explains it more clearly, discombobulation i.e. confused. They create a lie to hurt an enemy and to excuse and deflect incompetence. Unable to convince people the manufactured event(s) occurred, they, stubbornly in pursuit, have formed a lynch mob and are at the door of one of their kings.
Perhaps it's time for our "Bill of Responsibilities". We "demand" our rights - even extremists hiding behind the 2nd Amendment as their "right" to bear weapons of mass destruction. But no amendment 2A declaring our responsibility to care for our brothers and sisters and to truly "do no harm".
It's time for us to stand up as citizens, NOT consumers. When our basic values - our "bottom line values" are more about "bottom line dollars" - maximizing short term profits at all costs (benefitting a few) - what we see is what we get. Complete disregard for anything but financial value, not human and life values. Trump and Zuckerberg, Facebook and Wells Fargo Bank, are perfect examples. They will screw their customers for a buck, and then make billions of dollars. When our system of incentives and motivations are all about money instead of the well being of life, we get madness like this. The sham that technology will save us is just that, a sham.
Yes - technology can clearly enhance the well being of life. Yet it's the underlying values that drive how the technology will be used and abused. if it's all about the money, making huge financial returns in the shortest period of time, technology will be driven by those values. If we awaken to the new reality that the role and purpose of business and technology it to enhance the well being of life and the natural world, then we'll be OK. If short term profit maximizing is the driver, we're dead. Truth and trust must live
1
It feels unfair to lump the Uber pedestrian fatality in with all the other social ills that Big Tech has visited upon us. I've seen the video from the car and I don't believe a human driver would have avoided this accident, either. By all means, criticize Uber for its workplace culture or its independent contractor policies. But this incident in Tempe, sad as it is, just doesn't warrant the attention it's gotten. 37,000 people died in car accidents in 2016 and human error was responsible for 94% of those crashes.
1
The Guardian is reporting this story quite differently.
It seems that Uber's testing program may have lacked necessary oversight, due at least in part to its lobbying efforts. This is not the first instance, either.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/28/uber-arizona-secret-s...
Kennedy's precept lead to a fifteen year fruitless war called Vietnam. We don't need macho nostrums. We need regulation. Or better yet, make the internet a utility that we all own and pay for. Take the hustle out and put the honor in.
3
Today is a good day to delete your Facebook account and divest from social media until they are capable of taking “responsibility for what their technology enables.” We must teach our children well— to expect dnd demand social responsibility and ethical behavior from business
3
The only way to fight a bad guy with technology is a good guy with technology. Right?
Zuckerberg and FB can go a long way to help us by spreading truths and facts about Putin and his kleptocratic friends to all Russian FB users. He can also stop Putinizing America with the help of his conman in chief in the Oval Office.
The uncool facial recognition feature that can be built into autonomous vehicles and killing machines can be hacked so that the first autonomous vehicle to identify a target can run them down too. Perhaps the only life saved will be that there's no need for a suicide driver-bomber. Ideally the technology could be used conversely to prevent, even stop, a terrorist from driving a vehicle or truck into people - but it could still be hacked.
Sili-con, we are awake now and cognizant of the perils of technology. Now what?
How about an option for ZERO TRACKING or SHARING WHATSOEVER for a fee? Unfortunately that will never work because the Wharton and Harvard trained MBAs will just see it as another revenue stream and continue to track and sell data.
A non-profit version of FB, Google, etc. is needed that can be funded like PBS or Wikipedia that has a duty to its users and is curated by users as well.
4
If the second inning in our technological prowess is an awakening of being more responsible for what we accept as normal, and recognize the perils of all the benefits involved, the third inning may be a sobering of our license in giving out personal information for the 'goodies' at hand...and expect our privacy to remain inviolable, under the guise of moral strength by staying immune to the misuse of our thoughts/actions for dubious and even malicious intent. It is an irony that in an era of profuse Internet information, with all the misinformation and fake news included, that our knowledge and comprehension has been cut in half, a pregnant opportunity for demagogues and charlatans 'a la Trump' to cheat on us, to exploit our naivete'...and take us to the slaughterhouse by our noses. In this era of societal loss of traditional culture, where literature, music, the arts, philosophy, social sciences, are neglected, and where our zest for credulity (i.e. conspiracy theories) and need for constant entertainment is cheapening our discourse, is there any surprise that News Media is now the gospel truth, and our ignorance of civics, and politics, has become abysmal? Do we really think that democracy is a passive sport, that if we just do our job to earn a living, we can remain disengaged from the body politics...without negative repercussions? Sad to say, but we have forgotten to think for ourselves, fertile ground for losing our right to be free and relevant. Are we the enemy?
Just because you invent something doesn't make you responsible for every misuse of your invention. Just ask the NRA. Guns don't kill people, people
kill people...right?
Never needed nor wanted the Face Book, thus I don't need to plead with the Zucker to cease and desist. But what he is doing to people who do need his product makes him a most powerful person. And in this republic of ours powerful people and corporations need to answer to the right of the people to protect their General Welfare. That makes it incumbent upon our representatives to get up off those numb be-hinds and actually do something to protect the citizens who put them in office in the first place. If not, then we need to put someone in there who will. It's called a democratic republic for a reason. As Franklin told us, "if we can keep it". Well? Can we?
DD
Manhattan
2
I was never worried about Facebook and other platforms I could simply avoid. I never opened a Facebook account simply because MySpace -- which I never used, either -- turned out to be so treacherous for nearly everyone i knew who used it.
Where is our privacy protection in the areas where we have no choice -- medical records, personnel fies, school records, and financial documents, all of which are now stored electronically? Does anyone believe this data is safe? Will you be surprised if all of this information is compromised?
Talking about morals when simple logic is a challenge seems pointless to me. How many people have the presence of mind to realize that posting a "get well" message on their friend's webpage could result in the friend losing a job offer? This sort of thing happens all the time.
Until the harm from the massive breach of the old norms that involved respecting our own private lives and those of our families and friends affected the elites themselves, no one cared. The fact that monetizing this social breakdown created instant billionaires should give everyone pause. Why do you want to give the people who promoted this breakdown money in the first place? What did you get in return that was so valuable?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/facebook-is-it-time-w...
1
What Friedman and people generally do not accept is that Facebook and their ilk are merely at the (current) bottom of the slippery slope we all started down with credit cards, electronic medical records, and all those Terms Of Service agreements we agree to (mostly without reading), not just online but also in the real world. Let's face it folks, we have sold our souls -- or at least our privacy -- for convenience, as Faust laughs all the way to the bank.
And then we go nuts because the N.S.A., which has some measure of accountability (albeit indirect) to all Americans, surreptitiously collects a tiny fraction of the information we voluntarily turn over to profit-making corporations which have absolutely no measure of accountability to all Americans.
80
Capitalism drives business to make a deal with customers to provide a product or service at an agreed upon place, price and time. It is not personal. It is strictly business. See 'The Godfather' film saga
1
Thanks for the great insight. While Values drive humanity in times of crisis like these, it is important to remember that Moral Leadership is a tough standard to live up to in a Business. A Business's main responsibility is to produce Profits at any cost provided it is legal. I personally see this as an opportunity for Legal/Regulatory framework led innovation but challenges will arise in enforcement across legal boundaries and this definitely is part of the second innings.
Moral consensus is unlikely, making moral leadership fairly meaningless as a means to curb potentially nefarious uses of new technologies. The logic of “because I could” (and because it gave me power and wealth) will never lose hold with a segment of humanity (recall epipen pricing). In the end, we are back to relying on regulation and regulators. It is their morality that matters, and again, we have the problem of consensus.
1
We broke up monopolies in the 19th and 20th centuries because we were afraid they would have to much control financially over our lives and unfairly stifle competition. How are the current media and social platform companies any different? Breaking them up is nearly impossible now. Why? Because we've been duped by some of these companies by their "free" access when in fact we are paying them with the most valuable thing we possess, our personal identity. Not just superficial name, address, phone, etc. but who we really are to the depths of our beings. Ironically all of this blessed in an odd way by our Supreme Court who deemed that corporate behemoths are persons, with exponential "individual rights" and power. Which has turned Facebook, et al, into "benevolent dictators" who we trust with everything we are and own. We can only save ourselves by insisting on 2 tough rules in 20 font after signing up with any personal information like phone number, email, address, etc. #1 DO YOU WANT US TO SHARE ANY OF YOUR INFORMATION? #2 SAYING NO WILL NOT CAUSE US TO LIMIT YOUR ACCESS IN ANY WAY.
1
Facebook is a corporation, which by definition has no conscience. Many people have consciences (not, apparently Zuckerberg or Sandberg), but industry leaders must use a huge amount of personal energy to direct and guide any corporation if it is to create any good for the larger society. It appears that the one Facebook executive with a conscience (Stamos) left the company because he felt there was no chance of honest, moral behavior by the corporation. Facebook uses every member solely as a tool for generating advertising income. I would respectfully ask Mr. Friedman how this business model can possibly generate any good for our nation or for those who participate?
1
Sir, I believe you are overselling the benefits of the "first inning"
Nothing you outlined can compete with watching a sunset.
I do not think it is worth it, so far. Not even close. And that's not even considering the problems.
5
Ignored in this analysis is the role and importance of institutions when moral leadership fails (as it has and will repeatedly, the world over). We're saddled with some 18th, 19th, and 20th century institutions that need updating: regulatory (net neutrality, food and water quality, land use, fossil fuels), legal precedents (campaign finance, mandatory sentences, patents and copyright), foundational (2nd Amendment, Electoral College.) These all won't be corrected at once, but in my mind, this is the place to start.
1
At this point, I think it would be smart for Mark and Facebook to get back to basics. When any company gets bloated and careless, going back to that which made it successful can often help, if not save its future.
Having said that, I remember a time when there weren't advertisers on facebook. When my feed was full of my friends thoughts, feelings, beliefs; largely uninfluenced by paid advertisements information overload. Most links shared were researched by passionate friends, before even Google was the powerhouse that it is today.
While the idea I'm about to propose might not appeal to everyone in the field of ethics (as it could serve to further the gap between the wealthy and poor), it would give consumers options, allow facebook to continue earning revenue, and still provide advertisers an avenue to make money.
Perhaps Facebook should create two different versions: One with a five dollar monthly subscription, that is completely without ads. No mining of identities, just a network for you and your friends/family.
The other, free to use, would use your data and browsing tendencies (like it does already) to sell to advertisers, and you will get the current facebook experience (full of ads, fake news, etc).
I imagine many would pay the small fee for the convenience of the original facebook experience, absent of ads. We're currently paying for it by losing our identity, privacy, and being bombarded with constant ads, which I can't see as any better.
Cheers!
1
The NYT could do the same. I pay for a digital subscription, but now receive content that is hard to see because flashing and dancing and scrolling ads distract from the content. When I open my “ morning paper” the ad from the lending tree has greater prominence than the Times masthead. Gee, could I just have a moment to take a first sip of coffee before you start shouting at me?
1
This is a strictly naive opinion, we are living in a society where big Corporations rule. Unfortunately, Corporations are only interested in their bottom lines, i.e. Profits and the redistribution of wealth.
Zuckerberg and Trump will continue to enrich themselves, the public good is damned.
We can’t even talk rationally about gun control because the NRA controls the monies. These monies are distributed to Legislatures to buy their votes.
3
Thank you from this report from Flat Earth Mr. Friedman. Your call to Mark Zuckerberg to save Facebook (and us) seems based on the assumption that Zuckerberg actually wants to save us. You are laboring under a fundamental misapprehension. People who use Facebook aren't the customers - they're the product.
If you want an analogy, Facebook users are like chickens in a factory farm. They have no control over the cages, the food or the water. No privacy. And their whole purpose is to serve as egg producers and sources of meat and meat by-products.
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones lays it out:
"...So what am I griping about? Two things, I guess. The first is that Facebook is so damn churlish about just admitting what they do. The second is that people keep falling for the idea that Facebook is really, really trying to be better but repeatedly fails because…
Because why? Lousy management? Crappy programmers? A misunderstanding of what people want? A lack of control from the top? Come on. Facebook has none of these problems. They have top-notch management, brilliant engineers, a razor-keen understanding of what people want vs. what might piss them off, and a CEO with total control and an almost monomanical vision. Anything they do on the privacy front they do deliberately and methodically."
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/03/can-we-please-get-real-ab...
Please stop being so gullible Mr. Friedman.
6
Unfortunately, good luck with that. Man is driven by profit, acquisition, winning, etc.Dont hold your breath waiting for corporations to be ethical, caring and responsible. Only the commercials are that.
1
The absurdness of this article is beyond belief. First to suggest a greedy little guy like Zuckerberg is going to SAVE me or anyone is beyond belief and dignity. My own dignity. He has NO, ZERO connection to my life other than to steal from it. His greed and that of others like him (Bezos, Musk, Uber, Brin) have known no bounds. They create nothing. It's smoke and mirrors. There is no added value. They create nothing, as Gordon Gekko said, they "own."
I will always take the position that going out for coffee with a friend, or talking to my child on the phone is infinitely better than a post on some crap feed intermixed with manipulated ads based on big data crunches of what should be meaningful to me in service of ad dollars. The Zuckerbergs and co. will put this data breach stuff off as some accident, some oversight, some attack against them. In fact THEY perpetrated it for their own gain. The potential for continued misuse into perpetuity at the intersection between technology and those that drive it, that control it, that own it, is boundless. Power corrupts. Absolute power (and as Gordon Gekko said 30 years ago, the most valuable commodity is information) corrupts absolutely. These people can gather information at unprecedented rates, from every source known, analyze it in ways heretofore unfathomable, and use it to manipulate in ways we won't understand until we are already just huddled masses 50 years from now.
7
Business, all business, is ipso facto a social enterprise. The sooner we incorporate that reality into our collective understanding of the human condition, the sooner debates like this will be obviated.
1
Yeah, I'm cynical enough to think that even though people claim to want to listen to someone with high integrity, such people are typically ignored and a great deal of attention is paid to the squeaky wheels. Also, living a lifestyle of high integrity is easier said than done, and the pursuit of money and fame tends to corrupt easily. You're right: how technology is used is a reflection of the society that happens. In other words, we get the technology we deserve.
Save us?? What? Let's be real here, people are being targeted for their racist, misogyny, stupidity and ignorance. We can't protect people from themselves. Buyer beware.
It's "funny" - NO, actually pathetic - How the likes of the Tea Party and Libertarians hop up and down "demanding" less government.
I'm a very open-minded person and I welcome "sensible government regulation".
And to all those who cry in fear; "Socialism - Socialism" - as it would be a "gate-way" philosophy to Communism . . .
So -
Who picks up your garbage ?
Who patrols your streets ?
Who delivers your mail ?
Who teaches your children ?
Who defends our borders ?
And on and on with every social service which actually defines what IS great about this country.
Zuckerberg is no less a greedy pig than our president.
He feigns innocence and naivete.
His platform for fake friends and fake news made him one of the richest people on the planet.
Of course, under some protest, he will testify - although he really does not want to . . . and as much as he "says" he wants to fix the problem of allowing over 50 million Face-Bookers to have all of their personal information - -
HE DOES NOT -
He makes his money by collecting and selling your "life" !
Of course these platforms MUST be regulated - for the safety of our countries population and the world.
I ask several people;
Our we a Democratic or Capitalistic Society ?
The most common answer I get - "same thing" ! . . which I find terrifying.
We used to have smart guys like Thomas Jefferson - who UNDERSTOOD - Our Democracy is in place to protect "THE PEOPLE" from ALL "ISMS" -
3
Our technologies are an expression of our values. Societies worldwide shift back and forth along the continuum between domination systems (based on power, fear, control, and competition) and partnership systems (based on care, trust, respect, and partnership).
Facebook and other social media have recently been used to foster a shift towards domination, but it is possible to use our technologies to foster partnership. That is one reason why it's so important that we have a diversity of voices participating in the development of our technologies.
Here are some others who have explored these questions of our values and of who participates as beneficiaries, users and developers of technology.
In The Chalice and the Blade (1987) and numerous other books, Riane Eisler lays out the history of partnership and domination systems and shows how they are embodied in relationships, education, sexuality, and economics.
In Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (1995), Dale Spender compared the explosion of digital information to the Guttenberg Press in terms of its potential to transform society (for good or ill).
In my own book (meant for a broad audience, but overpriced into obscurity by my publisher) Gender and Information Technology: Moving Beyond Access to Co-create Global Partnership (2007), I demonstrate how we could use technology to co-create a shift away from domination and towards partnership.
1
Why wasn't values built into the first inning? This has been a recurring problem throughout history, with major technological advances and ideologies--mostly capitalists---associated with these advances---ignoring the human cost embedded in these advances. I know, if you are Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford, who has time or energy to focus on moral and ethical details---but, it is at this stage that moralities are built into innovation---trying to correct first inning moral lapses in the second inning demands a no hitter leadership---I don't see that kind of pitcher anywhere in our political class.
1
Thanks for the article but the moral lesson is still Kant's, or, if you insist on a contemporary tech framing, the cyberneticist Norbert Wieners' (former MIT Prof.) axiom in his book "The Human Use of Human Beings": "Never treat people as means to your ends, but always as ends in themselves." With few exceptions, the entire Silicon Valley (and smart car) business model is to max out the profits that can be gained by treating their customers' ("Users," fah!) as means to their own ends, despite the "we are the world" message they are selling.
1
So, in other words, we need to regulate markets so that they achieve their social potential. What an idea.
Tom, you know what any of these Internet companies has that the NYT doesn't - billions (or merely hundreds of millions) of viewers...
You know what none of these Internet companies has that the NYT does - an op-ed section...
To paraphrase Dennis Miller:
Nothing is more interesting to me than my [perspective on things]...
Nothing is less interesting to me than your [perspective on things]...
Your paper is beginning to jump the shark...
Not only is none of the front page real-time news any longer - most every article has the intellectual-elite-analogue lead-in headline of the tabloids at the grocery checkout lines...
Read your own report - if not your own paper...
https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html
About 500 words down, look at the graph...
To riff on Dimitri Moisevitch:
Have you checked the NYT's orbit lately...
PS
Don't think Zuckerberg is going to snap up the NYT up any time soon...
Had watched as he tried to shower money on Newark to improve help them improve their school system...
He probably still has the bite-marks on his hand...
WHAT? Are you serious Tom? Mark Zuckerberg cannot "save...us."
While we worship money and the brutal capitalism we have accepted in this country there is no hope for us.
And a company like Facebook has nothing to offer me.
I have refused to participate from Day 1 and am working to help my church wean itself away from it.
Mr. Friedman, you've drunk the Koolaid once again.
Shame on you.
2
If you’re dumb enough to get your news off of Facebook, then only have yourself to blame.
5
Dear Mr. Friedman:
Amaisingly portrayed, however just take into consideration
Baseball game takes nine innings, so also mantain your ecpectation open for new, or news. regards
The heart of capitalism is to maximize profits. When a company uses underhanded methods to do so, we count on an honest Congress out for the public interest to set them straight.
And that will happen soon. Soon after hell freezes over.
www.newyorkgritty.net
Was it really necessary for Tom Friedman to use hackneyed baseball clichés in this article which was supposed to target Mark Zuckerberg for destroying Western Civilization as we know it?
1
Regardless of anything they say or “do”, trusting Facebook is foolish. You will never know what they are really up to. It’s a black box of evil.
2
Zuckerberg has used the most special thing in society, friendship, as a platform to make himself rich by coning people into giving up personal information. His software employs trickery to give up this information under the guise of keeping connected to friends. Frequent reminders and requests to add pictures are religiously delivered. Young people, minors, are his favorite victims. Many have destroyed themselves at his encouragement by their 18th birthday. Despicable is the intention when the ultimate use is to sell it to advertisers, foreign nations and any other thug, pervert or criminal out there. He hides under free speech and open internet for all. He has lied about his attempts to be responsible. He has done more to damage democracy than any one I can think of. His personal demeanor is a classic con, low key, doesn't say much, hides until he shows up in a tee shirt to look friendly and promote generational trust. Even his logo with no capital F is a con. But he is also naïve. He has gone into a burning ring of fire, that he has set ablaze himself. The further he goes down the flames will only get higher. He will be mired in lawsuit after lawsuit, hearing after hearing. He will eventually go bankrupt. The party is over. Never trusted him or (small f, as pointed out by my spell check) facebook.
2
Your first sentence puts it best.
The information age gave most a second chance at overthrowing the very "adaptability to change" w/o which the information age wouldn't have duly evolved from staid survival-of-the-fittest tendencies in the first place. Now that cyber meteorites have also doomed are already maligned dinosaurs, having to "pay any price and bear any burden" to quash communism back when McCarthyism was destroying liberty, for example, needs to be clawed back -- indeed remodeled -- if its square peg's EVER gonna fit what Darwin had originally embraced for rounder [w]holes of natural selectivity. Having one's MAGA fake and cheating it too, after all, is waaaay too zero-sum if MOVING FORWARD's ever to reach our survival's "extra innings."
OUR already maligned dinosaurs; not "are." My apologies.
Facebook needs to be shut down. It has destroyed American culture and made one man a filthy democrat billionaire. Plus Facebook was responsible for the election of Trump. Facebook influenced millions with fake news from Russians. Trump won three key swing states by less than 80,000 votes. Zuckerberg owes the world an apology.
1
From the first paragraph: "... tragically killed a woman..."
Are there killings that aren't tragic? How about an example or two?
Otherwise the first word is redundant.
Except that guys like Zuckerberg are mostly progressives who don’t give a whit about liberty and Americanism.
Do you know what the best thing guys like Zuckerberg and the other Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe can do?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
1
The voter files that identify moron conservatives and Trump supporters were stolen with Facebook's complicity and will be used in the 2018 mid-terms and on into the presidential election in 2020. And, Republican candidates in gubernatorial and dog-catcher elections will also rely on these files to target the now identified right-wingers. The impact of this Cambridge/Facebook heist are catastrophic for the survival of any intelligent democracy going forward. There is no solution, no remediation. Trump and his ism must be destroyed no later than January 20, 2021.
Commenting on NYT articles is a great replacement for noodling around on Facebook.
Reading could kick off the 2nd inning.
1
Friedman is an unabashed devotee of the Web. Although he waxed on philosophical mambo jumbos, he ignored the fact that Facebook controls and owns everything about us, once you log on to it. There is no way you can delete a data about yourself. Zuckerberg is a great genius, but he is now driven by the same American greed and because he is a genius he can camouflage it unlike our dearly beloved leader in Washington.
This piece is totally useless as far I am concerned. I was once a Friedman fan, but no more.
Facebook does not need to be saved: it and its founder can vanish without qany loss to humankind.
1
Many of us viewed, and continue to view the first innings with anticipation of all the things that happened in the second. We take little satisfaction in saying " I told you so".
Told you so Obama about FISA court
Told you so teens about giving away your privacy, the most valuable commodity for nothing but the chance to be on the receiving end of propaganda and totalitarian manipulation
Told you so not to trust Zuckerberg, who stole the idea.
Told you Google boys were a wiser place invest.
Told you so New York Times for GIVING Facebook your hard earned news so they could cream billions off the top as a portal while tainting the truth with whatever garbage provider would pay the most.
We all used to spin around, arms spread out under bright blue skies, deliriously happy on a hilltop covered with flowers, wistfully chanting "Free Internet" and "Privacy"....all while paying a monster corporation 60/month for the Hippie Delusion of "free"....and the monster corporation working in tandem with Big Brother Government to collect and sell meta-data about every living soul on the planet.....using the guise of "war on terrorism".
Flash Mobs.....does anyone seriously NOT understand how various forces are using this phenomenon to control people's behavior? Think of Arab Spring. Think of the National Shaming of Roy Moore(never mind the pros and cons of his behavior...focus on the reality of 300million people engaging in "internet bullying" of Huntsville, Alabama).
Our Congress worked hard to deceive us all....now we have a mind control system that is the envy of China and Russia.....NSA Prism system that monitors every key stroke I just made......Facebook and similar operations collecting all kinds of marketing info..."free".....and using it to manipulate YOUR choices, your thoughts,,,,,your vote.
I find it interesting that you're willing to admit that fake news actually exists.
Tom, Zuckerberg doesn’t process the moral compass nor the inclination to find one in order to turn things around. He’s a sly opportunist and a self-consumed mogul. C’mon. He’s suddenly appearing to step up and do the right thing because his shareholders are freaking out. Let him fail. All we know about him and the culture of Facebook is that it’s about making a profit and misleading its subscribers.
87
Stop focusing on the morality of executives like Zuckerberg. It is completely irrelevant. He is simply a cog in the driving algorithm of capitalism -- which is to maximize profits. That's all the "invisible hand" does - blindly, and amorally.
Focus on regulation, not the good graces of the executives. Because they are controlled by only one imperative: when privacy goes up, profits go down, and vice versa. That is their business model in a nutshell.
4
Making a profit for himself and his fellow owners is the only 'moral compass' that Zuckerberg is ethically and legally bound to follow. While balancing the interests of users and advertisers.
2
Read the Times Pick comment from Steve Fankuchen. We started on this path long before Facebook with credit cards, etc. Your data has been with other entities for a long, long time, and Facebook is a better corporate citizen than most.
2
Not to defend the FB business model (or Google for that matter - they read your email for heaven's sake), but banks, credit card companies and credit bureaus have been selling our shopping and financial data for years without our permission and without recourse. Targeting consumers and voters happened in the analog age as well - baby food companies found me by snail mail 30 years ago when I was an expectant mother. Paper lists of boat owners, second home owners, members of certain organizations, likely voters etc. were abundantly available, for a price. We do need better privacy laws here in the US (not the right to be forgotten, however), but to switch metaphors, the horse has been out of the barn for a long time.
1
Russia to Facebook. How are you going to end this dirty war of words?
Why don't you focus on big companies which are taking advantage of private information of mine provided by Google and Facebook to advertise their products annoyingly by following me day and night?
Stop trying to make last presidential election invalid. It's perfectly valid and it's just a judgement of working class people to elites like you. Get out of your bigotry and try to change yourself not others.
oh please, the title of this op-ed just makes me sick. Zuckerberg or Facebook "saving us"? from what? the pathetic lives we have spending our time on that platform?
get a life.
Zuckerberg or Facebook.. saving us... please..how does he and/or Facebook get this much attention?! and now as a savior no less!
2
What Friedman fundamentally fails to comprehend is that "virtual reality" and "internet security" are oxymorons.
1
Poor ole Tom Friedman.....still lost in reverie for a hippie computer nirvana that never existed. Free Internet! Private Rights! Anonymous!!
Mark Zuckerberg, far from being a visionary, is simply an opportunist, he capitalized on everyone else's naivite.....apparantly including Tom Friedman.
Mark Zuckerberg....the Pied Piper of the Internet.
Mark took the old school college coed freshman photo album, once used to introduce the Radcliffe women to the Harvard men, known amoung the males as the "Pigbook" an easily accessible field guide to potential dates later in the fall..........and turned it into an incredible privacy invading advertizing revenue generating behemoth.
There has never been a single "private" transaction on the internet....every packet, by design has a "from" address and an "to" address..........yes there are ways to obscure that....but as the group Anonymous can prove.....you can run...but you cant hide.
The Social Media Platforms have all transformed into out-of-control monsters harnessed by various Big Brother Enterprises, governmental and corporate, to deliberately invade your privacy....Social Media serves no other purpose.
3
"How Mark Zuckerberg Can Save Facebook — and Us"
Who is "us" here, Mr. Friedman? The rich who spent billions of dollars buying up Facebook shares like hotcakes? Why not save the US middle class, when their prospects for a dignified retirement evaporates because shares of some companies in their 401Ks take a dive?
Having a respect for the ethos upon which this country was founded as your guide tool is so much healthier for our democracy than "let the buyer beware".
Linda Seliva
Zuckerberg needs to go to jail for a very long time!
1
The morality of our business leaders is definitely a key to our success as a society and a nation since our political leaders have dropped the ball in this horrible inning. We see that CEOs of gun companies could not care less about their moral responsibility, so we need bank CEOs to step up and hold them accountable. We need CEOs of big tech to be accountable for hacks, trolls, and lies. Most of all, though, the consumers need to ask these leaders to be accountable and not be so gullible. The consumers cannot be idiots.
20
But 'The morality of our business leaders...' is limited to maximizing the profit of it's owners.
1
Largest owner of Cambridge Analytica....the Mercer family. Connect the dots. Forget innings. Take to the streets.
I gave up facebook a long time ago. My friends did not really enlighten me. They would check into facebook every hour to let me know some information that was idiotic like where they were eating and with whom. They would post stuff that was totally irrelevant to anything.
Occasionally, maybe once a month a friend who rarely posted anything would post a picture of their kids.
I would have to scroll through pages of worthless information to find that one picture. Those posts were not even put in order of their submission. The most recent would be buried under a week's worth of other stuff.
I am totally done with facebook. It did not help me stay in touch with my friends.
2
Who’s on first?
1903: Wright Bros. invent the airplane.
1911: First warplane drops bombs.
2004: Facebook invented.
201?: weaponized by Cambridge Analytica.
Top of the 2nd? More like bottom of the 9th!
1
FB and Google's YouTube must change, must learn to be "good" and not let anything goes continue. Fox also should be investigated. America is divided and the sides are getting more hateful. Dangerous times. Manipulation is gaining as people question less and are less educated
The fish rots from the head: there will be no moral compass in the US until our president & his minions on the Hill find some ethical backbone.
FB save who? Please. They took "likes" data from 50 million people... from a social website. It's not like they took SSNs, DOBs, credit card, license from 140million US citizens... oh wait... that would be terrible, no? Please, tell me you're not seriously expecting the leader of a hugely popular but shallow social website to lead us in any way or fashion, much less morally. If you expect this, I have bridge to sell you.
2
Who voted for Trump because the Russians tricked them? Anyone?
1
Zuckerberg is an annoying egoist who isn't going to "save" anything. One hopes, not even himself.
"Through this deep knowledge of its users, Mr. Zuckerberg explained, Facebook could determine “what actually matters to each person on a more granular level.”
My message to Mark Zuckerberg - Why do you assume people would like Facebook to determine what matters to us? Facebook is not anyone's parent, teacher, guru, therapist, lawyer or doctor. Do you even understand it?
The ease of use which Facebook provides tempts many to post a minutiae of events best left off the table.
The vicious feedback loop of self gratifying “likes” drives users to engage. That engagement is a data mining mineral extraction bonanza.
Curb your enthusiasm, write a letter, jot it in a Moleskin. Let them be diamonds in the rough, to treasure for your pleasure.
There has never been a human invention from fire and the wheel to the printing press, the combustion engine, to nuclear power or the internet that has not been used for good or evil.
In the case of the Internet it was created for communication between individuals. It was never created to have safe guards for commerce, banking, politics etc
All these attempts to protect us from internet trolls, phishers, confolks etc are being back ended in an attempt to keep one step ahead or is it behind the malfolks and criminal hackers
The solution for Facebook and all human mass communication is transparency. The NYtimes, facebook etc should not accept political ads or articles on politics without transparency. We need a little Sunshine on who writes or who sends us stories. Each article or ad needs some information on who is the author, where he or she works, if they are members of a particular party and who pays parts of their income. Maybe we could have a spot in each publication, facebook, google etc, a click away, to look up the CV of the person or company, or nonprofit that just sent that post or wrote that article. Sunshine would help keep information disinfected.
Rapacious greed and its consequences will doom Facebook. I dropped mine.,I don't support traitors
I don't see anywhere in this column where Mr. Friedman explains how Mr. Zuckerberg can facilitate the saving of democratic institutions. Zuckerberg is the epitome of the greedy, look-the-other-way, "it's not my fault", "we're working on it" technocreep who has caused the problem.
He should be forced to give up control of Facebook.
1
Allow me to be first, and excessively smug. Never used Facebook, never will. I told you so, years ago. Seriously.
2
Tom, remembering the intellectual cover he gave to the Iraq war liars and thugs, and also remembering that it took him years to sort of, kind of, admit some culpability, he is now covering his behind around his uncritical praise of these technologies and their salesmen for the last 15 or so years.
During that heady first inning part of Thomas' Iraq war plan was to provide computers to the survivors of people that the US slaughtered and they would realize how lucky they were and be eternally grateful.
Wow Mr. Friedman, you are, as always, one step ahead of the game! Each week I look forward to your articles with eager anticipation, trying to imagine what you are going to write about, but I didn't expect this. Didn't even have this one on my radar. I guess that is why you are writing for NYT and I am not. You remain on my "living" dream dinner party table.
Waiting for 'moral leadership' and 'humility' from the likes of Zuckerberg...
= Waiting for Godot
Delete Facebook. Leave. Be your own person, not part of a data farm. Why must we always follow the herd down to graze? We talk about rugged individualism, but it's more than a bluff, it's an outright lie. Sheeple.
How many times must we be fooled until we say "Shame on me"??
3
It's interesting that the familiar argument "Guns are not the problem, but how some people use them." Technology is not the problem, but how some people exploit it is the problem. We as citizens have been too eager to give away our personal information to get the next app, and businesses, like Facebook and Twitter, have been just too eager to allow this exploitation to go on to increase their bottom line. What we need for starters are privacy laws that make it a crime to allow businesses like Facebook to sell our privacy for any price. With regard to driver-less vehicles, unlike Facebook and Twitter, there isn't much redeeming societal value to make the whole endeavor worthwhile. It's a job stealing, investment sink hole, when what we need is an inexpensive electric vehicle that can be mass marketed like the Volkswagen that will create jobs and save the planet.
Asking Mr. Zuckerberg to treat his "users" as "citizens" is wishful thinking, at best. It should be an option not his decision. It should be the law, whatever his business model. When was the last time anyone really paused to ask about the "ethical" implications of new technologies? Yes we have the latest software, and still don't have any "moralware".
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I absolutely agree with Seidman's prescription. And I absolutely believe not one of the big tech companies will follow it. It's not just a gigantic leap from the vow of JFK to "pay any price..." to a similar vow from Mark Zuckerberg, it's the equivalent of jumping the Grand Canyon on a tricycle.
There is nothing in the history of free enterprise to indicate that, in the absence of government regulation, businesses will unilaterally adopt policies of transparency, placing the public good ahead of profits, investing in moral behavior, or "publish[ing] standards of quality and expectations of conduct." This doesn't mean all businesses are bad actors, it simply means that Seidman's policies don't correlate or coincide with their objectives. Even the threat of government regulation is rarely incentive enough for businesses to change their profitable behavior. What would the average mileage per gallon for cars be today without government intervention? I suspect, instead, Exxon and GM would have merged long ago.
Perhaps it's my age that drives my cynicism and caution. I don't see a difference between a CEO in a Brooks Bros. suit and one in a t-shirt and hoody. They both have shareholders, and relying on their promise to do better is a fool's bet. It's time to get Zuckerberg in front of a congressional panel, and it's time to embrace the EU's GDPR regulations. If we wait until the 9th inning for these guys to do it themselves, the game will be over.
Please don't talk about the self-consumed Mark Zuckerberg "saving" anybody.
Most of the critical demographic in the know—
Already are saying "Facebook" has had its day. Let's move on.
2
Zuckerberg will surely read this article.
We’ll see if it makes any difference.
1
How to deal with facebook and all of the other time consuming, tee totally wasteful ideas pushed onto poor souls who believe the computer is the answer to lonely evenings, silly and stupid non friends?
Shut the blasted thing off for a month, remove all your personal financial info.Be surprised by all the non friendly friends you don't need.Open your front door and make a great discovery, a fantastical world in front of you.And the magic word? HI! or Hello, walk your dog. Smile a lot, that makes lotsa folks wonder what great things are happening in your life, share some and keep the best ones for yourself. Another idea, it works for me.....give the counter person at your coffee shop extra money and say to pay for the 2nd or 3rd person behind you in the line
facebook and its thieving compatriots are best compared to a picpocket who steals something way more valuable than money. TIME.
1
"Honesty is the best policy", Benjamin Franklin.
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We need more regulations and public overview on one hand and privacy oriented innovation (blockchain?) on the other.
Technological innovations, just as laws and regulations, are generally developed to protect, serve and empower all the people, especially the weakest; but they are often exploited by the cunning, cynical and wealthy to their advantage and to the detriment of the people and the weakest.
Without regulation and governmental supervision and without the control of the media, it is useless to hope that the powerful spontaneously assume ethical, altruistic and virtuous behaviors.
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1
Values are central--the “original sin” of the Internet is the ad model that enabled wide access to “free” services. It is clear that “if you are not paying, you are the product.” We have created an “attention market” monster that threatens the democracy we thought digital media would enhance. Confronting that directly is the fastest path to better values.
We need a new social contract: if we are to have our media serve us--as people and as citizens--we must pay to make that sustainable. We need to vote with dollars, not likes--to pay for what we value, and motivate our services to provide that. Our incentive structures determine our actions--and must align with our deeper values.
Solutions are emerging to let services be very cheap/free for some, but sustained by user payments from others (who can afford to pay a fair price for the value they receive). That seems impractical only because we are stuck in the old logic of scarcity, rather than the new digital logic of abundance. Now we can deliver services at very low cost, and can mass-customize prices. We have been blinded by alienating 20th century mass-marketing based on set prices and advertising. But now the power of digital can restore and improve on the value-based pricing that we have relied on for millennia.
(An architecture for applying such value-based solutions in individual businesses now has been described in a recent journal article (http://rdcu.be/HTfJ), and at FairPayZone.com.)
One of the major unintended consequences of the internet is its ability to amplify the minority, erode basic civility and easily spreads lies. I fear there is no way for FB and Twitter to combat this because they are only a part of the problem. Unmoderated comment forums like those of my local paper are brutally uncivilized and filled with propaganda. There are so many white nationalist web sites that a racist can feel they are in the company of hundreds of millions of like minds. If FB disappeared tomorrow, the trolls would just find new dens, maintaining their echo chambers.
1
We went through this worm hole when television was introduced and how it manipulated us (Nixon vs Kennedy debate). I would imagine FCC could be the first place to start but it needs to be done with bipartisan rules and laws. Mark Z knew he needed help with facebook when trolls started posting back in late 2000. Maybe this is when Facebook went public and he didn't care because it all boiled down to money. Anyway it is what it is and it needs fixing
When Zuckerberg says he needs my trust.....I run, run as fast as I can.....in the opposite direction
The bottom line: In a war (physical, psychological, mental) between "good" (Iwarriors/old souls) and "evil" (Ewarriors/young souls) the bad guys shoot first, the good shoot last. It's all Ivolution (the evolution of human self-consciousness).
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a million times, shame on everybody. Since the myth of Prometheus, everybody has known that new technologies bring with them new means for exploitation and evil, so (duh) why don't we foresee the risks... Anyway, here's my plan: There should be an analogue backup for every technological innovation. Banks should be able to revert to brick-and-mortar banking in a snap. The energy grid should be able to revert to pre-digital operation with the pull of a lever. Voting should be able to use paper-ballots without a hitch. It may be expensive, but we need a back-up hard copy. As soon as the Russkies shut down the electrical grid, we could go on line the old-fashioned way. Take that, Putie. Let's get proactive, people.
I guess everyone of a certain age - let's say 55+ - is given to head-shaking of an "I knew it would come to this" variety.
Op-ed writers must be even more prone to do so. Mr. Friedman, among the Times team, has always (IMO) been excessively ponderous.
"Second inning?" ...I'm sure there were some fatalities in the early ears of aviation... or cars. And, sadly, people still die in construction accidents as more and more skyscrapers provide other people with a place to live and/or work.
YES, the article goes on to raise BIG, IMPORTANT questions like, "How do we preserve DEMOCRACY when technology obviously has given some people with a different agenda new tools?"
I think that brings us to one of those "Do you believe?" moments. (Obviously, some do and some don't on issues as big as "the almighty.")
What makes me a little pessimistic is that we clearly live in a society and as part of an economic system that prizes profits above all else. Yes, a very few companies will pass up a chance to make more money because they are troubled by certain obvious consequences. Facebook is clearly not one of those.
Who knows? Maybe, pass a law that every company employ a kind of ombundsman. His/her job would be to make the higher-ups mindful of things like much of which Facebook continues to ignore, because it would be so costly - "set the defaults" to "Privacy On." That would be almost as revolutionary as social media itself.
I'm not optimistic that we'll see anything like that ... ever.
Your innings metaphor scares me. Seven more to go? Get me outta here!
Hacking is not the problem. The problem is Facebook itself, a first step toward fascism. Facebook snoops on us all the time and sells private information to the highest bidder. We need strict government regulation of Zuckerberg and his ilk.
1
I've mentioned this before. Govt. programs, technical innovations, corporate policies, the media are all chain saws. You give one person a chain saw and they build you a house. Hand one to another individual, and you have "The Texas chain Saw Massacre"
Narcissism has evolved with our technologies, and it's just easier than ever for some extraordinarily self involved person to wreak havoc on a very wide scale.
1
I quit FB five years ago for a number of reasons, not the least of which being FB’s lying about their privacy rules.
Zuckerberg does not impress me in the least. He’s no Elon Musk, nor Bill Gates. He’s doing nothing for society, just lining his pockets... dishonestly. And he’s partly responsible for giving us Trump. Z is a guy in the right place at the right time who stole the Winklevoss’ idea and kept cheating from there.
I quit FB and life is better. Mark Z can jump off a bridge.
1
Capitalism involves truth and trust? Laughable.
1
Try casting a wider net for insight (and metaphors) than single-sourcing Seidman. Readers deserve it.
This: "It means seeing and treating people not just as ‘users’ or ‘clicks,’ but as ‘citizens."
Communication, connection—these are moral touchstones for the coming technological revolutions. Will our children wake up to Black Mirror, or democracy?
it is another reminder that freedom has responsibilities
1
Zuckerberg's self-proclaimed "shyness" is not so much timidity, as an intense lack of understanding of human social interaction. He is unable to foresee and manage the complexities and dangers that are arising continuously from the simplistic platform he initially created for his fellow nerds at college.
Zuckerberg is possibly utterly unable to grasp that his carelessness, bordering on amorality, has had a gigantic role in the destruction of democracy in this country.
Zuckerberg is obviously incapable of moral leadership, because it is doubtful that he can process the elaborate concepts that go into the formation of a moral stance.
The government needs to come up with regulations grounded in common sense and decency - laws for social media that will protect this country from total chaos. If Zuckerberg has trouble instituting, and abiding by, such regulations, he will have to hire managers who can do it for him, or go to jail.
78
Or, we could just take responsibility for our actions and ignore Facebook, et al.
9
social media is such an engineered product designed by keeping human psychology in mind, it can dodge most of the human efforts to keep away, various notifications, customized ads popup and so on
Where and when can I volunteer to be a social misfit 'dense dunce' like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates?
What does 'amorality' or 'morality' or 'common sense' or 'decency' have to do with making a capitalist profit?
1
Let's not let Google off the hook yet. The daughter of their Exec. Chrm., the eminent Eric Schmidt, was the intern at Cambridge Analytica who pointed them to the use of Palantir software. This fact in itself doesn't make her a criminal, but does cause one to wonder what Google is doing with all the data they have on their users and how their search engines and platforms are used.
Ad revenue created their fortunes, ad revenue still fuels their financial results, and they hold an 80% market share for American search engine use.
Palantir s/w can be used to track search results to identify patterns of disease outbreak, for example, and is used thusly by our own CDC.
Palantir software is also used by large investment banks to track their employees' communications in order to identify potential embezzlement behavior.
It's possible Google, or now Alphabet, is next on the list of companies to be "outed" by investigative reporting. I've always had the highest regard for Mr. Schmidt, who was hired by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to provide "adult supervision" to GOOG's business.
However, if the evil forces of Bannon, Putin, Cambridge Analytica or whoever else may be involved have penetrated Google's cloud of user data, there may yet be more to be uncovered to this monstrous, ever-growing and terrifying conspiracy.
I am reminded of Albert Einstein's change of heart and behavior late in life when he expressed regret at unleashing nuclear power on humanity
1
When I hear that Zuckerberg’s board contains the libertarian Thiel, and is surrounded by men like Mercer, and Russians and Cambridge Analytica, and that Schmidt’s daughter from Google pushed them towards Palantir, I doubt our savior will arrive in Silicon Valley.
To get out of the mess we are in with
these companies, in absence of strong competitors, are regulations with stiff fines.
You don’t protect data? You allow Russians, Chinese, North Koreans to scoop data? You allow democracy to be undermined? You get penalized.
It’s your company. It’s our data.
3
Another nail in the coffin of our global culture dominance.
In entertainment and now, social media, we are slipping...quickly now, from world leadership.
1
Given Facebook’s problems a better product will come along. Facebook has opened themselves up to completion. Facebook ate MySpace. Something will eat Facebook.
1
One solution which might save the fun of Facebook put protect its information from exploitation would be to establish, like Wikipedia, a non-profit Facebook self-governing commons. Mr. Zuckerberg has made all the money he needs. It's time for him to make a real gift to humanity and turn Facebook into a commons.
1
Platforms like FB are becoming these threats to liberty and democracy because they were never built to be guardians of those ideals. These platforms are designed to make money. And they are working exactly as designed - to extract, collect, and monetize your data.
Me thinks your looking for solutions in the wrong place.
"Russian troll farms to divide us and inject fake news into our public life" - I'd say trolls easily built more faux news that looked just like the home grown stuff.
I think it's misguided to blame the technology for the content delivered on it. An analogy would be blaming Gutenberg, and people with owned movable print type for all the fake news in the print age.
Fake news has always been around, and will always be around. What broke down in US society was the once identifiable, competitive industry producing credible news information in the public's interest. Today's news is a shallow echo chamber with little credit. That happened aside from the invention of the internet.
Back in the 1930s political fake news on new media (Radio & film) gave fascist tin pot dictators in Europe a political lift into power. Cooler heads in US democratic government protected the industry called "the press". In 1934 the FCC regulated media ownership. Unfortunately collective memory fades and In 1987 Washington gutted the FCC, without public support. Voila, unregulated capitalism did what it does best, monopolies bought the industry up, and produced a cheap imitation product.
What won't work is asking company owners, like Zuckerberg to stamp out fake news. The question is how to rebuild a credible and competitive American press in all 50 states. Maybe give it a protected space on the internet that requires companies who want access a license with the rules we had before.
1
Facebook concept of creating and connecting communities was a childish concept from the get go. Wonderful marketing but Zuckerberg knew that he wanted to make money off of users. In the same manner he stole the application from his college roommates' he stole users information and sold it to the highest bidder. Once again these technology titans were treated like some type of Gods, disruptions was there motto as if they were creating something better like the cure to cancer, dementia which they are not.
All of these technologies are destroying American democracy, think about it when Zuckerberg was confronted that Facebook played a role in the elections he played it off, lying knowing full well what he had done. Facebook should pay everyone who lost there identity, and he needs to go to court and explain in detail what he has done, here and in Europe. How much money did he really make, he put his shareholders in front of the regular person.
I don't want someone who has abused me to then try and pretend to save me, that's called an abusive character. They supposedly made proactive changes. Please what about the old information that is out there floating at another company. American people grow up get off of Facebook, nothing in life is free and this app has really hurt people and our democracy.
1
Morality as a leadership trend, sad.
1
I like Friedman's solutions more than I trust this Congress to get anything right. Facebook and other techsters need to man up and restructure to reflect current threats and anticipate those on the horizon. Hopefully they will lead rather than be forced to react to nonsense flowing from Congress.
The world is now networked. This will continue unless top down totalitarianism enforces a great leap backward. The flash revolutions of Arab Spring (do we now call it Arab Indian summer?) and today's clickbait regarding November, 2016 represent society adapting, for better or worse, to entirely new ways of organizing, of spreading information. The printing press was a great thing, except maybe for the French aristocracy. Radio, amplified speech, television, changed things for better or worse. New media is two way, anyone can publish, and "memes" are weaponized as were the pamphlets or attack ads of the past. The Chinese ruling party understands this quite naturally, two way media is a potentially fatal virus to their power structure, and they are seizing control as ruthlessly as possible. In the (relatively) democratic cultures of the US and the UK we have been now been exposed to the infectious disease of fake news and click bait, and we live historically in the lap of such luxury that we can believe whatever we want, edgy amateur tribalism and confirmation bias conspiracy theory Netflixing our current lives, giving us an edge to go along with our lack of hunger and world scale warfare.
Like commercial jet air travel, the hydrogen bomb and antibiotics, networked smartphones are a global evolutionary change. We either develop an immunity to the accompanying toxins or we don't. Facebook or whatever comes after isn't the problem. We have to grow up.
1
in 2012 Facebook reps walked into Obama campaign headquarters and said "we'll give you guys more access to our subscriber's information than we would anyone else because we're on your side." This is the most chilling thing ever uttered in regards to social media. What difference does more preprogrammed security measures offer when the owner of Facebook flings open the door and lets the fox in?
Every time we get on the Internet from our personal computers, aren't our preferences being harvested, isn't our privacy being invaded? We don't have to get on Facebook for that to happen. I don't value my privacy so highly because I have nothing to hide. I do fear being manipulated by those who wish our democracy evil. The answer is an enlightened public, informed users.
55
You don't value your privacy because you have "nothing to hide?"
Did it ever cross your mind that a trivial medical condition, much less a serious diagnosis, or having a special needs child could cost you a job offer?
This is why no one should be on Facebook. Well-meaning but naive "friends" could ruin their lives with a single ill-considered post.
7
An enlightened public and informed users may be the answer to not get on the Facebook in the first place as there is no privacy that can be expected from their business model of profit without any conscience.
However, due to our cuts in education funding, when there is an observable frightening decline in our national IQ this is far from likely.
Strict government regulations to safeguard or privacy from not just Facebook but all social media is what is needed.
2
@Ann:
"Every time we get on the Internet from our personal computers, aren't our preferences being harvested, isn't our privacy being invaded? "
Well, not if you obscure your IP address, only interact with HTTPS websites, and clear cookies, and run tracking suppression.
All perfectly normal things to do.
3
I have a mantra that keeps me sane in this fast moving digital world:
"Convenient but unreliable"
When a phone call gets the digital ax, I mumble it over and over while I attempt to redial, like a monk in the Himalayas. That was for a technical failure; they abound.
Now, it seems, I must extend my mantra to the ethical side of the digital world:
"Convenient but unreliable."
aka Caveat Emptor.
First, the article too flippantly talks about a woman's death. She deserves more honor.
Second, only democracy will save us. As an old, high school US Government teacher I know how difficult it is to be a good citizen; nearly impossible, with all the various issues and perspectives about it all.
Democrats must own all issues, and by that I mean: talk about them. Abortion is a real, moral issue and the best way to prevent unwanted pregnancies is through education and access to effective contraception. Own that. Be real and help us prevent unwanted pregnancies, with abortion being the last resort. Otherwise, we give millions of votes to the Republicans (the party of tax cuts for the rich) who act like abortion is 'their' issue. And, the lazy citizens that vote single-issue, follow that lead (as fake as it is).
A state legislature is trying to make abortion illegal. Why? To focus on that issue only. That's votes. Cunning, immoral and destructive of democracy; the Republican Way.
Saving us? Who is us? So many talking heads, including NYTimes, say so little about inequality. This is the issue: inequality (coupled with poverty and near-poverty). Where's the econmist's answer to inequity and greed, avarice and wealth concentration?
With wealth concentration comes income, property, power and safety. So, what about that? The working American, falling since Reagan's tax cuts for the rich. Falling.
We will be 'saved' when we learn to love: equality, democracy, humanity. We can.
The assumption that Mark Zuckerberg or any of the high tech whiz kids can save us (although this was not the heading in today's print edition) is hopelessly misguided. Assuming because they are high tech geniuses (are they?) does not mean that they are smart in any other life domain. The newest techies on the block have proven to be geo-politically and socially, naïve. They have helped to create powerful technologies but like children should not be allowed to be left alone with them. I could be wrong however, if so, they are just morally and ethically bankrupt, as well as greedy.
The Internet will be the death of America. We are a uniquely capitalist system. Our economy is dependent on a giant casino on the end of the island of Manhattan. No matter how much we may want technology to be a force for good—and I do!!—the fact remains: there is money in it. And money, in the volume technology creates, blinds those who might be the force for change—especially when faced with Wall Street’s quarterly calls.
Investors do not care about five-year, three-year or even one-year plans. They only want to know how much juice will be flowing in the next three months.
The only way to win this second inning, and make it to the third, is to take the ad dollars out of all of it.
It would be great if Friedman takes on cyber currency, currently a facilitator of money laundering and tax avoidance.
Do not agree with this narrative. First inning dominated by Microsoft and Bill Gates who was the JD Rockefeller of the nascent computer/internet industry. His shoddy operating system cost businesses and individuals into the trillions of dollars. And is still out there doing plenty of damage. His business practices were ruthless and predatory. Steve jobs and apple dominated the second with iMac then iPod then iPhone, he crushed the music industry changed telecommunications and in some respects is/was just as uncaring and ruthless as Gates. Facebook is just a subset leapfrogging to the next big thing. Social networks were made to be mined for information. It’s great until it isn’t.
Mark Zuckerberg can save Facebook by resign and he can take Sheryl Sandburg with him. His apology sounds cheap and insincere. Make way for new management.
I strongly recommend watching the movie "Forbidden Planet". As Dr. Ostrow(?) said as he died from the brain boost: "The Krell had completed the project. But they forgot one thing. Monsters, monsters from the id!"
1
Content monetization technology has been a largely ignored area of development over the past 10 years. This technology has been spread like a fertilizer over a large amount of the web and we are starting to see some strange and unwholesome things growing.
Advertisers bought into unfamiliar and largely unmonitored channels in an attempt to be among the first to take advantage, as valuable eyes moved from paper page to webpage. There have been some wake up calls: some popular Youtube stars making off-color comments while hosting ads from top brands, sites like Breitbart successfully monetizing their misleading political content, and of course the trouble Facebook is in now for their work with Cambridge Analytica.
Despite these isolated incidents, however, the real rubber hasn't met the road: brands are still taking a reactive approach to these issues, waiting for screenshots and negative PR before they take action.
And that makes sense. Advertisers often don't have a way to know where their ads are going, but the platforms that manage these ads need to evolve. Youtube needs to prevent conspiracy theorists from building profitable businesses on their platform. Ad exchanges that place banners on the likes of Breitbart need to be more sophisticated in their site profiling. Facebook has a lot of soul searching to do.
In all of these cases, we can be the impetus to change. Put pressure on advertisers. They will put pressure on the platforms.
In my own generation of Americans born between 1945 and 1960, those of us who had relatives that perished in the Holocaust retained a unique and terrible sensibility. One of responsibility toward the lost, whether or not we were into religious observance. Zuckerberg reminds one of the often-voiced perception concerning what ingenuity and inventions were lost in the Shoah. And Zuckerberg also disappoints greatly, for many reasons, that his invention of this particular social medium is so fraught with ugly attributes like greed, exploitation and narcissism. Surely, one hopes, these were not his intentions when starting out. By now Fakebook has become an abomination in the biblical sense, with its corruption showing on every page through targeted ads and new relevations of political chicanery that it enabled coming just as frequently. Intelligent adults have largely forsaken this disappointing medium.
1
This article is ridiculous and naive. Moral leadership from business? I don't think so. When I was younger, I believed that a common moral compass would drive people to do good in all aspects of their lives. However, I have come to realize that if there is money to be made, well, morals become relative. As a scientist (biological) seeking to improve the world, I thought I was beyond such impulses. However, as I entered the business world, I was surprised to feel the tug of profit on my own moral compass. It is human nature. No, I don't trust businesses to put me first and look out for the interests of their "customers". Thus, I avoid companies like Facebook and Google as much as possible.
Let’s be very clear. Facebook never was and never will be a “cool platform” for anything.
It’s an aggressive scam to collect and use the data of anyone who touches it, for whatever purpose it feels will collect more data, and make more money. Period.
4
Technocrats love metaphors: innings, friending, social networks, tweets. They cover a multitude of sins, inaccuracies, and vagaries, but that’s the point. The metaphors provide soft social cover for other, less savory intentions. Here is a snippet from Zuckerberg’s blog when he first opened Facemash at Harvard.
“The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendiedous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”
This is one of the guys Friedman is counting on to step up to the plate and save us in “inning two?” Yeah, right.
Maybe education is the tonic for what ails people intent on using the Internet in a manner which exposes them to a host of mind control techniques by various organizations, whether for marketing purposes or more nefarious political reasons. Protection from fake news and other damaging information starts with a click, for the most part. Companies whose financial success depends on data mining, however many trolls and bots that practice enables, are not going to be able to resist the temptation to misuse personal information.
Kennedy’s pledge was a double edged sword. Vietnam was one edge, The Peace Corps the other. The threat of communism in Vietnam was not worth the price of 58,000 American and who knows how many thousands of Vietnamese lives....The Greeks, with stories of Phaeton, and Icarus, warned us where this would all go.
Ah, the ethics....
What the FaceBook exploits reveal-and what isn’t actively being discussed in public yet-is what it means that “we”, as human beings and animals-could be manipulated by psycho-statistically driven news and advertising.
Of course we should, and are, focusing on how our collective privacy was violated, weaponized and used against us all by a variety of people-most notably a group of Americans including Trump, Bannon, the Merciers and very likely Peter Thiel. And we’re slowly coming to understand just how utterly unethical our digital industries are, and how strict regulation needs to be for software makers and electronic device makers across all categories. The concept of self policing is not nearly adequate.
What we have not focused on, however, is a brief clip of video where a Cambridge Analytica executive is pitching a client and more or less says “winning elections are not about facts; winning elections are about harvesting emotions.”
Advertising and experiential experts have know this sort of manipulation works for years. But now we’re seeing proof of efficacy on an even larger, more subtle and more nasty scale. It begs the question which is the 800 pound gorilla in the room:
If our emotional response as a species outweighs our ability to make logical, well reasoned decisions, why aren’t we confronting this human characteristic openly? We all need to learn about and be aware of this aspect of ourselves-and be on constant guard for our own good.
i.e. our "monsters from the Id."
Zuckerberg and crew have proven they are not responsible with the power they accrued to themselves. They should not be given a do over with a pinkie swear that they will do better this time. Of course the financial crisis didn't't stop Wall Street so why should this stop big tech.
I have a FB friend who posts great recipes and also posts mean-spirited alt right memes that are offensive. Same is true of another friend on the left. I block the source of the hateful memes but not my friend. I’m slowly cleaning up my feed and getting more recipes, nature shots, family and friend photos and less of the vitriolic dribble that has been rampant on FB. But, honestly, I’m not sure how much of the nice stuff is worth the grinding process of protecting my feed and the continued albeit diminishing exposure to hate and bullying and falseness. I’m growing weary of the negative and tend to use FB less and less. It’s a shame.
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Mark Zuckerberg is a neophyte when it comes to moral responsibility. He's a salesman... his goal profit and greed. The connectivity that he sold wasn't free. He has sold every Facebook's data to a spectrum of individuals, organizations, businesses that every individual with a Facebook page has no knowledge of. Was it legal? Yes, because our laws haven't yet evolved or adapted to protect citizen's rights. Was it ethical? NO. Facebook has made BILLIONS & BILLIONS of dollars. The myth that too many people bought into was the myth that it was "FREE". Not only that, FACEBOOK didn't care or take any responsibility for FALSE and Harmful Information that was posted over and over again. They knew Russian Trolls were posting FAKE PAGES. They didn't care. They just kept collecting the money and cashing in. FACEBOOK makes their money mining data... Will WE THE PEOPLE wise up? Will technological systems evolve to provide tools and remain ethically responsible? Hopefully. Will it be Mr. Zuckerberg who leads this effort. I don't know why the world would trust him. He's asked to be "forgiven" one too many times.
"fully transparent about how you operate....all the ways that you monetize their data." Mr. Friedman would like us to believe he was not aware of these non-transparent practices of Google and others from the beginning ("inning one"). It was always not so subtle invasion of privacy. When commercial entities or government use your data, your personal information, they need to tell you how, when and why, and for how much, and that they have secured your written permission in advance. You own your personal data.
The masses that use social.media were duped. Facebook and all the rest were after our data from the start and most IT people knew it. We knew it was no coincidence that when your college bound kid filled out FAFSA that parents received mail 2 days later pitching private student loans. Google knew you needed help. Ever wonder why you see ads for thing you and your friends like? Facebook and other apps for your phone mine the data from your phone and it says so when you install them.
There is no Facebook in a moral business environment. Remember AOL Online communities where you paid to be connected? Almost everything in this world has a price tag. So what do we do now? Quit social media or demand regulations? No we will do the American thing - forget this "privacy breach" and keep on feeding the beast.
1
People have been swindled by con men for centuries, The con changes as new opportunities present. Why should tech be different? Milton Friedman already established that corporations have no social responsibility, a concept widely embraced. Facebook is especially suspect when Zuckerberg uses the word "trust" in every other sentence, a form of deceptive marketing.
1
Mark Zuckerberg and his bros don’t have the wisdom or the rights to “elevate” anybody by supervising the content of the messages that reach them. And this IS a “business model” problem, because Facebook and its fellow gargantuan online networks are businesses, made to sell ads, publicize ads, and generate profits, not citizens. The only way to rein them in and limit the lies and junk they broadcast is by establishing rules, passing legislation. But the sort of legislation that used to regulate radio and television stations has been weakened and the sources of news, some trustworthy, some trashy, have multiplied exponentially.
It looks like we will have to depend on citizens to make themselves into citizens.
1
This is high-sounding drivel. The whole question is how do you implement the policing of one of these sites? For that I recommend the recent article in the New Yorker about Reddit's efforts to do so. It ain't pretty. It's nitty-gritty line-drawing between opinionated put-downers and pathological haters. Where is that line and what is the rationale by which pathological haters are weeded out from the public square? It's quite subjective and requires dedicated policing and difficult line-drawing.
1
Only one "money" in the op-ed Thomas. Mentioned in the first inning. Money, profits, and the search for ever more of it forever is the central problem for us in this game. How we handle it could be to pay for Facebook, a dollar a month per monthly user would equal their current revenue. Stop the profiling, the metadata collection, the system gaming "Cambridge Analyticas" and end......the ads.
It's a myth, largely perpetuated by people like Thomas Friedman who presumably hasn't written a single line of useful code in his entire life, that Facebook represents some sort of innovative leap forward. It doesn't and it never will. It, along with various other 'tech giants' has profited handsomely (well, ok, some of their early stockholders have profited handsomely) from Americans' seemingly insatiable , and growing, appetite for mindless diversion. Nothing innovative there; P.T. Barnum was onto this schtick 150 years ago.
1
Tom Friedman and Dov Seidman's solution to the problem of high tech businesses exploiting unaware customers: change human nature. Good luck!
Looking up the aforementioned Seidman it seems that his book’s forward was written by Bill Clinton who sadly has issues with “how”things are done. Questionable fundraising ethics while his wife was Secretary of State, having an affair with a young employee and then compounding it by lying to the body politic....etc....etc. The “how” of having such a shady person pen the forward puts Mr. Seidman’s claim to be a messenger of values highly questionable. In the one public choice he chose the prestige and publicity value of the Clinton imprimatur sadly tainting his message and ending any hope he could be a badly needed messenger for values instead of a case study of not making the hard choices thst true values require.
It's been a constant source of amazement to me this past decade that we as a society blindly invested with "wisdom" a rank, arrogant, 20-something kid who happened to hit on a way to fabulously monetize a single idea.
I guess in our society that equals "genius," especially when "genius" equals money.
Where I come from, it just equals a rank, arrogant, 20-something kid, infatuated with his own "success," in over his head (see Zuckerberg's Newark schools experiment), and mouthing the most banal platitudes about the democratization of information without the least bit of skeptical questioning from a credulous public, and very little from the news media.
All while he gets rich organ-harvesting our privacy. And sorry, Milennials, too many in your generation just don't get it. Time to wise up.
Excellent points Tom, but 60 years ago, most CEOs actually had ethical business models and were concerned about the county's citizens.
The amazing Mr. Z. is as morally lacking as the Dread Tyrant Trump, and will weather this current PR storm to get back to his normal course running his cult-based company with self-centered arrogance.
2
Wow. How about discussing if it's a good idea to have monopolistic trillion-dollar companies controlling our technologies, our data and our privacy? The recommendation we get here instead amounts to this: "If you notice a dictator is about to take over, don't try to stop him, just suggest meekly to him you'd prefer him to be a benevolent dictator."
SiliCon Valley has too much money and too few morals. They will not save us but a republic that fixes its campaign finance laws, regulates the internet and taxes all income as ordinary income will
2
Also unrealistically hyperinflated valuations.
As much as I like him, maybe Zuck is in over his head—at this point in the evolution of FB. Maybe it’s time for a change in leadership.
If you've ever worked in any networked organization you quickly learn that you cannot protect data absolutely. It's a never-ending hunt for security.
I am still astounded that people put the most amazing things out there for all, yes possibly all, to see.
Get off social media. Making billions through enticing people to release personal details or click on seductive ads has to be the biggest scam in the history of big scams. Social media plays to the most insecure parts of our selves.
1
Mr. Friedman
I will believe the words Mark Zuckerburg utters only if he donates immediately with no conditions attached all his earnings from Facebook since 2014 to a not for profit organization that works to protect the privacy of ordinary Americans. If he does not do it, then, it is all just talk. No remorse and certainly no real action.
Yes, there was a technological revolution. But the functions of plutocracy have given the lions' share of the gains to what is essentially the prior generations' "winners."
Imagine a game of Monopoly that never ends, in which the past winners get to make the rules, dictate how technology is used or not used no matter the costs to humanity, and capture all the future wealth and technological advances because they happen to control the most property rights.
That IS modern capitalism, i.e. plutocracy, and humans everywhere are right to reject it as the inherited system that we are supposedly stuck with, because enslaving all humans to a handful of plutocrats is a crime against humanity and anathema to democracy.
Human science and technology are created in common, so why should the fruits of our science and technology be captured by the greedy few?
The solution to plutocracy is for human society to cap the amount of property rights that human society will recognize or protect. We've modified property rights before, in the 19th century, with the abolition of slavery.
In the 21st century, it's time to abolish the plutocratic enslavement of humanity by capping property rights, and implementing higher taxes on wealth/technology/capital/robots rather than labor income.
Of course, Friedman is a dinosaur but doesn't realize it. Progress in science and society come one death at a time. But it will come.
reddit.com/r/Autodivestment
I have nothing to do with facebook. I just see no need to hook up with someone I knew when I was 8 and waste all sorts of time to boot.
1
Zuckerberg faces this choice: stop mining users' personal data and selling it to advertisers, political organizations and others or keep all users' data strictly private. In other words, give up tens of billions of dollars in revenue or do the right thing. Given that he's already demonstrated that Facebook views its users as cash cows to be milked for the revenue their data provides, the answer is obvious. Zuckerberg goes for the $$$$ every time. His moral compass always points south.
Now it turns out that Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and early investor, has been associated with Palantir which helped create the data-mining app that stole data for Trump's campaign. Thiel and Mercer ( a Cambridge Analytica founder and major owner) are both Trump worshippers. Coincidence? Yeah right. And Stormy Daniels is just someone Trump never met.
Friedman has been a cheerleader for all things Tech since the invention of the pencil.
His column should be entitled "Brave New World". All the glorious things Tech will bring us, all the problems it will solve. We'll all be "connected", "empowered", "free".
Tech will bring a revolution of democracy and will make the peasant in Africa equal to the engineer in Milwaukee.
But lo and behold at the other end of the Tech revolution we find exactly what we had in the beginning, before the first Inning: one the biggest uses of the internet is pornography; we see the empowerment of racist, violent, hate groups; the acceleration of our de-humanization; the rise of extreme anxiety brought on by social media and extreme marketing.
The surprise is only for those like Friedman who were salespeople of the Great Tech Revolution. Many of us suspected that Tech would provide no escape from human nature but instead bring what it always does: some good things, and some very, very bad things.
But any reader of Huxley, Orwell, or even Shakespeare already knew this.
2
Mark Zuckerberg can't save us from his loving worship of making more money from his business. Because it is the bottom of the ninth inning and the home team is losing 5-1 with the bases empty and two outs with the best hitter up with a 3-2 count.
Silicon Valley's technological marvels are akin to John D. Rockefeller's oil refining genius and Henry Ford's car making insight from decades past. The benefits of their business models inevitably invoked costs upon individuals and society that had to be controlled and reined in. And their arrogance and hubris had to be partially broken and burnt down by executive and legislative action. Due to the speed of science and technology in his industry Zuckerberg does not have the benefit of moderation by the passage of time.
The deep wise insight of Jesus Christ of Nazareth from two millennia ago gave us the route to our salvation. Warning that the love of money and pride are the essence of inhumane evil. While treating others as you would yourself in a humble empathetic manner is the enduring eternal ultimate moral virtue. The 'business' of Jesus was saving souls.
Zuckerberg swings and misses. Strike three! Game over.
1
How realistic is it to expect a for-profit monopoly to regulate itself through moral leadership, if it did not exhibit this since its inception? (Recall the Winklevoss story.)
Here's an interesting excerpt from:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/podcasts/big-social-and-facebooks-mor...
"Wesley wants to know how Facebook gets a moral core. Jenna worries that the company’s business imperatives — growth and scaling, at any cost — make that nearly impossible. She calls it “the new imperialism.” Mike’s theory is that it’s a challenge because Facebook’s viewpoints are too paternalistic and all-knowing."
Wouldn't a global monopoly need regulation? And viable alternatives for users to choose from?
1
It's a waste of time waiting for Mark or other techies to fix the newest problem regarding ethics and personal responsibility.
I suggest we look to ourselves, the users, for decency and good judgment instead of projecting all responsibility on the inventor of the idea.
When Facebook first came out I signed up and began messaging my friends. Very quickly, my background and training in experimental and clinical psychology alerted me to the risks of spilling your guts to assorted internet subscribers. The possibility of manipulation glared out at me from my tablet screen.
I encourage others to take charge of your own lives and not allow others to invade your mind!
2
Time for new management at FB. Zuckerberg, Sanberg, they should go. They're not trustworthy. It's laughable when technology executives claim they didn't know their applications could be leveraged fully to exploit their users? Please. That says they didn't ask enough of the right questions, and that down-the-line PM's at FB hid or didn't know it either. Time for a fresh start.
2
While the focus on Facebook and its role in the Russian hacking scandal is proper and well deserved and hopefully will lead to changes that are needed, I see no reporting on any investigation by our government into the actions of Cambridge Analytica. Surely, we should be looking into all the alleged abuses and assaults of this company too. Are we avoiding the elephant in the room because Robert Mercer is a Republican billionaire?
The messiah complex of Mark Zuckerberg has been tarnished. He who proclaimed that 'Facebook was the new religion' has been taken down a peg but is this just a temporary glitch? We will see if he moves in the right direction to protect democracy or keep those profits coming.
Meanwhile, lets also look at Robert Mercer and his company's action. CA was and is a major disruption factor in our democracy and elections.
104
Elizabeth Cambridge Analytica being investigated by the FTC according to a March 20 article in BBC news and a October 2017 artcile in the Daily Beast.
"While the focus on Facebook and its role in the Russian hacking scandal is proper and well deserved and hopefully will lead to changes that are needed,"
As of March 28th 2018, there remains no evidence to support the claims of Russian state, or Russians, hacking the election.
"I see no reporting on any investigation by our government into the actions of Cambridge Analytica. Surely, we should be looking into all the alleged abuses and assaults of this company too."
In 2012 and early 2013, the Obama2012's campaign was widely celebrated for using even better Facebook data mine techniques.
Are you unfamiliar with basic concepts regards directed marketing? Back in the 1980s it would have been called "direct mail".
I'd be surprised if Mueller wasn't following the Cambridge Analytica lead.
No argument that corporations operate for profit and not for the good of society. But, an important step is changing the behavior and expectations of consumers, be they "bricks and mortar" or "virtual" consumers. Society is filled with lemmings who go running off cliffs because they are attracted to the brightest flashing light. Education and awareness are vital steps to a strong and equitable democracy. Thank you Dev Seidman and T.F. for printing these words. We have to start with excellent intentions and a sense of right, and not lose our navigational skills along the way.
1
Mr. Seidman's remarks as quoted by Tom Friedman pretty much boil down to: we need to be better people, and the emergence of social media magnifies that need. Who can argue with that? But I don't see anything in this op-ed realistically explaining how we might get there.
5
These companies have no incentive whatsoever to turn from money-making enterprises to forces for good any more than the oil companies, the banks, or the health insurance industry. The problem is unfettered capitalism, and the counter to that is government regulation. It is naive to think that things will change otherwise.
3
These companies so far have shown that they do not really care about their users. One way is providing security and privacy settings that seem sensible but in actuality do nothing. How about the hundreds of opt-out settings I have chosen with little or no results. I still get emails from most of the companies I have opted out of.
Facebook has done the same thing NPR reported just yesterday on how Facebook has privacy settings that make people feel like they have control but essentially do nothing.
Tech companies are being revealed as being who I they have been - businesses that seek profits. The things that separates them from from other businesses or snake oil salesmen is that they provide products that are helpful or fun it their goal in doing that is not to make the world a better place. It is to make money.
They usually sell this as a win-win. Right now it is not.
3
Zuckerberg clearly thinks this will all blow over and he can continue with Facebook's current business model. It will be interesting to see if users finally decide that having their data sold to groups like Cambridge Analytica is not worth the free services offered by Facebook. It opens up an opportunity for a company that charges a fee but doesn't use people's personal information as their product.
1
This is a must read. Zuckerberg is an example, albeit a big one, that we cannot approach technological advancement in a valueless vacuum. Our values do matter. They need to be spelled out with clarity. They need to be applied to all of life, and especially to political decisions involving technology. At this point, ironically, the evangelical right and Trump, now in full view of most any person with discerning eyes, has illustrated the inescapable need for character in all that we do. Nothing is neutral. All is weighed by standards of human decency that seeks the well-being of all of humanity and the planet on which live TOGETHER.
7
Pass laws that require companies to pay their dues in social responsibility.
Oh, wait, we already have that, they're called taxes. Of which corporations are paying less and less, because politicians have been captured.
*That* is the problem that needs fixing.
10
Well yes, were were promised a utopia of self-expression and globally equitable interconnectedness. But what we got is a science fiction insidious intrusion into our very brains. I used to be a human being, indeed.
I'd love to know, and perhaps you do, of any prognosticators in say 1990 who looked at this looming force and predicted its all-pervasiveness and factored in nefarious human behaviors and expressed a few oh I don't know, doubts.
I for one did not look at the sky one idle day in the last decade of the 20th century and say gee, I wish there were glass screens in all aspects of my life, forcing me to conduct virtually all of my day-to-day activities tapping a keyboard and neurotically glancing at a pocket computer and 'texting' rather than talking to actual people.
And of course, we haven't seen anything yet. And I do believe the great irony in this, of many painful ironies, is the undermining if not wholesale eradication of individuality and democratic norms, all in the name of aforesaid utopia.
9
Its title is 1984, by George Orwell.
1
The next frontier is the change of our minds--away from our ideas of who we are and what we're doing on this beautiful planet of ours. We must learn to cooperate for this, the noblest endeavor of, and challenge to, humanity.
2
If you really think that corporations -- whose very reason for existence is to make money for the owners -- are ever going to start viewing their customers as "citizens" rather than customers, then I have a bridge to sell you. Check it out on my Facebook page.
11
Perhaps another reader has addressed this, but Mr. Friedman didn't.
You can say we got all this connectivity for 'free', but how many Facebook or Youtube users understood that by signing up, they became the product? Even those of us who more or less understood that never signed on for the ways in which our permission we stretched to unforeseen lengths.
Just as we are the product for the credit rating agencies, we are the product that Facebook and others sell to advertisers. Every click, every like, is valuable information to them.
Oh, but we get cute puppy videos.
10
Yes, I agree we are in the second inning of the tech battle. it can be won if these high gtech companies lower their expectation of more profit at the cost of people's life. These companies have developed the right platform for business, no doubt. Now, they need to focus how these platforms can create other platforms of social and political reforms. It is not easy taskt and may be more painful than the tech platform of sharing, convenience and quick response. It is not impossible but need higher level moral dedications at the same level as the first inning. Let us keep working on it.
Don’t equate Uber’s faulty algorithms and irresponsible backup driver to Google’s self driving car which has racked up miles without incident.
Also, don’t equate Facebook’s recent shenanigans to the overwhelming success of the Information Age companies that have propelled us into the 21st.
While I largely agree with Friedman's point, reference to a driverless car's striking and killing a pedestrian obscures, rather than clarifies, it. Friedman is saying that we're now starting to reckon with the unintended consequences of the technological advancements we've seen in the last two decades, and that taking a neutral position as an actor in that sector can't suffice because the tech can be twisted to serve undemocratic and immoral purposes.
But the driverless car doesn't illustrate that. The people who built driverless cars always knew the cars would strike and kill some people--it's a risk that the designers are consciously trying to minimize. It's not an unforeseen externality or subverted use of the tech, but a planned-for, unavoidable cost of using the tech (although, it's certainly worth pointing out, we can expect fatalities to drop after driverless cars become commonplace). Using technology with known risks is not the problem; ignoring the unintended consequences of technology is the problem.
3
Facebook is “too big to fail” and they reached that point when any form of quality control and vetting was forfeited, i.e., from its birth. Founded as a medium to vet women at Harvard based on their looks, with no consideration of their humiliation, Zuckerberg is not someone to be respected for his values. There is no doubt that while it will cut into his profit margin, more humans are required to personally vet every ad that wants to be on Facebook. If that’s too overwhelming for a platform that size, then it’s too large - plain & simple.
However, a Board of Directors should be held accountable to expect that, just like traditional media, Facebook ads are: 1) true, 2) divulge the source of funding for that ad and 3)not allowed to exclude anyone based upon race, creed, religion or sexual preference. Buyers of Facebook ads should not have a checklist allowing exclusion.
Other countries do not allow mass media political advertising in the last weeks of an election. It’s high time we caught up with the realities, and knowing Zuckerberg will NOT do enough. Therefore, it’s time to start regulating Facebook and any other social media platform - and at the very least, hold them to the traditional media standards.
19
My new book addresses the very issue you raise, but offers a new answer. The books begins "...we live in a whirlwind of connectivity. There is seemingly no limit to who can connect with whom. Distance is no longer a word that has meaning. And place seems a quaintly irrelevant term. When we are within reach beyond the here, there seems to be no here.....Is there a location, amid our connectedness where we are we? Where we are we?....I suggest that we can conceive of Social Space as the base camp in which we actually live our lives..." The title of the book is "WE LIVE IN SOCIAL SPACE: A window to a new science" which outlines a way of understanding how, amid the connectedness, we actually operate from a base camp that is real. (I am a 90 year old, Holocaust survivor and former sociology professor)
1
Sadly, Friedman doesn't get it, writing, "To be sure, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube should all be commended for trying to find engineering solutions to prevent them from being hacked and weaponized."
What Friedman doesn't understand should be obvious by now to anyone not vested in self-delusion. The business model of Facebook entirely depends on selling your information. Period. If they cannot sell you, they do not exist. More fundamentally, however, what he doesn't get is that the internet cannot be made secure from "being hacked and weaponized." While he rightly understands the basic issue is one of values, Friedman is not willing to accept the fact that, when it comes to technology (and other things), the bad guys are as smart as the good guys and, arguably, more motivated. How is it, does he think, that drugs make it up and guns make it down through our southern border?
Friedman also writes, "At the height of the Cold War, when the world was threatened by spreading Communism and rising walls, President John F. Kennedy vowed to 'pay any price and bear any burden' to ensure the success of liberty." Is Friedman prepared to pay the price and bear the burden, giving up his internet phone and 500-channel TV to "ensure the success of liberty", for that is what it would take to even begin the necessary conversation on values and ethics, an environment where we no longer would be able 24/7 to immerse ourselves in nothing but reinforcement of what we already believe and think?
14
Steve F, Oakland: Yet another commenter - along with Barbara Franklin, From Where I Sit and Bill Brown, to cite just a few - who makes far more sense and writes with a greater sense of reality than the much ballyhooed star Op-Ed Columnist!!
I tend to feel NY Times op-ed regulars MEAN well, but they so often sound like they're sitting in an ivory tower, writing many fine words that amount to little of practical use. Do they really live in the same world as me? It's hard to tell...
3
Ambient Kestrel, thanks for engaging in the discussion. I think you are essentially right. Most columnists -- or "pundits"" as TV seems to call them -- are like most national politicians: they take planes from here to there, never crossing America at ground level, whether by thumb, car, or Amtrak, seeing, meeting with, and talking to flyover America in the process.
2
Greed, Mr. Friedman, is the culprit, not technology. Technology does not care about our personal information. In our "second inning" we need to extricate ourselves from greedy people without dismantling the technologies we celebrate.
9
Oh, please. No using a useless app, feature or system doesn't make one a Luddite. Facebook and it's "social media" brethren are merely 21st century iterations of the early twentieth century's party line. The entire Facebook data, Russian manipulation, 1984 redux is of our own individual and collective making. Getting free of it is a long and arduous multi-step process: 1. Don't create an account. 2. Move on with your life.
14
The U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries – it's done so over 80 times between 1946 and 2000. Why are we shocked that our chickens came home to roost? That number doesn't include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S. didn't like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala & Chile. Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such as election monitoring. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. involvement in foreign elections was motivated by the goal of containing communism. The U.S. didn't want to see left-wing governments elected, and so it tried to influence races in other countries on a constant basis. The U.S. also attempted to sway Russian elections. In 1996, with the presidency of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian economy flailing, President Clinton endorsed a $10.2-billion loan from the International Monetary Fund linked to privatization, trade liberalization and other measures that would move Russia toward a capitalist economy. Yeltsin used the loan to bolster his popular support, telling voters that only he had the reformist credentials to secure such loans, according to media reports at the time. He used the money, in part, for social spending before the election, including payment of back wages and pensions. Least we forget Friedman was an early & enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq war. This column's outrage is mind boggling in it's pomposity & hypocrisy.
8
When we do it to others we are helping democracy flourish in less enlightened countries.
When others do it to us they are nefarious evildoers.
FB is toast. They facilitated open disregard for their own terms of service and enabled clear violations of human subjects protocols set for by federal, state, and EU law.
2
Perhaps a start would be to analyze the data re "self-driving cars." There have been at least two reports of deaths caused by self-driving cars--one that killed the driver of a Tesla in Florida and another a Uber vehicle that killed an Arizona pedestrian. In terms of deaths per mile driven, so far how do self=driving cars compare with ol' Lizzie? Is it a little early, from an ethical sense, to expose humans to the power of self-driving vehicles? Based on the two accidents so far, we're not quite ready.
1
Don't delete Facebook, devalue it.
FB makes money selling users data, so give false and misleading information at every opportunity. If enough people do this, the value of that data will be diminished and it will cost them money.
8
I learned long ago that one should not believe EVERYTHING that one reads in a newspaper, even though all newspaper do have editorial boards that function with varying degrees of efficiently. However, in the absence of anything resembling an editorial board on the social media in question, sifting the "wheat from the chaff" is much more difficult, especially for those who are almost "mesmerized" by the social media and have not yet learned how to think critically and/or have no well-defined system of values. That is the crux of the problem. What we have is a form of "electronic graffiti" that disseminates vast amounts of false and misleading misinformation that undermines the trust in virtually ALL of our public institutions that our society relies on.
3
Telling companies that they have to be more transparent about collecting, storing, and selling people’s information does not begin to go far enough. The government is not allowed to mine our data—look at the problems the Obama administration had in trying to maintain access to people’s phone calling patterns in the fight against terrorism—not even including the content of the calls. Why should Silicon Valley—or any company—have the right to mine, store and sell personal data? It is a profound violation in the right to privacy. It is not good enough that they tell you they are doing it. We thought Big Brother would be the government, but it’s actually Facebook, Google, and a lot of companies you’ve never heard of. If they are not stopped, democracy is finished.
6
“The business of business is now society.”
When I read that line, it made me wonder whether we are giving up our right to representative government and moving those powers over to the corporations where we have no vote? Should only wealthy business owners, the Captains of Industry, decide on society’s rules?
13
Yes, "truth and trust" are essential to successful human interaction. If anyone trusts Zuckerberg and thinks that he has been truthful, well then stay on his, not your, money machine. Yes, it is easy to witness the power of social media platforms and it is easy to see how they are addictive so can retain most of the two billion members. Second inning? This is not a game, but one of the most cynical inventions in history the way that FB has chosen to violate privacy. Transparency and full disclosure are obviously deemed unnecessary by Zuckerberg. If they were, members' personal information would not be used to direct advertisements to them for FB profits. FB should pay members when their personal information is used for advertisement targeting. Sorry Zuckerberg, but you will have to settle with the billions you already have including your various private retreats. We know, however that this will never happen because money is power and Zuckerberg and FB have enormous financial resources.
Although in its embryonic stages, the difficult to understand distributed applications of blockchain technology may well be the second inning of social networks. True peer-to-peer interaction with no central authority or arbiter may well disrupt the FB model. It is difficult to see this now and sadly, Mr .Friedman has not addressed this potential to build trust among strangers with no central authority in control. Zuckerberg certainly does not want to educate the masses on the subject.
10
"It means seeing and treating people not just as ‘users’ or ‘clicks,’ but as ‘citizens,’ who are worthy of being accurately informed to make their best choices" Really? Facebook should treat it's users as citizens? I'm sorry, but these are businesses. Some may have better ethics than others, but in the end it's going to be the bottom line that matters. That's capitalism. So what does it really mean? It means, just like it did in the era of the industrial revolution, strong, pro-active government regulation.
15
Technology is essentially a tool which could be used to serve human needs or misuded to damage humanity. The current debate on the unauthorised personal data misuse involving the Facebook data theft by the Cambridge Analyrica does forcefully bring to the fore the issues of data ownership and informed consent. This could be addressed only by having data protection standards and effective regulatory framework in place which will help reverse the recent trends in data and privacy violation, a kind of data colonisation.
6
Tom,
The "Seidman said" solutions offered are all accurate and philosophically deserving but they are ultimately just talking points. You have omitted the biggest anchor: time. Face Book and Twitter are established and damaging and your written reminder of honor, while deserved, will be a long time coming.
3
Great philosophical ideas re human data, law, integrity, etc, etc,etc.
BUT, I am surprised that one very very practical question is not answered yet, indeed not even asked; not by politicians, not by legal theorists, not by business, not by news media, not even by facebook users.
Where is the data of the 50 million people that facebook allowed to be stolen?? Where is it right now, march 27 2018? Who is using it for what? Has it been sold? To whom? Which of the world's coming elections are at risk?
Are any real human beings at risk?
2
I think we all need to be reminded that Mark Zuckerberg is not in the same "tech" category as a Stephen Hawking, and has never shown the kind of business ethics as someone like Warren Buffet.
The genesis of Facebook was Zuckerberg and a couple of college dorm-mates developing a program to compare/rate female college coeds ("hot or not"). It immediately got him in trouble with Harvard because they thought it infringed individual privacy (among other things).
More recently, Zuckerberg, et al. at Facebook cast around for years trying to find a formula to monetize their brainchild, in order to go public and then keep their stock and option valuations high once publicly traded. Along the way, they failed to carry out much of a 2011 consent decree with the FTC that apparently was directed at many of the destructive privacy/data problems that have now come to light.
So, with this storied history, there is no reason to believe that Zuckerberg and those at Facebook will be the saviors of our democracy. Their profit motive is stronger and works directly against it.
12
This is a good observation. Zuckerberg is sort of like a Mega Millions lottery winner -- he scored really big really quickly but didn't and doesn't have the wisdom to know what to do with it. Just because he's very wealthy and prominent doesn't mean that he has developed a moral or ethical compass or even reasonable business acumen. Perhaps a more slow-growth billionaire might learn along the way. But it's silly to expect that Zuckerberg is any more able to make wise, moral and ethical decisions than other 33 year-old.
3
Businessmen are not in business to promote social welfare, create a moral society, or to strengthen democracy.
They are in business to make money and maximize profits.
That is why regulation and government oversight is both necessary and desirable.
37
well said. now we need a serious discussion of how we regulate the ways we capture and store personal data. the GDPR regulation going into effect in the EU is a good place to start but it's not enough because it focuses too much on what can be done or not and doesn't focus on how. We need how in a big way. I've written about regulation elsewhere.
1
While our society and its culture may be bereft of values at this moment in time, the human spirit, our very nature, is nature’s circuit breaker beneath which we cannot slip.
Have courage , deploy our personal powers of values ethics and morals. They may temporarily have left society but they remain in our hearts and in our heads, ready for action.
It might be that in each individual resides the ability to restart the group if necessary.
If this sounds libertarian, I don’t mean it that way. More of a biological theory.
5
On the surface your column sounds sensible. But probe deeply and you will find that Inning One and Inning second are both fraught with ethical issues. Its a film one has seen a thousand times. Business plans seem sound, but so did the tobacco industry business plans. Which is like the Boiling Frog Problem. We love to take risks and remain in denial that anything wrong will or come out of it. Just look back at your position regarding the Iraq war, where was your ethical bone at that time? At what cost did you achieve anything from the Iraq war and what kinds of complications spun out of that one event, which was unfounded and not thought through.
Everyone wishes they have 20/20 vision and foresight is a blessing...but when it comes to business and war, all foresight vanishes and only emotions and greed dictate consequences. Which are never never for anyone's good, yes people make money both in business and the military industry complex, their affiliated defense contractors make pile of money, but none of it goes towards the "collective good", only a sliver of selfish wealthy powerful oligarchs partake of the spoils.
3
I think you are missing the real point, human learning. Our support of human learning is failing to keep up with the challenges, expectations, and promises of a the experience load these new devices and processes have placed on us. Our support systems are antiquated and beyond their limits so that we don’t even see the problems much less their solutions. Be happy to talk if you have any real concern for the third inning and beyond.
5
The first inning was like the Wild West, and most of us jumped on board for the free ride that the tech companies promised us. We did not realize that there is "no free lunch." Now many Americans are questioning the cost of these wonderful technologies for our culture and our democratic ideals. Hopefully, we will begin to foster some moral integrity in our corporations and government to allow democracy to survive.
7
Thomas Friedman's ( via Dov Seidman) contention that in order to "save" Facebook, and by extension its users, we must rely on the moral fortitude of its leadership. To this reader, there stands a Dark Abyss of Censorship awaiting all Facebook users if this proposal is put into practice: It asks for Facebook to be the arbiter of what constitutes acceptable speech. This much is made clear when Friedman, quoting Seidman, states, "It means promoting civility and decency, making the opposite unwelcome." How is Facebook an authority in determining civility and decency? More importantly, we would be opening the door to Facebook's censorship of information it deems "unwelcome". It also assumes Facebook's benevolence towards its users, and that the company itself is fundamentally "good", despite its clear motives as a publicly traded company to be highly profitable. Social media has democratized information in a way not seen before; this proposal seems to be at odds with that notion, altogether.
5
I agree. Facebook or any other business is unqualified to arbitrate acceptable speech, truth, justice and so on - we have the courts, Congress and the President (when working as they were designed) with the voters' input to do that. Citizens United must be overturned as corporations are not people! The Elected representatives of the public need to focus on key issues like privacy and information control and discontinue their obstruction, bickering, misbehavior and distractions over religious wars, suppression of races and the poor and what women should do or not do.
TOM writes insightfully about the evolution of high tech and how it is perceived. In all advances, the first "inning" is a time of euphoria and unlimited expectations, while the second inning is replete with remorse, resentment, fear and outrage. When the Internet came online, it was referred to as the "wild west," where the fastest gun made the law. However, big business had not yet whet its appetite for data mining and the applications of burgeoning deep learning qua artificial intelligence. To cut to the chase, I agree with the idea that the Internet is a pipeline. A conduit for information. As such, it needs to be regulated as a public utility--like all other conduits, such as water, natural gas and electricity. Lest the big players such as Facebook and Google think that regulation will kill the goose that lay the golden egg, the outcome of judicious regulation, structured with input from the tech giants, will end up safeguarding the interests of all involved. For example, there should be a way for users to view all of the information about them floating around in cyberspace, with the rights to remove it. Currently, the data is owned by the Internet provider. But I disagree with that disposition. Since the information is private, I believe that, under the Buckley Freedom of Information Act, it should be the decision of the consumer whether to leave it on the Internet or not. Also, anonymous personality tests should be banned completely.
6
"It all depends on how the tools are designed and how we choose to use them." For humanity, it has always been about choice and attitude: our attitudes towards each other, to the world, and to the future. Mankind came out of Africa. Why did we spread across the face of the globe? Because we were thrill-seekers or because we wanted to get away from the neighbors? Or because we imagined there must be something better over the hill? Land was wealth. It provided sustenance and tradable goods. Who now has such land? Money is notional. We may hope for new inventions, but who will buy them? The poor? In the 1920s America went through a phase of invention paralleled by contraction in employment and credit. We have a name for the result--the Great Depression. So now, we have no new land as safe havens for billions of people. We destroy land and ocean. We generate pinpoints of wealth and great swathes of poverty. Attitude, attitude, attitude! Perhaps the Libertarians of Cato and Koch are right: the only way out for the wealthy few is the withering and death of the many,
3
In the 1970s biologists were faced with a technological revolution. We had the ability to recombine DNA and clone genes that became the foundation of molecular biology and gave rise to biotech giants such as Genentech, Amgen and Biogen. But early on biologists recognized the potential danger of creating new organisms and forms of life. Led by soon to be Nobelist Paul Berg at Stanford, they organized a conference at Asilomar that led to a declaration of principles and a self-imposed moratorium one this research until it was better understood and could be conducted safely. Eventually, as we gained more experience guidelines were eased and science could proceed. Now is the Asilomar moment for social media and information technology.
4
As an old lefty, I am very much sympathetic to the idea that the "government must do for people what they cannot do for themselves", and while a certain degree of skepticism and caveat emptor from each and every user is always a good idea, the average person simply does not have the resources protect him/herself from the dark side of social media connectivity and reach, just as s/he doesn't have the resources to make sure water is always safe to drink of that pharmaceuticals are effective and not overly harmful.
That is why there is a place for government regulation, in those realms and in this. People generally don't object to the need for an FDA or FTC to exist--beyond the radical alt right Mercerites and Kochites--and they should not object to some rein-in of electronic media, either.
In fact, treating Facebook and the like as public utilities has been suggested, and might be a reasonable model to adopt, with the capacity for adaptation and tweaks over time. But it's become evident that, capitalist/libertarian ethos notwithstanding, there needs to be some oversight to balance the enormous power, both for good and for evil, these entities have developed.
9
There is another question about the business model that needs to be answered: What is the purpose of a corporation? Is it to enrich shareholders (Milton Friedman's view) or to serve customers and other stakeholders (Peter Drucker's view)? This is a fundamental question that underlies the "moral leadership" discussion and applies to all companies.
Facebook is clearly placing its shareholders ahead of its other stakeholders, if not customers. It's business model is to monetize the beliefs and options of its users. It sells itself to the users as the equivalent of a public house where a good time can be had discussing everything and anything with anyone. It has cameras behind the mirrors and microphones in the light fixtures and sells the video and audio. Because it has users click on a complex agreement to accept terms and conditions of use, it claims it is no further obligation to the users. While this might be true legally, I think FB's best days are behind them.
16
I have for some time believed that business schools have been misguided in espousing the belief that corporations have a primary duty to enrich stockholders rather than providing an ethical platform for its products and services. This is what "the common good" is all about, not a system which leaves behind all the people rather than the wealthy and privileged. Workers are just as much wealth creators as are stockholders.
7
@JMM and David--There's this real concept called "Inclusive Capitalism." Google it. Simply put, the needs of owners, shareholders, employees and the planet are equally important components of the corporate business model. It's about ethics. People who espouse Drucker are often advocates of Inclusive Capitalism.
In American Capitalism, items one and two are paramount. The purpose of items three and four are only to service items one and two. That's what business students are taught here.
Inclusive Capitalism has little traction, although some European corporations do try to embrace it. Those companies are always being targeted by M & A teams because items three and four can be squeezed to benefit one and two, which makes them extremely attractive in our greed is good zero sum American dream world.
Government has always, and will ever be, the mechanism that sees to the "greater good" of its citizens. Americans have been taught to see government only as an oppressor. The outlook for us is not rosy.
5
Thanks for the insightful comments. I'll check out "inclusive capitalism." I am more familiar with balancing stakeholders from a while back, before that term became popularized. For another perspective, I'd suggest Steve Denning's posts on Dumbest Idea in the World which is on point to David's point. First of them is here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing-sharehol...
Moralware versus a profiteering arms race. Which do you think will win, in this era in which Ayn Rand is god?
The fault, deer Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves.
No small problem in all of this is the old "Tragedy of the commons." When we all use a common resource - data, information, connectivity - our individual decisions and actions that maximize our own value cause other people a loss of value, actual harm. So we can all benefit from having the convenience of Amazon, but will see our local mall close, and all the jobs and tax money with it. We can all share family photos, cat photos, recipes, opinions and media, but we don't invest the time to understand what we share and become part of a propaganda machine.
Morals start at the individual level, with an agreed ethos. What is our ethos? Is it that we all have value and rights to be protected, or that we all have the right to earn and hold as much as we can?
Without that central problem solved, we can't demand morality from Zuckerberg or Uber. Because we don't agree what morality is.
12
I can't accept the premise that the first inning was so utopian. The personal computer revolution was sold to us as labor-saving, time-saving, and "virtually free", as Mr. Friedman says here. None of those things have turned out to be true.
13
With every one of our inalienable rights come the largely unaddressed responsibilities. When entrepreneurs congratulate themselves as the makers of their own destiny they often ignore the fact that it is their luck to be in in America, where all things are possible (albeit most easily for whites). The ability of any capitalist to create a product and push it into society using only “legal” safeguards, which safeguard THEM and not society, is the recurring theme of our country’s capitalist evolution. If each organization or industry set up its own set of ethical standards, and connected those to a larger government-oversight Capitalist Code of Ethics, then capitalism might survive. As it stands now, capitalism is constantly showing itself to be based less on creative competition than ruthless alacrity in a culture that values those things over safety. While you cannot legislate morality you CAN validate it with just a bit of regulatory effort.
7
Good! But: "any capitalist to create a product and push it into society..." Who will buy? With what?
The accumulation of personal data into a giant database is a threat to democracy. Facebook by definition will lead to results the vast majority of people reject. Mr. Friedman does not mention the abuse of that data to sell a used car, as capitalism takes all that data and bombards us with products that are harmful to us but profitable to them.
4
Dear Dr. Tom - there are no sustainable values left in our culture and society. There is no moral leadership in our Executive and Legislative branches of our American government. Putting people - and not social media touchscreen widgets - first is as gone with the wind as Tara and The Confederacy. Promoting decency today? fuggedabout it. As you said - first inning was amazing. Second inning - now - could destroy our experiment in Democracy.
15
While our society and its culture may be bereft of values at the moment, the human spirit, our very nature, is nature’s circuit breaker beneath which we cannot slip.
Your point is well taken but have courage , deploy your personal powers of values ethics and morals. They may temporarily have left society but they remain in our hearts and heads, ready for action.
4
And now the growing island of garbage in the Pacific is three times the area of France. Democracy didn't ever get out of the lab; beta-tested, but rejected.
1
There should have been an umpire that shouted ,"second inning"!This technology is so seductive that millions embraced it and ran with it for the answers to all questions and never asked "does this technology have any potential to hurt me and others"?Being in touch, sending photos and ordering cars seemed harmless.We are now getting a rude awakening about the perils of the technology.Wise men and women need to help lead us to modify the business model so that we and society are not harmed.Mr.Friedman, what is the third inning?
6
All true of course. But - have you driven on an interstate highway lately? The problem as I see it is in evidence there - a me-first, ignore-the-rules, full-speed-ahead mentality, run over everyone else before they get ahead of you. A trivial example, to be sure, but exemplary of our society. The rules that are meant to ensure safety are now totally ignored, and there is no slowing down. It comes down to morality and ethical behavior grounded in individual values and belief in principles. The smartest people I know, most of them anyway, are the calmest, most thoughtful, most considerate. Maybe we are simply not smart enough as a society to use the technology available to us. Nuclear power is just that, powerful and, as we know all too well, it can be used for good or evil. The choice is ours. Or is it?
8
One challenge, of course, long pre-dates the tech revolution. When we speak of moral standards, whose do we mean? There's the old joke about politicians wanting to regulate porn. When asked to define it, though, the response is that they will know it when they see it. What is unacceptable or even immoral to me, may not be so to someone else.
If your 'side' is doing the mining of data and that mining leads to your guy/gal winning, it may be that you believe that the end justifies the means. People can support all kinds of intrusion if they believe that it is in the name of a higher cause (just as many Evangelicals will excuse almost anything Trump does so long as he puts people on the SCOUTS who might overturn Roe).
Who decides what the standards are? We currently have an administration in Washington moving as hard as it can to deregulate everything and to remove as much power from government agencies as it can. As noted elsewhere in the Times, they are appointing judges who view government regulation as something to be dismantled. Will business like Facebook & Google decide what our standards are, then regulate themselves? That is a lovely fantasy.
41
Know it when I see it? Not a joke, but a quote from SCOTUS Justice Potter Stewart, 1964.
2
Just one thing. This is the third inning. The first one came with the personal computer in the early '80s. PCs and Macs got people using computers--basically tools, which prepared them for the second inning. The second inning was the rise of smartphones and connecting all those computers via the internet. That made them actually useful for more than word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, page layout, and photo editing. Now we are in the third inning where all these things change lives and the world, and that includes GPS and self-driving cars. And it may be that the Internet of things and self-driving cars are really the fourth inning.
4
When caught, criminals can be (not always "are") punished, proving that you cannot legislate morality and virtue. You can teach these values, but ultimately, you either choose them or you don't and sadly, too many don't.
You cannot program morality and virtue. You program in safeguards but technology remains just a tool of its users, vulnerable to abusers, intrusion and malicious intent.
Facebook failures and abuse have exposed and highlighted two important human weaknesses:
1) Facebook's creators were sloppy - ambition to get to the top of the hill too frequently outdistances thoughtfulness, even a care about consequences;
2) Technology serves all, including and especially a minority who find morality and virtue a humorous gift of human weaknesses.
Stay optimistic about the future of mankind. Those who choose morality and virtue far outnumber those who choose to abuse technology and others. True, it is depressing (and frightening) when little people like Trump are elevated to positions of power and admiration. Technology like Facebook helped make that possible. But these failures have resulted in many good people coming forward to counter the few, little people and their abuse of technology.
Many look before leaping. Which helps keep technology on the positive side of the equation. However, it would help more to keep our eyes open to our human weaknesses and the reality that not everyone chooses a moral virtuous life.
Choose wisely and stay alert my friends.
10
Mr. Zuckerberg can simply re-structure and form 3, perhaps 5 Facebook entities and retain control of only one. Each would operate independently and in competition with each other. Mr. Zuckerberg would still be a wealthy man.
Oops, that would not be the same as operating as a monopoly. Which is what he has now.
6
It is unlikely that competition in a free market would solve this problem: survival in the marketplace is not determined by morality. In this case, a benevolent monopoly would serve us better, we just have to persuade him that it would be cool.
1
"It means, Seidman continued, being “fully transparent about how you operate, and make decisions that affect them — all the ways in which you’re monetizing their data. "
The only way full transparency will ever happen is through strong and closely monitored federal regulations. I have absolutely no faith in the 'civility and decency" of human nature. Somewhere along the line, the acquisition of wealth now buys one great power over the many.
25
The importance of "how" we do things does not only apply to technology but also to any business discipline: finance, accounting, business analytics. marketing, etc. Business is no longer just business. Values is what it's all about. Our lives depend on them.
7
I never really cared that much about the privacy of my data before.
I’ve changed my tune now.
As an individual member of a larger society, it was not obvious that my individual position could be leveraged and abused to excite conflict in the public square.
The value of privacy is rising to me.
12
Aha, they make look cool, smart and young, but they are the new iteration of the robber barons. All the new technology don’t change the old rules of greed, power and corruption. Mr Friedman unabashed believe in the liberating force of the individual ignore these basics facts at his own peril. Placing an ethical face on these businesses is only disguising the truth. Only true respect for the good of all can control, not eliminate, the force of darkness within us. Silicon Valley is built in the premise that smart individuals will dominate culture for the benefit of the brilliant few admitted in their midst, the rest of us are like cattle serving a purpose.
Never had Facebook because without being brilliant, is obvious to me that human communication should be based on human feelings that do not yet go over the wire. When you understand this, it become obvious that no matter how it is presented, it is simply advertising and marketing data to sell. And sell they will.
15
Wendell Berry published a set of personal governance principles in 1987 that contain the core ideas that Seidman advocates for business in the fused world. They are the rules Berry uses to decide whether to buy and use new technology. Here they are, from his essay, "Why I am not going to buy a computer:"
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
Berry has written extensively on the tractor as a modernizing tool for farming and on agribusiness, the primary consequence of its use. Friedman is right that digital community tools are as revolutionary to our communities as tractors were 80 years ago.
6
I enjoyed this thoughtful piece. While I am not cynical I will believe all of Mr. Friedman's and Mr. Seidman's wishful thinking about business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility when I see it. As for the baseball metaphor, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that no technology is an unalloyed good--all technologies have their downside, as well as their benefits. If some of the problems created by computerization and the internet came as a surprise to Tom Friedman and Dov Seidman, they were no surprise to me.
6
It would be interesting to know how much Facebook makes per customer per month.
If it’s just a couple of bucks then the solution is clear. If they net 2 dollars but get the fall of democracy thrown in for good luck, then then the total price would be a bit higher.
2
Take their quarterly investor call, they'll tell you the revenue per user. They'll also tell you their corporate goals per user, revenue, time on their platform, etc. Taking the next FB quarterly call should be an objective all FB users anguishing over their lost privacy.
1
I don’t see why we need to put our fate and faith in the hands of right actions of a handful of tech billionaires. This is a democracy. Fight for a constitutional right to privacy.
79
I agree, but the problem is that the only part of constitutional rights that come into play where private corporations are concerned is our right to sue them when they breach their contracts with us.
These companies have no Fourth Amendment constraints on what they do, and much else that might have posed a problem for them (like having defamation on their sites, posted by a third party) is protected from liability by federal law.
1
Values matter and how we employ them is the crux of the issue. Yet how they are structured in our rules and practices may matter more than how they directly inform our actions. When the structure is corrupt, we are half way to sin in the first inning.
Tech companies (or Wall St.) are often “pump and dump” business ventures. The approach is to take a good idea (or liquid asset), get it funded enough to take to a massive scale and then sell the company (or CDOs) at an incredible profit. It is not to stay in the game for the longer term, but to get out at the peak of profit. This is true for many executives as well as investors.
Many venture investment firms structure their practices to find the company that will return 10 times their investment, not just to pay for the ones that lose the bet, but to fatten their bottom line. These are not long-term investments where long-term begins in decades.
The idea of building a company for a generation and more is not just considered quaint, its counterproductive in an age of flash trades where fortunes are made and lost in seconds counted in the nanos. Thinking and planning for the long term has no incentive in our business structure, especially as investors are only on the hook for their investments not their wealth. (I’m talking to you, limited liability.)
Values are basic and important, but need to inform changes in laws and regulations that require sticking around through the ninth inning, not just the first couple.
6
“It means seeing and treating people not just as ‘users’ or ‘clicks,’ but as ‘citizens,’
I agree with the above sentiment, however...
Mark Zuckerberg would be lost in a world of non digital values. His enterprise would collapse, and his shareholders furious with him.
He’s trapped in a billionaires world of his own making that is the only home he’s ever known.
No, there is no redemption for Facebook or the anti-social media that it leads.
16
For a change Mr. Friedman is making sense. Unfortunately, this is the price we paying for playing fast and lose in the first innings and being so enthralled by the technology that was unfolding. Partly, one can call it hindsight, partly it is the result of not holding technology to the rigor and questions it deserves. Take for example Aadhar in India. Here again, it will become big brother surveillance tool that was actually initiated by Mr. Friedman's friend in India....good in principle but a devil once implemented. Technology is the toy developed by the elites and elites don't want to be questioned.
5
Facebook, the first social network, allowed their platform to break a fundamental rule in social contracts: you don’t sell out your friends. Every knows when they use anything online they give up their personal info. But they don’t expect to sell out their friends .. or family.
13
Good point Sarah. The key to leveraging personal data was to leverage the groups, not the individual.
4
I suppose true transparency would sound like this "we are Facebook and we plan to use you, but it will not cost you anything up front, and, of course, we are not responsible for any consequential damages".
1
FB wasn't the first social network (if it was they would hold the basic patents on social networking), people had used networking technologies prior to the introduction of the first web browser. What FB did was bundle some popular chat, contacts list and HTML applications into a convenient bundle and then sold directed advertising based the user's own data to its real users--the advertisers and retailers. FB monetized its user's personal data.
1
Great piece, thank you. What I would like to see on this subject is Zuckerberg take real responsibility. Ducking and hiding is what we have seen from him. This is an extremely important issue and his recent denial of a meeting with parliament in the UK is a clear example. He said he was going to send "his" people instead. Mr. Zuckerberg, yes send your best people and travel to the UK to lead your team to answer the questions being asked. That is what a great leader would do.
8
Thank-you for giving thought to this issue and sharing the pov of Dov. I hope that you and others will keep our democratic values in the forefront as we navigate the future.
4
Thomas, your book, The World is Flat, was the required reading of a leadership seminar that changed my professional trajectory about 10 years ago. That book seemed truly momentous to me and I’ve read your work carefully since then.
This essay now captures much of why Zola’s great novel, Germinal, has been on my mind almost that entire time, too. Zola’s themes and characters help readers, among other things, explore earlier technological, moral and social change.
Your analysis here seems equally momentous — technologies, social change, work lives, and moral leadership are critically important at this time. Please help us understand this better and focus on it more.
Friedman ... for President!
10
Only in America do people expect private industry moguls to be the defenders of justice and morality. Other countries rely on robust regulation, a functioning legal system, and a functioning government to safeguard the public interest...
303
That's because, for better or for worse, only in America you have private industry moguls with such huge, world-changing power...
6
In America our leaders invest in business not people. It's why everything is about fixing things after the damage is done. Why protect people? It cuts into profits. We have always been reactionary to problems. People have to die before changes are implemented. Let's hope the election of the most unqualified man-child ever is a wake up call to fix our tech. sector and quickly before the November elections.
8
As well as a first rate education, which teaches critical thinking skills.
1
It is delightful to call upon the better nature of businesses to save us from our selves. But much of the problems that social networks create happen because of our own irrationality and cognitive laziness. The system we have today looks like it does because we all want things for free so that we don't have to do the hard work of deciding about the value of the things we consume. If we want a better system it won't be from the moral leadership of billionaires but from a collective movement that says what I put in my brain is just as important what I put in my body. Check out oalrus.com for such an approach.
9
The future of the internet in face of fake news, foreign and domestic interference in governance and the like?
It all seems to me clearer by the moment. We seem headed to a combination of Plato's Republic and modern control of political economy, control of currency value, project similar to the Federal Reserve. People commonly speak of information being money today, so now the internet, and entire history of communications culminating in internet, is to be treated as money is treated, which is to say just like currency values get set and controlled, information/truth values will be controlled.
The U.S. is thinking and feeling its truth values, morality, entire concept of reality, is being undermined by fake news, trolls, foreign and domestic interference, as if its money is being devalued, as if the economy is in jeopardy, therefore the entire communications project of the U.S. culminating in internet must be brought under control like entire economy, money, which is to say truth, information, must be kept from debasing, inflating, crashing the system.
It's like Plato's Republic because we have our gold standard philosopher king experts of truth, as well as gold standard running of economy, even though of course the economy doesn't actually stand on gold anymore but trust in currency. But the big question is what happens to truth really when system toward such is treated as money? What happens to poetry, the arts, humanities, philosophy, science, truth itself?
2
This made me think - a lot. I'm going to go away and implement these ideas in my own business.
6
In content management circles, the necessary ingredient is called curation. In about 2008, we tried to have an open comments area, and it was promptly spammed by posters who wanted to promote links to questionable offers. So we established roles and allowed only trusted commentators to post freely. Everyone else had to have their posts reviewed. It was the curation that enabled us to allow public discussion.
8
I commend you for trying, Thom, but ultimately government will have to intervene to protect its citizens from privacy invasion and mass deception. The EU is launching its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR -- https://www.eugdpr.org) in May precisely for that reason. Many people have argued that the freedom to operate without restrictions is a crucial reason why US companies are dominating the world's tech/Internet scene, but now those same tech giants are buying and squashing innovative competitors before they can become a threat we have to question both that logic and its consequences, i.e. (ab)use of their enormous market power.
12
You raise some provocative points that need more discussion .
2
The manipulation of the internet for evil (hacking, trolling, domestic and foreign people manipulating politics/economics, the spread of fake news, etc.) rather than being a force for good, truth, trust, enhancement of society?
I don't believe the internet was ever developed with the naive belief that people are good, will automatically use the technology for good. Rather it appears from the start to have been a communications project military, a political/economic means of control. Sure it has enabled increased communications, but it is also a system which can shut off communications, control society, something of communications in general getting under control like the Federal Reserve can turn on and off money at will. The good times people speak of of early days of internet were little more than turning the "money of communications" on, and now with all the bad actors the powers that be are saying "time to turn the money off, hold it tight, else it will go bad".
Of course level of truth in society, like currency, is only relatively good or bad. So now we must clamp down on the internet lest our truth devalue to level of that found in more controlling states such as Russia and China and Iran and N. Korea. But this doesn't mean our level of truth is particularly good, even if run by experts and political establishment. In fact the experts in America seem quite Manichaean: "We are the good, now let's lop off entire other aspects of reality, in fact the bad half of life".
4
Instead of using vaguely thoughtful swords and concepts, it is healthy to go back to basics.
1 - Profit is king. Facebook deals in private data. Uber deals in getting rid of all driver costs up to the driver have myself.
2 - Past warnings on every tech company behavior go without consequences on their behavior. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, all of them going under the absons denomination "platforms" effectively have built themselves into customer captive monopolies.
3 - All these companies are the culmination of economic ideals : reach the maximum of customers with a minimum of personnel thanks to technology. In practice that means contents published by some platforms are failed to be filtered. The solution are beta like technologies as employing enough people to actually filter content would mean a quotation decline in the markets.
Reading this article is like going back to the first internet bubble, brandishing nice words and concepts that will flatter company executives and allow them to hide the ever-the-same priority in their decisions, to any social cost, and legal ones in this Facebook matter.
8
Tech has a vision for the world. Sadly, that vision derides most of present day society. It's probably like the first time an airliner went down. And what is funny is that society is funding and accelerating their own destruction. How much time and money have you spent the past ten years on Facebook, Apple or Google products? I would argue it's the seventh inning stretch. And this game ain't going extra innings.
4
We have outsmarted ourselves and now we are trying to put the genie back in the bottle. But it’s too late and hiring thousands of hall monitors will give us false assurance.
7
The internet did indeed provide "unprecedented and valuable tools of connection". It was like opening the front door to your home and inviting the world in. No one, of course, would ever do that today. We know better. And we should have known better then too. In the Times today is a story about how the city of Atlanta's computer systems are held hostage by ransomware. It is, I suspect, going to be impossible to defend against these attacks. Maybe it is worth the risk... maybe those who are victimized by harassment, thieves, and oppressive governments will just have to be sacrificed so others can share vacation pics online.
Convenience is very convenient until, you know, it's not.
9
The hullabaloo about Facebook privacy rules is just hot air. Facebook is an open book social site. The more people see what is on it the more the company is seeing its objectives being met. When individuals, businesses or organisations sign up on Facebook, the more the likes, the better. The same happens when posts are made. The only challenge is the data mining and analytics by businesses, political parties and all manner of researchers for profit that need to be addressed with proper legislation to protect abuse by third parties.
2
Profit and Expansion motives - the true ruling goals of capitalism - are antithetical to a morally driven business class. Fighting injustice with corporate dictates costs money. Companies such as Facebook, that are held for profit, would have to take a stand that there are some customers they'd rather not have, affecting their bottom line. It's titled that for a reason - it is the lowest threshold they will not cross.
Perhaps, rather than demanding something from company leaders we ought to know is unattainable, we should be reevaluating our economic motives and incentives.
10
There is one simple solution and that is to return the power to control how one's data is used to the user. In other words, digital platforms should be regulated in such a way that they are required to obtain the consent of the user to store and make use of their personal data. This would include platforms like Netflix which make use of user's viewing choices to fashion their programming. There is in Europe a right to be forgotten, to have one's data removed from digital platforms. There needs to be a right to prevent one's personal data being used for commercial or political purposes. That used to be called privacy, but the concept needs to be sharpened and repurposed for the 'second innings'.
31
The “right to be forgotten” seems so much at odds with American culture, but some of us “old school” types yearn for this return to privacy. Thank you for your wise comments.
2
Yes, in Europe the assumption is that your data belongs to you. In America the assumption is that your data belongs to anyone who takes it. It is legalized theft, as is much that passes for "business" in this country.
Why do so many people in the U.S. assume that being s "business man" is synonymous with lying and fraud? There was a time when a business man had to fiercely guard their reputation for honesty and fairness. Now these bedrocks of a functioning society are considered weaknesses to be avoided.
The Trump revolution is a revolution of liars and thieves who worship liars and thieves. The rest of us must not let them normalize the corruption of all society in the pursuit of profits at any expense.
2
Nothing is without a price. Sometimes the price an innovation demands can be historically transformational. And we are not always wise to simply accept the benefits blindly without very seriously considering the cost. Not so much the sophistication of technology but the rush to it so quickly is just a bad deal.
It will have become a very bad deal indeed for me, who has spent a career involved with technology, when Detroit tells me that there’s insufficient demand for them to continue producing cars that require a human driver, because I’m a control freak and I LIKE to drive, particularly along California’s Coast Hwy, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, on one of their unpredictably crystal-clear and sunny days; or when a government already become altogether too paternalistic tells me that humans behind wheels simply are too unreliable for me to be permitted a license anymore, despite having driven millions of miles on three continents in my life without ever having harmed anyone, over almost 47 years with an unrestricted driver’s license – and approaching my SAFEST driving years (old people hardly ever get into accidents – it’s all the people immediately AROUND them who get into the accidents).
This wouldn’t be an issue if we didn’t cave to the blandishments of transformative technology so FAST. The young are less control-freakish and fewer of them are driving. Someday I’ll die and, frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn if you all become wienies after that.
7
Uber will survive its “second inning”, and in their case, despite so many saying that theirs is a dreadful culture, the solutions really ARE in the technology. But most of Tom’s thoughts today are based on current push-back suffered by Facebook, Twitter and other social interaction engines, which don’t affect me as I don’t use them – too old to need the ego-reinforcement of placing the latest pic of the youngest rug-rat online, too young yet to need them to interact easily with other shut-ins and open up a world again to which my legs no longer provide me access.
And here that push-back, that “second inning”, is driving home the price of a headlong-drive to rush to technology.
However, Seidman describes a business governorship model that NEVER existed … ANYWHERE. And far from advancing in our awareness and the ethical modalities for conducting business, we’re headed backward. I suggest that we can forget depending on managements, as a general rule, to improve in this respect for at least the decades I believe I can see ahead. We need to teach our children to become far savvier consumers of information and users of technology, and that must start before age five; and THAT requires a focus on effective education that we’ve never yet managed on a wholesale basis. To have an effect, we need to do far better.
Perhaps the wisest aphorism ever concocted is “And the wienies shall inherit the Earth”. To avoid that sad outcome, we need to teach our people not to be wienies.
6
Seidman's business governance model does exist on Wendell Berry's farm in Kentucky and in the network of farming communities and related groups he describes in his essays. See my other post on Berry's "Why I am not going to buy a computer" article for a personal governance model, and his other essays and novels on communities that embody its principles.
Richard,
Great post. We are heading backwards on many fronts and to expect business, and God forbid, Mark Zuckerberg, to save us from ourselves is giving up any agency we had to begin with. Long before Facebook, we were already buying everything that was advertised to us without even thinking about what we were giving up to get it.
And wow! Now it's all free - free music, free movies, free information, free psychological profiles. What could possibly go wrong and whose fault would it be if it does?
Given this particular genie is out of the bottle, and the industry is not about to pay anything but lip service to ethical modalities unless they prove their profitability, we all need to man up and take responsibility for the monster we have created. We do that and the kids will be fine. My three grandchildren are in the philosophical stage of life. Why is their favorite word. It's one I've never grown tired of either.
3
I thought it interesting that Elon Musk dropped his Facebook account. Under the Trump administration Net Neutrality is dead. There is even open speculation as to whether the Internet ought to be regulated as a public utility. I suspect that the Cambridge Analytica scandal will continue to cause many to question posting on social media. Our Twitter president doesn't seem to have a clue. The midterms are on the horizon and still no public word from the administration on steps to make hacking of the electoral process unlikely. I fully expect more public discourse whether we rule technology or technology rules us.
11
The role of corporations is to make money. These days, that is viewed as returning the most money to the shareholders.
The role of government is to protect its citizens from costs that are borne by society and not paid by the corporations that impose the costs. In our history, that has included regulations to protect air and water quality, keep our food safe from contamination, keep our banks from destroying people's jobs and causing loss of homes because of the bankers' greed, etc. All of these goals are imperfectly attained, but without government, they would be so much worse.
Now, government must intervene to help save our democracy from Russian trolls, protect children who disappear and end up in web-operated prostitution rings, and decide which other threats to our moral values will not be tolerated.
Laws must be passed to "protect us from the downsides of the technologies they've created." Such laws should only be passed by elected representatives.
3
Either all these companies are controlled by very tight laws (think European style) or they will not protect people. Voluntary controls will not work in the setting of this much money at stake. Power corrupts, and all that....But good that the issues are arising now, before the data capture, facial recognition, and autonomous everything is not already so entrenched. By the way, if you have the right to bear semi-automatic arms outside of the confines of a well-regulated militia, does your robot have that right as your proxy?
8
The first inning was a blast, erasing common sense and creating the illusion we could be "connected" to everything---just virtually, which is no real connection at all. The second inning taught us both 'if it's free, then you're the product' and that psychographic, micro-targeting still leads to trickle-up profits for the big boys---strange how silent Google has become, no? And Zuck will sing his obligatory mea culpas to the Senate committee without the FCC or anyone else doing anything about it. The third inning will see these platforms, further empowered by artificial intelligence, not only eliminate Uber, as well as millions of quantitative-information jobs, such as accounting, banking and investing, but also any remaining vestiges of common sense, history, civics, morality, and responsibility to the environment we depend upon. Not sure this species, after it succinctly and unconsciously clips its umbilical cord to the planet, is going to make it to the fourth inning Tom. And making it to the seventh-inning stretch? Well, that's just a stretch of the imagination Tom, for some things we think we should do we should not do, yet being illusively-connected and "fused" to everything will soon make that careful thinking obsolete (if it hasn't already done so). Haven't you noticed Tom? Civics and morality are now illusions no one has time for. Let's see what's on deck for human regulators, who do not even have a clue as to what kind of heat these algorithmic-giants are throwing.
5
The author could have generalized the title "How capitalists can save us and themselves: With a little bit of ethics." It has not worked. We need to save us and also capitalists from temselves with a lot of legislation. Second inning: it is time to legislate and protect the people.
26
In a short few hundred years or so, when the Sixth Mass Extinction has eliminated the vast majority of humans on the planet, how will the remaining people view technological innovation? If the human population ever rebounds and civil societies are again pursued, I am guessing that most technologies and the pursuit of them will be outlawed. That may sound radical, but I think not. I believe humans will revisit the wisdom on the Amish, Native American and Buddhist belief systems and how perhaps they may be the key to sustained happiness and genuine prosperity.
While I find myself as fascinated as anyone by technology, the vast majority of it is, in fact, either useless or harmful in the big picture of things. Technology that is useful for making lives longer, fuller and richer while not harming the environment are definitely worth pursuing and implementing. But how many such technologies actually exist? A lot of technologies that may fall in that category are actually inventions that correct previous imbalances and problems caused by humans.
In my work life as a business executive, I have seen technology allow far fewer people do the same tasks as before, those tasks being simplified and these people being paid far less, while the inventors of the technology become obscenely wealthy. And as an older white male, technology has done nothing to extend my life expectancy. In fact, the life expectancy in my age group of white males is decreasing, not getting longer.
23
If moral leadership means truly putting people first, what will people replace? What do we put first now, that would have to be dethroned to put people first? Offhand, I would say that it is money. And since money is what is involved in deciding what investments to make, we have no idea how to replace it with anything else, or even demote it from a sufficient criteria to a merely necessary one. Whatever we decide to do, we should do it efficiently, and money is how we measure that. Ideally, it should not measure what we decide to do but only how we decide to do it.
For money to be dethroned, either we must generally agree that it should be dethroned, or those who want it dethroned will have to limit the rights and powers of those who do not want it dethroned.
Facebook should be, or should be replaced by, a nonprofit entity similar to Wikipedia, planned and maintained by people who enjoy doing such things and who are not interested in making themselves or others rich so long as they are reasonably affluent. There are many such people in the world; at present they are kept from most positions of power by those wanting the money game and playing the money game to be the preeminent game.
1
C-3p0:
I have a great idea for a can't-lose investment vehicle: a movie, entitled "The Ultimate Fantasy". People de-emphasizing money is a cornerstone of ALL fantasist future-history offerings in this medium -- something we all agree might be desirable but that NOBODY with perceptions rooted in reality believe can actually happen in a world that bears ANY relationship to the one in which we live and humans have lived since the development of civilization.
To change enough of that world's drivers to enable your vision to be attainable any time soon would require a cataclysmically transformative event, such as aliens landing and asking for a beer to cut the dust of interstellar travel, or a messiah to appear, perform a few miracles and dictate future permissible behavior with the punishment for non-compliance being a long-life compelled to watch chick-flicks.
Back to the drawing-board. There probably is a solution out there somewhere, but de-emphasizing money is a lot more marsupial than it is human.
I use Facebook, but I am always amazed by the personality tests that my friends pass on (along with their scores) to see what movie star I look like or what my age is based on my picture. Invariably, when you click on these tests, you are told that by allowing them to use your profile, they will have access to your contact lists and personal information. I don't take these tests, but am amazed that my otherwise smart friends do. Not only do we need government regulations, we also need to regulate and inform ourselves. Checking the sources is not that hard, when you read something that seems ridiculous, but few people do it, they just pass it along. We are lazy and expecting Facebook or Google to regulate themselves is the equivalent of having the fox guard the henhouse. We need to take responsibility for our own behaviour on social media and be more pro-active in checking the validity of stories crossing our feeds. It is pretty easy to identify fake news, start with the spelling and grammar or look it up on Snopes, but we have a victim mentality. This feeds perfectly into those people who self-identify as victims, for those who are disaffected this reinforces their beliefs. It will take efforts by all, the government, the Mark Zuckerburgs and the users who can choose not to click! Please don't share your faerie name with me.
7
Having spent a large part of my life on a farm: I loved your comment about asking the FOX to guard the HENHOUSE. You hit the nail directly on the head. Expecting Mr. Zuckerberg to come up with the solutions in this matter is asking the FOX to guard the HENHOUSE.
1
Why do we think we're fighting over gun control and the second amendment. Same holds true for the first amendment and that we are stretching the limits of the first amendment with social media. The same as we are adding fuel to the fire in new weaponry available on demand. We are limiting ourselves at the same time with how to use technology the same as by not having universal health care. This is the United States and now we are fighting over the 2020 U.S. Census and the 1950 Census has not even been available yet to download!
Mr. Friedman has stars--or dollar signs--in his eyes. The "technological revolution" has been somewhat helpful for a few fields, mostly science & research. For the world in general, it's been a way for the Silicon Valley oligarchs to turn our lives into their money machine. True communication is becoming a thing of the past, replaced by "connection," which is something we all do in isolation, with our overlords monitoring every word and click. Knowledge is irrelevant now, replaced by "information," which means any lie that sells. The entire infrastructure of the economy and civilization has been dismantled and digitized for no purposes but surveillance, control, and profit. Yes, the technology could be wonderful if it were made for all of us, but it's being designed solely for the power of the few over the many.
14
These are the people with whom Friedman associates, at whose feet he sits and wisdom transcribes. If you don't have a corner office, you don't count in his universe. And he stubbornly persists in seeing a meritocracy at work, when it is mostly privilege and rapaciousness; he's a social Darwinist through and through. It is no coincidence that the caste he celebrates are also the main purchasers of his books, where they get to see themselves depicted as angels and prophets.
1
And that is the bottom line....morality and ethics. Almost all technological, medical, and scientific advancements and discoveries are dependent on the human dilemma between intended use or abuse and exploitation. In and of themselves they are inherently passive. It takes human hands and intentions to serve a purpose. Will it be for the good of the community or for an individual's ambitions for power, control, and/or money?
I can not speak for Mr Zuckerberg. I do believe he started out sincerely and idealistically. But money is addicting and corrupting. We need look no further than the White House for its ugly results. But I think Mark Z does have a conscience and may just learn the hard way the importance of moral leadership. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed and sunk by its own weight in Trump's case.
5
Mark Zuckerberg and his organization is a threat to democracy. If just a few years ago somebody proposed to have a unique platform capable of reaching 2,000,000,000 people, and hosting most of those people's chatter but in addition almost everything one can think of (clubs, groups, news channels, organizations, nonprofit and commercial enterprises), one would have not thought it possible.
But now we have it: it reaches 2,000,000,000, it has zero oversight on its activity, it to make things worse it is run by a libertarians who do not care one bit about democracy.
It is the closest to a 1984 scenario we have got so far. There is nothing to save, it needs to be taken down. And it is very easy to do so: stop logging into it.
65
The fact that many of our college educated, best and brightest, are wasting their expertise on designing yet another app is not too encouraging for our future.
117
Not sure these are our best and brightest - just the wealthiest. In my opinion, big finance, in all of its iterations- banks, hedge fund, investment bankers, equity managers, lending and credit card industry also hire “the brightest” and have created the venality and irresponsibility that undos the tech industry. Tech companies, ever seeking IPOs, are businesses driven and directed by the underwriters.
1
This reminds me of the Gulf oil spill. It could easily be fixed, the technology is present, but it would cut into the wicked high profit. Shame on Zuckerberg for selling us out and giving an assist to getting awful people elected.
10
I'm wary of over-regulation of speech. Swap out Putin and Russia with DACA and Mexico. There's no substantive difference between the two: foreign influence of our political system. I don't think we should go there. Transparency should be the goal here.
Plutocrats and politicians conspiring to adjudicate moral leadership, truth, and trust in service of humanity has a dark history. Let's not let Russia scare us into acting more like, well, the Soviet Union.
1
DACA = Putin? Mexico = Russia? No, can't let that stand unrefuted. You're equating many hundreds of thousands of innocent, decent people with a murderous autocrat, and a relatively poor country with almost no history of aggression outside it's borders with one that has a dangerous national inferiority complex and has dreamed of conquering the West since Ivan, at least, and a long record of unprovoked assaults on sovereign nations. Please think again, Stephen.
@Dr. GV:
An entire country has "a dangerous national inferiority complex," and has "dreamed of conquering the West?"
Thank you for proving yet again that there is one form of ethno-racial bigotry that will never go out of style, or cause anyone to hesitate, or blush. The ironic part is that you say this when calling someone else to account.
(By the way, which Ivan?)
1
DACA = Russians organizing to influence US policy through candidate advocacy and meida propaganda.
Russia = Mexico with state interest in said policy outcomes (continuing foreign remittances from US, etc)
One step further. . . .US persons representing DACA could be charged as unregistered foreign agents. . . .like Paul Manafort
The principle is the same. One group is simply more popular/sympathetic.
Sadly, Friedman doesn't get it. He says, "To be sure, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube should all be commended for trying to find engineering solutions to prevent them from being hacked and weaponized."
What Friedman doesn't understand should be obvious by now to anyone without a vested interest in self-delusion. The business model of Facebook entirely depends on selling your information. Period. If they cannot sell you, they do not exist. More fundamentally, however, what he doesn't get is that the internet cannot be made secure from "being hacked and weaponized." While he rightly understands the basic issue is one of values, Friedman is not willing to accept the fact that, when it comes to technology (and many other things), the bad guys are as smart as the good guys and, arguably, more motivated. How is it, does he think, that drugs make it up and guns make it down through our southern border?
Friedman also writes, "At the height of the Cold War, when the world was threatened by spreading Communism and rising walls, President John F. Kennedy vowed to 'pay any price and bear any burden' to ensure the success of liberty." Is Friedman prepared to give up his internet-enabled cell phone and 500-channel TV to "ensure the success of liberty", for that is what it would take to even begin the necessary conversation on values and ethics, an environment where we no longer would be able 24/7 to immerse ourselves in nothing but reinforcement of what we already believe and think.
63
To what end all this connectivity? What have we gained? Nationalism, xenophobia and bigotry on the rise all over the world, inequality rising even in the richest countries, the poor without any prospects of climbing out of dire poverty. And are we more happy? I think not. Fixing Facebook won’t fix this. I am reminded of a poem by William Wordsworth - “ The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; little we see in nature that is ours; we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” That was written in 1802. Where do we stand now?
14
In 2005 I cautioned a giddy group of technocrats at a large data storage firm to beware the unreal world. In their zeal to develop "smart data" objects they were blythely creating "technology" and "tools" that clearly had at least as much potential for abuse and tools of oppression as for any good they may serve. They didn't heed my warning, of course, and went on to enable much of what we are experiencing today.
Knowing a fair bit of physics, computing, and analytics, my concerns have only increased since then, and are amplified by the increasingly frequent assaults on law reason, the distorting of facts and devaluing of truth, and our seemingly inexorable fall into utter degeneracy of commercialism such that we only matter as consumers to each other.
Have you noticed what is common to all these threats? Our vanity and insatiable appetites for immediate gratification and celebrity blind us to the danger. We are not so smart as we pretend, and far shallower and more self absorbed than we'll admit. Dazzled by big bucks, perks and TED talks, good and talented but naive techies reduce us to bits and package us in analytical charts, and so diligently craft the chains - link by link, yard by yard- that ARE being used to bind us. We must awake from our collective "look at me" fugue and act accordingly. Remedy begins with THINKING, not emoting, and we shouldn't need IBM to remind us to, nor an app for that.
6
Asking Facebook to save us is like asking Donald Trump to switch over to moral leadership. It ain't gonna happen! Facebook, like the other Tech monoliths, is driven by one overarching motive: money. The rest - bringing people together, fostering community, making shopping as easy as breathing, searching for info faster than the time it takes to blink - are secondary, meant to lull an already docile population into digital submission. And while we may be awed by the so-called geniuses who design software fused with artificial intelligence to take over all aspects of our lives, let's stop overestimating these workers. Detached from any ethical consideration, the products they design will ultimately fail us in the most disastrous way possible. They are building not an utopia but a dystopia devoid of meaning, purpose and value, the kind articulated by Aldous Huxley in his novel 'Brave New World' in 1932.
67
I am not on Facebook, have never been on Facebook, and have no plans to ever be on Facebook. What have I missed? Nothing.
I am not what one would call an "early adopter" of technology; rather, I suppose, a wary adopter. There is much that the advent of computers and the internet and social media has brought to our lives in a positive way, but there is also much that is less than positive -- downright negative, in fact. In addition to the problems of identity theft, trolling, cyber-bullying, hacking of various sorts, etc. etc. we even have the latest news that Facebook's data was mined to possibly have steered the presidential election in Donald Trump's direction. While I'm not willing to go all in and say that Cambridge Analytica's work here had the outcome of this president sitting in office, I am willing to say it could have easily played a role.
Facebook? No thanks.
19
The problem is that Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg will probably never fix the Facebook business model, unless the government demands it and I won't be holding my breath waiting for this corrupt and evil Republican led bunch to do anything but ignore the problem. Fake news and foreign influenced elections helps them win.
Boston College has spent a generation studying the super rich and no surprise to me, many spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about how much more wealth they could build before they died. For some, it was never enough. It didn't matter if they were born to wealth or were self-made, the need for greater wealth was seldom absent. I wouldn't be surprised if that bug has already bitten Zuckerberg and Sandberg.
They'll make promises they can't or won't keep and continue raking in the dough. If it threatens our democracy and liberty, so what. Asking them to "pay any price and bear any burden" to protect us is useless. There's no money in that.
I hope they'll surprise me and do the right thing. I would gladly take back my words but I have the lowest expectation that will happen. Our Brave New World seems to have already gone mainstream.
159
Zuckerberg and Sandberg seemed like automatons when they were interviewed this past week. Speaking the same gibberish, the non-committals, the fake sorries, and the weasel words that showed no true empathy for their users. They've been captured by the lure of unlimited wealth and are lost. To think they can change is wishful thinking.
67
Today Facebook offered several pictures as my 'winter memories: in two I was on the river in a short-sleeved shirt, two others were of blooming flowers. Wrong again, Facebook. The ad I see most frequently is for Jaguar. Obviously Facebook doesn't know my car taste or actual finances.
My Facebook behavior includes: never participating in a personal quiz; limited personal photographs; not following something needing multiple clicks; and not liking stories I don't know the source. I follow friends, enjoy some music, try recipes, and totally appreciated the coverage on March for Our Lives.
I've never been under the illusion that Facebook had only good intentions for its users: User beware...
27
You're doing a fine job, then. Believe me, if you handed over all your personal information and went click-crazy, they'd know exactly what car you like and can afford. You are keeping them guessing--good for you!
I try to review my privacy settings every so often. It takes a while to get through them all. I've been doing that since the early days, when Facebook would reset them every time they updated their programming.
Facebook was free, so there had to be a catch. Getting something for nothing is anti-American.
3
One can tell the story of the last 20 years as a series of Friedman's predictions gone wrong. Free trade begat the trade agreement with China that recent studies tell us administered an unanticipated employment shock in the Midwest. Celebrations about the ability of people to trade stocks on chairlifts seem ironic in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis. And of course there is Iraq, and Libya and....
But how, given Friedman's previous prayers to the gods in Silicon Valley, can we describe the latest of his predictions gone awry. The march of freedom was, when coupled with the genius of Silicon Valley, supposed to be unstoppable. Instead, social networks have given dictators influence in American politics in ways that would have been unimaginable.
Et tu, Mark? Et tu?
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Mr. Friedman's "virtually free" is simply wrong. In order to use Facebook, Google (YouTube), et al., we must agree to turn over our personal data. Millions upon millions of personal data points.
Facebook said Russian interference was fake news. That was a lie. The Trump campaign stole and used the data for 50 million users. Facebook said and did nothing. Facebook has just fired the only executive who was a consistent advocate for transparency.
If "values," "courage," and "leadership" are what is needed to take us safely through the storm, then we are in trouble. Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook have not demonstrated any of those. And we know what kind of man Mr. Trump is.
Their business model is the problem. Citizens are the product not the customer. Bad actors coopt the algorithms and market power of these natural monopolies which are among the most powerful companies in the world.
We cannot get through this without proper and reasonable government regulation. Without regulation, the financial cost will prevent Facebook, Google, et al. from ever behaving morally, ethically, and responsibly.
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Jumping on the train to follow the latest pied piper has blinded far too many people to the simple fact that humans are still humans. They've been enabling predation since history began. It's time to stop being so dam' gullible.
Following the latest rumor mill, believing conspiracy theories, and condemning hardworking public servants and people on the front lines who have to be pragmatic is still dividing good people from each other.
Zuckerberg is not a saint. Billionaires have too much power. Free isn't free. We are all suckers for stuff about ourselves, and too ready to click on personality tests and offers for self-improvement.
Instead of hoping the powerful will turn a new leaf, no matter how youthful or intelligent or clever, how about we all take more walks, look at each other instead of our computers and phones, and wake up.
If there are heroes today, it's the group that have coalesced around #neveragain and #metoo, not some disrupter who's figured out how to sell you to advertisers or cornered the market or replaced jobs with benefits with a gig economy.
Too many of the benefits of society are being taken away from the many and given to the few.
We don't need wars, we need peace. We don't need more machines capable of killing more people at a distance, we need to value life, everyone's life.
If you were taken in by the first inning, you are too gullible.
We have only one planet. Looting and exploiting it, while ignoring its limitations, is seriously dangerous.
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To borrow a word from the techie culture, "Awesome"!
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You're awesome yourself. Keep of the great work, pleased to meet you! (Others might like to look up Dr. Villaume's work: "Garrick cherishes Minnesota's natural beauty and rich, innovative culture. His work is devoted to developing new technology and products that protect what nature has to offer. Implementing new biological systems allows all of us to live a more sustainable life. ")
Yes, it is the second inning. And, just like in baseball games, the users are sitting in the stands with absolutely no control over how the game is being played. Zuckerberg is the player, the coach, the umpire and the owner.
If we don't like the game, our only recourse is not show up at the park. Drop Facebook and you'll discover how great life can be. Go for a walk. Read a book. Volunteer. Actually write a letter. In other words, "unfriend" Facebook.
Who knows what might happen if you have one less tech problem to aggravate your day?!
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As long as profit is at the root of the technology nothing will change. Facebook's entire business is built around mining, aggregating, analyzing and selling the data they've taken, plus or minus dense EULA's, in broad daylight. Without the ability to sell their users data Facebook, Twitter, ad infinitum would lose the bulk of their revenue stream and be gone in less than two years. It's a beautiful dream, Mr. Friedman, a world where big C capitalists give up profits for morals. But, sadly, it's not the one we live in.
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If we were truly capitalists, would not the individual consumer be the center of all rights in enterprise? Why do we not own our data by default? Why is the consumer subject to the whim and will of the corporation? I submit capitalism has been subverted, in that the atoms of the system - individual people of any and all kind - have been bound by forces that are decidedly acapitalistic. If we corrected that with an economic constitution that mirrored our political governance version, much of what we bemoan about "capitalism" would vanish.
If I may borrow a word that's getting lots of exposure lately, we are "complicit" in this affront to our senses. Sure, we didn't understand the extent to which Facebook data were being collected, sold, analyzed and used to sway our opinions. But we (well, not me personally) were the ones who believed so much of the nonsense that flooded our pages and inundated our gullible minds.
Some portion of the blame might be assigned to an education system that focuses on testing, rather than critical thinking and healthy skepticism. The rest of it is a need to feed our own airtight ideology with information that doesn't challenge our version of the secular gospel.
The clues were everywhere -- misspelled memes, outlandish claims, quotes attributed to people who never said such a thing -- but we liked and shared and sharpened our snark instead of our syntax.
Mark Zuckerberg has apologized, but will we now apologize to each other?
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Right.
The world needs to "pause". Globalization. Artificial Intelligence. Wall Street. Silicon Valley. Shenzhen. Brussels. Everybody take a "time out" so we can figure this Digital Revolution thing that was supposed to have "made the world a better place" by now out.
Let's all huddle and ideate this thing. When we're done, we'll just hit the "Play" button to resume. And we'll all elevate. Together. As one. And then the world will, in fact, be a better place. But it doesn't sound like capitalism is going to come out the other side.
Why didn't I think of that?
If the first inning was so amazing, why's the world on the edge of an abyss?
Is the ability to call a taxi with one touch and to rent an igloo worth the collapse of western liberal democracy?
The decade of the 2020's will either be the best in the history of humanity, or the worst. That, without any exaggeration, is what's at stake here.
The "second inning" has inflicted extraordinary reputational damage on emerging technologies like Big Data and AI that have the potential to solve the monumental problems caused by the past 38 years of recklessness, and to advance the cause of humanity beyond anything we've seen before in history.
So because of Silicon Valley’s irresponsibility in the "second inning", the odds have tilted strongly towards a disastrous 2020’s. All in order to sell more ads.
Unconscionable.
Silicon Valley needs to execute the most important "pivot" in history, if we're to avoid a cataclysm.
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I'm afraid that "making the world a better place," and "not being evil," were never anything but silly advertising slogans. There will be no pivoting in Silicon Valley, because, from their point of view, there have been no mistakes.
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Zuckerberg could change the world if he wanted to, by featuring climate truths that our media ignore. That stance would be strengthened by refusing ads from companies like Peabody Coal, Georgia Pacific, and other carbon polluters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMQ3iSQIu2Y&feature=youtu.be
He would reclaim his reputation- and his business model. Instead of being viewed by history as a greedy pariah, he could be the savior we have all been waiting for.
We'll soon find out if Facebook is driven by greed and a $100 billion valuation or what Mark has claimed in the past: global connectivity, quality information, and a future that might be salvageable after all.
It's on you, Mark. Maybe you can join us for a major climate event at Lawrence Livermore on Thursday, to be attended by lead IPCC authors. That would be much better than spinning your wheels in front of government committees and self righteous media hacks.
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Saviour?????!!!!
There is no saviour coming for us.
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Don't hold your breath!
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Yes, there are no saviors.
We all need to work together to save ourselves.
Pretty much everyone who tries to sell themselves as a savior is really a thief.
Notice that Trump sold himself as a savior. According to Trump, is was all about him and his abilities.
Notice that Bernie made it all about the People. He says we have to work together and calls it our revolution.
There is more to democracy and governance than voting for some "savior" to make everything better.
We each have a responsibility to be informed and to hold our representatives accountable for creating good policy. Voting is important, but all of you that think your civic responsibility begins and ends at the voting booth, and that activism is a waste of time, are waiting for a savior who will never come.
Wow . . . Tom, This is a doozy !
What does moral leadership look like here?
Dov Seidman has is spot on with is vision of this rapid free-fall into the second inning of the technology game.
Reading this piece transported me from the near-coma I and many have fallen into from just peeking at the daily news cycles.
The juxtaposition of what really needs to be done and what is happening in our White House is absolutely terrifying.
Zuckerberg, when first asked about testifying - kinda side-stepped the issue a bit by suggesting; "the best person should testify" - insinuating maybe one of his top technical experts could handle the questioning better -
No Zuck - YOUR'RE the Face of Facebook YOU should, without the hesitation your already displayed are the exact person we need to hear from.
It seems like the road from the depths we are now in, up to the heights of true moral leadership seems to be an almost impossible journey.
Can we, not only as a country, but as a global society, rise above our petty smallness which has engulfed our planet?
Is Seidman's road map achievable or just a hopeful dream ?
History seems to teach us that mankind does have the ability to rise - but it seems that this occurs in our darkest hours of some great peril.
After the attack on 9'11 - The entire world took pause and came together.
People were compassionate - generous - and friendly . . . . "for a while" and then things went back to "petty".
Who will lead us !
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Vladimir Putin said of artificial intelligence, "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” How terrifying it is that information technology is being weaponized to the detriment of democracy, and of mankind. The greatest leaders, in the US and abroad, do not hesitate to manipulate the populous to achieve their greedy agendas, and to harness technology to turn truth on its head. We cannot recognize the puppeteers, much less defend against them. Friedman's "second inning" may be the start of the AI apocolypse. Countering it will be a difficult struggle, and one we might just lose.
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Mark Zuckerberg won't be saving anything or anyone because he has no moral compass, no ethics and appears to be a total deer in the headlights of 'The Internet Research Agency', Kremlinbots and professional right-wing propagandists who know exactly how to organ-harvest human brains and eat democracy for breakfast.
What might save us is good government regulation and oversight.
It's fine if a certain portion of the population enjoys being systematically fed fake news, conspiracy theories and a wholesome diet of fear, loathing and disinformation, but raw untreated sewage deserves a few public street signs that gently warn drivers and pedestrians that they're being submerged in a Trump Toilet or an FSB advertising and coup t'tat campaign.
A few gently placed general Surgeon General WARNINGS on fake news purveyors would be a good start.
A better solution might simply be for people who respect democracy and America to delete their Facebook accounts and to pledge to NEVER AGAIN let one company gain such an unhealthy level of control and influence over human minds.
Democracy seemed to work pretty well without Facebook, as I recall.
Just flush your Facebook down the Trump Toilet where it belongs and be done with it.
Freedom from Facebook never felt so good.
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Socrates, love your writing - thanks.
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What about the same warning for other corporate behemoths, the big Five or is it Seven, or Nine....loosing count...but number one is Amazon on my list.
3
Been there, done that (deleted FB)
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The baseball analogies or metaphors abound here. I'd like to know who's on first and who is the umpire. The guy on first should have been called out because he cheated his way there. Trump shouldn't be president and Zuckerberg should not be left to get away with making billions while his users are manipulated, sold off and deceived. Time for some adults to step up to the plate and REGULATE. TV and radio went through growing pains. Broadcast frequencies required licenses. So too should broad band internet networks. Those licenses need specific operating parameters. We are far from there yet. Too many bad pitches and stolen bases. Time for more referees. Come on congress. It's your turn at bat.
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Yes, the internet should be invested in and regulated like a public utility.
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@East End.
Congress may be "at bat," but it is not stepping plate. Instead, it is spread-eagled upside down in the dugout, with its head in the water boy's dirty water bucket, flailing around trying to steal popcorn and chewing tobacco from the players on the bench. Time for a new line-up.
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It does not appear that Mr. Zuckerberg has any intention of doing the right thing by changing the business model of Facebook. Turning it into a paid service or a Wikipedia-style non-profit could end the privacy dystopia we've stumbled into, but too much money is being made for a bold solution to come from the top voluntarily.
Broad government regulation is needed to reign in the excesses of Silicon Valley. Until that happens, the good news is that FB is not necessary for a happy and productive life. Just delete it.
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In this instance at least, I don't see why Mr. Friedman considers his mentor such an oracle? He's just stating the obvious, without acknowledging that the real obstacle is the enormous amount of money these companies make and the influence it buys them. Is it any coincidence that Europe, which does not enjoy the blessings of Citizens United, is always in the forefront on these issues, while our reps drag their feet, even on events as egregious as Equifax? Tech giants now are the largest lobbyists in Washington, so when the hearings arrive, look for a lot of faux outrage, a lot of faux contrition (Zuckerberg's specialty) - and absolutely no change.
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@stan continople - I agree that Seidman is just stating the obvious. Not only that, his comments have been expressed by others during the recent discussions of Zuckerberg's greed for profit.
I think social media need regulation. It's not enough to treat them as corporations that will voluntarily police themselves.
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Seidman is simply providing the ethical principles that the tech oligarchs would be willing to buy. At best, it's about helping them imagine that they might be capable of doing anything at all for any reason other than their own profit.
3
The news new is that Friedman is leaking to the obvious, instead of claiming that free markets are the solution to every problem.
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Here is the third inning. The only way to secure our data and prevent our minds from being hacked by trolls and bots is to change the business model of social networking. Instead of collecting our data and selling it, completely ban the practice entirely. Instead, charge customers a small fee, like two or three dollars a month. I don't Facebook. I New York Times. However, I can see the benefits of connecting with a few relatives scattered around the country. In its current configuration, I want no part of Facebook.
But, if a patron valued true privacy and security and wanted to get rid of the commercials (like streaming TV does), I for one would be willing to part with a couple of bucks a month for the service.
Why not set up a parallel fee for service Facebook and see how the public responds? So long as Facebook makes money selling your data, customers can never be certain of data security.
What's the point of connecting the world if doing so turns humanity into slaves of propaganda? Everything cost money. There is no free lunch. Look what the Facebook freebie cost us.
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Right on! But what about all the other internet companies that mine our data? It's not just Facebook; it's Amazon, Google, Apple, LinkedIn and every retailer that has been forced to establish an on-line presence to survive. Even the NYT follows my clicks through ads interspersed between the paragraphs of op-eds decrying the excesses of Facebook. And if I'm interested in an ad, a click often takes me to a pop-up that asks for my personal data before allowing me to see it.
I for one would be willing to pay for subscriptions to sites, as well as a couple of dollars more for on-line purchases if I could be sure my data would neither be shared nor collected. Filling out my credit card number every time I buy an item on line is another little time-consuming delay I'd be willing to endure..
8
You can ban it but you will never know if they comply. Way to easy for them to figure out a means to do exactly what they want to. It is their business model.
8
Absolutely....to mail a letter you pay for a stamp,to make a phone call you have to pay for phone services and to “Facebook” you should have the option to subscribe with a guarantee that your privacy will not be monetized.
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Tomas Friedman:
Zuckerberg is a money-grubbing narcissist. I wouldn’t count on him to save anyone but himself.
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