What is Congress doing to punish Zuckerberg for his blatant lies and incompetence? Bupkis. So where are our Representatives going to start representing US not moguls? Don't hold your breath.
DD
Manhattan
5
It is a good thing Zuck did not take those humanities courses the author suggested. He is socialist enough as he is. Can you imagine him with the Marxist patina more Harvard humanities courses would have burnished on his psych.
2
Frankly FB and Whatsapp (owned by FB) are doing more harm than good. India is the perfect example where minorities live in fear thanks to lynching and hate spread by Whatsapp. Before this it was Myanmar and the Sri Lanka. Gosh, "I did not expect it" does not carry weight with any sensible person. Time to kill this genie before it further devours the world. FB and Whatsapp cannot be tamed or put back into the battle. Sorry Mark, you have not changed the world but you have certainly destroyed it with your immaturity, arrogance and lack of accountability.
14
Mark Zuckerberg is a lot like Monica Lewinsky, in that a relatively normal and benign person, somehow gets elevated and swept away by forces beyond their control.
Now everyone is waiting for Mr Zuckerberg to dream up all the brilliant answers to the now glaringly obvious questions he never asked, and still doesn't grasp. How should he know?
If you want to know why Facebook stock dropped recently, its the patina of confidence showing its first cracks. The myth of infallibility has been broken. Same reason Elon Musk will have more trouble floating further debt for his outer space adventures.
Its the same reason why no one ever got to see the Emperor of Japan. 'Living Gods' don't do press junkets. (and don't even think of insulting their dog!)
Mark Zuckerberg I'm sure is a fine person; neither hell bent on doing evil, nor out to save the world.
Why do we so need to aggrandize mere mortals beyond their earthly station?
7
No matter what he does, someone will snivel about it. About their rights to post anything they want.
It's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. What do you want him to do?
2
Someone in my family started a Facebook page years ago to honor our mother when she died ten years ago, and as a way for our large extended family to stay in touch over her memories. Since then the account got hijacked and people have gotten ‘friend requests’ from my dead mother. I find it a vile waste of time and purpose which benefits no one but Mr. Zuckerberg.
15
Kara want’s to believe Zuckerberg will get there, but like most of us, has nagging doubts. Unlike Kara, my view is that Zuckerberg is blinded not just by naïveté but by the thrill of making money as a measure of success.
And there is this: the whole business of Facebook depends upon computerization so zillions of decisions can be done in nanoseconds and very cheaply. Unlike slow expensive human judgments. That model is not especially good at nuance and fast-footed shifts in spreading disinformation and ill will.
It may be that Facebook is INHERENTLY unworkable as a means of communication stripped of fake “news”, slander, disinformation, and bile. Do we have to wait for Congress and Zuckerberg to figure that out?? And to do something?? Maybe Facebook should be denied the ability to spread news or use advertising? Just a subscription service to assist exchanges between actual real people who want to communicate?? Not proselytize to the world at large?
10
Has it occurred to anyone that Facebook should close and clean house?
7
Oh please. The era of ostensibly "neutral" media platforms was very recent, modern and short lived. And depended entirely on the supposed benevolent obscenely concentrated ownership of the media platforms by a few hero-worshipped "moguls" like the Sulzberger and Grahame families, and Bill Paley and Ted Turner. But that was nonsense -- witness how nefarious the whole setup suddenly seemed (at least, to the snowflakes) when Rupert Murdoch stepped in? Digital media has simply reverted us to the historical norm of huge amounts of extremely partisan noise, disguised as news and entertainment. And on many levels, its healthier. More distracting and confusing and louder, yes. But more open and obviously partisan and interactive and (gasp) democratic, also yes. As for the RUSSIANS, well, I, for one, am shocked! shocked! that foreign adversaries are engaged in disinformation campaigns targeting the USA! Why, why, that's so aggressive! And uncool! Sheesh. Its welcome to see the Left suddenly remember it's a hostile world and our democracy is fragile and vulnerable, and I welcome it. But just because the Soviet Union was an evil empire doesn't mean McCarthyism was OK. Chill out, people.
2
Might a review and comparison of the latest legal Incorporation Documents for ALPHABET, Inc.'s Google, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative LLC non-profit, Laurena Powell Jobs Emerson Collective, and others give insights into the extreme complexity, technical legalities, and financial accountability of these specialized mega companies?
1
In my book, Facebook needs to scrub events and pages off its platform. Period.
If it is truly a social networking platform for family and friends, then get rid of the pages and events.
Keep it simple - photos, posts, notes.
I left FB after this Cambridge Analytica scandal as I saw clearly that I had been played by the Russian disinformation campaign. I fell for it. I remember thinking at the time it felt like people had gone mad (crazy). Now I see it was the Russians and their US duped surrogates creating the dystopia.
No more Facebook or Twitter for me.
4
You have perfectly clarified the difference between the engineer's mentality and that of most others.
The engineer's focus is on fixing the problem, not on feeling guilty about it.
The bit I don't get is why you think this is a bad thing. What would anyone gain from hearing that Mark Zuckerburg felt bad about something?
I'd much rather learn that he's working to address it. Surely we already have enough "sincere apologies and regrets" in all the other news - at least let the engineers cut the nonsense and just focus on what they're good at, which is fixing problems.
1
Please NYT! I am so tired of reading about Facebook. Give it a break.
As someone who took up tech later in life I was went through a phase where I was watching videos from the Computer Museum library of interviews with well-known computer scientists and others who are now 60+ years old. What struck me about their interviews was HOW MUCH MORE INTERESTING THEY ARE AS HUMAN BEINGS than the generation associated with Zuckerberg. The older generation had a level of intellectual curiosity and had lived through the 60s. I am a few years older than Zuckerberg.
That's when something clicked. I realized Zuckerberg and co. belong to the generation that was "raised" and brainwashed by the sociopathic libertarian far-right ideology espoused by Peter Thiel (Facebook's first investor), Keith "die of aids faggot" Rabois and David "date rape is fine" Sacks, of the so-called "PayPal Mafia" that is powerful in Silicon Valley . The "PayPal Mafia" normalized far-right sociopathy as something acceptable, while conquering and thereby intellectually colonizing the tech world. With the exception of Max Levchin and Jeremy Stoppelman who have carved thoughts of their own. Younger kids like Zuckerberg and the Stripe founders follow with zero critical distance ( Patrick Collinson, the CEO frequently praises Charles Koch at public events).
Once I understood this, I realized that Facebook is reaping exactly what is has sowed. Facebook demonstrates the same contempt for users that libertarians show for the "little people" whose habits they are happy to profit from.
3
Swisher speaks of “weaponization”. Perhaps some perspective is necessary regarding “weaponization”.
Way back in June 1995 the following piece appeared in the Harvard Business Review:
“Why the News Is Not the Truth”
https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth
The unfortunate truth is that the Mainstream Corporate Media has been “weaponized” for decades.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have threatened their dominance, so the new narrative is:
“Join Us”…………….or we will silence you.
1
The simple answer to any delusional belief emanating from Facebookers is: Did you learn this on FaceBook? Yes? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
1
Leave facebook today
3
Backstage crew--missed it the first time? Once again:
Give me a break. It wasn't an issue with the Obama administration till Hillary crashed like an overdosed racehorse at the finish line.
Point of fact: NYT "weaponized" newsprint long ago, now digital too. Swisher's self-serving lecturing and ad nauseam finger-wagging--QED
3
The supposed wunderkinds of artificial intelligence fall pretty to their own shortsightedness. Natural stupidity prevails!
1
NYT, please get Kara to write a regular (at least a weekly oped) column for your paper on the workings and consequences of social media since it is having such a deep impact on people’s lives and society at large. If Kara doesn’t want to do it for whatever reason, have her recommend some candidates for the same.
NYT also needs to have an economist write a regular column about the economics underlying the business models of social media. Given the unchanging goal of ‘profit maximization’ but constantly changing tactics of social media to achieve this goal, NYT needs to shine a light on the economic motives behind such tactical moves. This reputable news organization owes it to its readers and society at large. Please!
4
Kara, see what happens when you drop your idolarty? Almost actual journalism, not puff pieces reeking of product/service placement gained while elbow rubbing at some SOCAL resort. Facebook's product is us - and the business model is so simple as to even avoid your now heightened scrutiny. Engage us, pull from us, then sell us to those that want us...
I wonder, where is COO Sandberg in all this? She hides behind the, "we're a platform" defense when it's convenient, but flaunts FB's ability to provide targeted media like any other news outlet when selling to those who will pay. So much for adult supervision (as she was once touted to bring to Zuckerberg).
Dispatch their EULA and just delete.
I really wish the word "weapon" hadn't been weaponized.
2
I think you are too easy on Mr Z. First, you don’t need a college degree to understand human weakness and depravity. In fact, you can graduate from college with few life skills. Secondly, any bar mitzvah boy has a good understanding of the Holocaust and the human depravity behind it. His comments about Holocaust deniers lost him any sympathy I might have had for him. He is a spoiled, self centered brat and his creation reflects him. We owe it to ourselves to not buy into the dark side of FB, and we need to insist that FB become a responsible platform or leave it.
2
See NYT article “Facebook Faces Tough Questions in Britain That It Avoided in the U.S.”
Says Zuckerberg escaped tough questioning by congress….US lawmakers weren’t well versed about how the social network functions.
“If American politicians have been lampooned for being Luddites, the British Parliament’s Committee has a reputation for thoroughness and detailed questioning.”
And says this shows the different approaches taken on both sides of the Atlantic toward oversight of personal data and social media giants. EU countries are more aggressive than the US in regulating social media companies with tighter rules to protect consumer privacy.
Brits wanted to know if FB misinformation influenced the Brexit vote.
NPR---- 'Are You Telling The Truth?' “European Parliament Questions Mark Zuckerberg”
1
Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is "just a platform" has always struck me as disingenuous. If you're selling ads and attracting readers, you're a publisher -- with all of the responsibilities and required ethics of publishing, like vetting your advertisers and controlling your subscriber list (in his case, his users).
I worked in publishing for 25 years, and I always laughed when he said, "Oh, we're just the platform for people to communicate." No, you're a publisher, and welcome to the world of publishing. We have a code of ethics here.
6
Remember that Barack Obama made Facebook into an internationally renowned tool for politics when he harnessed it and its data to sweep into White House in 2008. He then took the first steps of weaponizing Facebook by using its data for advanced analytics, His campaign boasted about it all and was proud of being ahead of the wave.
Now Democrats have learned that when you invent a new political weapon it can cut both ways.
3
The problems are not Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. It's the fact that many of the people who use them are too stupid to distinguish truth from propaganda. The author is right about at least one thing: they are weapons and are being used as such.
1
Silly piece. Facebook and media of that kind permit humans to do what they would do even if these media did not exist. If people are going to be propagandized they will be no matter what.
1
Hubris. Callow. Arrogant. All words that come to mind when I think of the "leaders" of Silicon Valley and Zuckerberg particularly.
Did these guys even get an education outside of sitting behind a screen writing code? I bet few even attended a Civics course in high school.
It's as if they have no knowledge of historical context which includes the strength as well as the fragility of our democracy or even the basic responsibilities of being a citizen.
1
Well it appears that the great white men of technology are traitors to American democracy I say white because minorities are not included in this group.
Zuckerberg and his silly statements bout the community is either a complete fool or a traitor. He created a community of hate and let the Russians come right into our lives. I am involved in my life and don't have time to do nonsense and make Zuckerberg and the rest of them rich off of my clicks.
Oh how quickly the mighty have fallen, history will remember you and Trump in the same paragraphs.
Everyone get off of Facebook and get a life, because every day is precious, don't let Zuckerberg and the rest of them USE you with gadgets and steal your identity.
We can recapture our freedom so do it right now.
Vote and get involved in life. I read the paper NYT and decided to leave this post because it is sickening to know how quickly we are giving up our freedoms.
Forget social media and move on to living in the world with real people.
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need education, he got admitted to Harvard!
I've heard one of their alumnates is about to bring peace to the Middle-East. If an institute of higher learning is capable of producing such fine young minds, then surely they must be as sophisticated as they find themselves to be.
1
I applaud Swisher for these opinions - from inside the bubble! I saw Swisher be bold in the May 2018 tough interview with Sandberg and FB's CTO. Swisher jump started by asking why no one at FB had been fired for FB data management failures as Cambridge Analytica undermined political systems. Sandberg sheepishly answered by countering that the person accountable for the failures in FB coding fundamentals was Zuckerberg; Giggling, 'what to do [when it's your CEO]!? lol!' So to the C-level FB team, shame on you for collecting revenue while failing to manage your system as it comprimised our nation of laws.
Swisher's opinions also shed light anew on how Zuckerberg's lack of collaboration with expert professionals shaped a weak foundation at FB. It's evident in RadioLab's 2015 'Trust Engineers' podcast. In a nutshell, FB technology made it possible for 'boy kings' to turn the world's people into its lab rats as they ignored peer reviewed neuroscience. It's critical now that these few should learn from the many to alter social media practices.
Call on Adam Grant to confront FB C-level players to call for reform and to get educated, start with all books by Oliver Sacks, Yuval Noah Harari, George Orwell and Octavia Butler.
Who is to blame for this mess?
a.) Facebook
b.) Facebook users
c.) Advertisers and the profit motive
d.) Society
e.) All of the above
Answer: e.) All of the above.
6
“The Holocaust, was a genocide during World War II in which Nazi Germany, aided by its collaborators, systematically murdered some six million European Jews.”
“The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians.”
“The Great Famine was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland between 1845 and 1849. About one million people died and a million more emigrated.”
Sadly, there have been others. The existence of facebook and other social media on the internet help insure that events such as these can be presented front and center to the world.
I know there are issues with facebook and others, as alluded to in this article but if I’ve got to wade through pages of “in depth proof” that Obama was the anti-Christ, I’m more than happy to do so, if it means that such media outlets remain open and fully functioning.
1
Interesting essay.
First problem: Facebook is an example of a self-driving media space. It's all algorithm. An ocean of if-then statements... "If a post says 'Nazi' then send to the next if-then statement, and then to the next one until it runs out of if-then conditionals. Human beings are not very involved once the conditionals are set up. This is why talking to a Siri doesn't work. She is funny, but she doesn't mean to be. She doesn't really mean to be anything.
2nd problem: No matter how much Mr. Zuckerberg claims that he just wants to give people a place to connect, his bottom line is profit. He wants us to interact so that he can study us. He is eavesdropping on every interaction and using a different set of conditionals to extract information that he can sell. Some of that information is used to target users with advertisements or commercial propaganda. The platform is designed to manipulate people.
Request: Can somebody with a megaphone please give some free advertising to FB competitors... especially those that don't data-rape and have good privacy protections... preferably non-profit, but if for-profit, then a pay for service that might be ad-free? FB gets free advertisements all the time, "Like us on Facebook." Competition is what FB needs to do better.
1
Until Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg abandon the ideal that more openness is better, there will continue to be problems. The Holocaust denier thing is a perfect example. It would be simple to implement some algorithms to block questionable content. But they cannot bear the idea of posts being "unjustly" blocked - like "misinformed" Holocaust deniers. They want to be as permissive as possible. So their answer is a huge, expensive contingent of human monitors, who we know will be far from infallible, not to mention difficult to scale. But they don't want to be responsible for an algorithm that arbitrates what's allowable.
I get why trusting an algorithm to monitor internet discourse is problematic. But it may be the best, most realistic answer we have. Avoiding it is simply skirting responsibility. If users don't like it, they will complain or vote with their feet, just like the old days.
If you want to know who started all of this weaponizing of social media, look no further than the 2012 campaign of Barak Obama against Mitt Romney. Now, that would be an investigation worth having. There was absolute collusion between the pro-Obama media and the cynical Obama campaign team, utilizing Facebook and Twitter and their top executives.
1
People have been saying stupid stuff, mean stuff, untrue stuff in publice spaces since the dawn of humanity. They probably always will. Getting all apocalyptic about it on a particular medium doesn't change that. Not that long ago, when social media, specifically Facebook, first started, I decided to try it. I found it to be a gigantic waste of time. Nothing that's happened since then has made me change my mind.
1
Sociopaths as social emperors, classic.
2
As often happens, pundits can't see the forest for the trees. I'm old enough to remember when AOL dial-up was the last word in technology. Fact is, Facebook use is waning in America; its growth is all abroad. Young people have abandoned it in droves for newer platforms; it's become the platform for oldsters — a sure sign of decline. In a few years, we'll be laughing at apocalyptic columns like this one.
3
The fact that Zuckerberg is unwilling to offer a Facebook experience for a fee in exchange for not being a product to be sold shows that the old adage “follow the money” always seems to fit.
2
Isn't an essential corrective step the transparent identify of each and every Facebook user? To be accountable means the person authoring the post is truthfully identified to all who view it. Let's start there.
2
For everyone pointing to the shortcomings of MZ's formal education, may this arts-loving techie point out that most politicians and lawyers are products of a liberal arts education and I see no empirical evidence they are thus endowed on average with greater wisdom or morality.
2
We have now come to realize that even a democracy, having a global mega-phone which can’t be turned off is a privilege that should need to be earned. Over the past few centuries, free societies have woven together a fabric of editors and publishers to aid the public in filtering through a global flood of information and analysis. They were each democratically “elected” over time, via the public’s willingness to spend hard earned money on their various media products. The Internet has now given unqualified individuals the unparalleled power to broadcast their unfiltered messages continually and globally. This has resulted in an explosion of charlatans, thieves and unbalanced sociopaths, now able to cheaply dominate online media with an endless stream of unfiltered propaganda. What is the solution? Bill Gates had it close to right a few years ago, he proposed that every email sent cost at least a few pennies. This would help substantially cut the continual flow of junk email, since lone individuals could no longer send demented messages to 20 million people for free by simply pushing a button. We need to figure out a way to allow greater society to once again filter out unworthy messengers. We can do it by reemploying the mechanisms of economics. Globally broadcasting a message should have an actual cost that better reflects its social cost. The price of getting twenty million to waste time clicking on your manifesto should not be zero any longer.
3
I want to comment on one and only one thing: the use (or rather misuse of the word "weaponize"). It sounds very dramatic. It sounds incredible. But what does it really mean? I can "weaponize" a table knife, I suppose, or I can "weaponize" a car... but "weaponize" a social medium? Perhaps rather than criticize the new media, the New York Times and its commentators could turn the microscope inwards, and wonder if their overuse of hyperbole is part of the problem in this Country. But,then again, I suppose I am "weaponizing" the comments feature of the New York Times and its helpful censors will censor me out. So a quick shout out to the censors - you're being weaponized by suppressing my dissent.
An arrogant fool will most likely always remain an arrogant fool, especially when he happens to be one of the most powerful billionaires in the world.
3
"This is silly". i totally agree with ripvwinkle. Its how the world works.
Sorry, but you seem to have a superficial view of reality. All good is on our side, all evil is repressed and should stay down there. In reality, all evil belongs to us too, and we better take responsibility for it, if we want to reduce its negative effects. The consequences of following your approach would be scapegoating all suitable others for "our piece of evil" and then persecute them. Remember Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and the Holocaust. Do you want to follow that road, to some degree?
1
Facebook is a commercial operation. Making money supercedes everything. Don’t waste your time interbiewing Z.
Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms have become serious problems, especially for democracy with free speech as a value. How to fix this?
Facebook has evolved into three things: individual accounts that link people about whom it knows a lot; news feeds to those accounts based on what it knows about all those people; and paid advertisements that make huge money for Facebook, based on that personal information about billions of individuals. You see the connection here?
Solutions? Really tighten up who has the right to have a Facebook account: no anonymity, no faceless corporate or non-profit account owner, and no troll-like behavior. This last will involve some fierce internal censorship by Facebook (I belong to several web comment pages that require my real name and decent language, and I don't get to post if I use any nasty language, etc. It's a pleasant environment!).
Severely limit what personal information Facebook can use for itself. When it can't sell that information, gathering it will stop being attractive. Yeah: huge loss of profit for Facebook. So.
No news feeds at all. If you want to read the Times or the WaPo or some alt-right screed, subscribe to them. This will mean Facebook reverts back to "connecting people" and people will be less [mis]informed through spin-offs.
FBI-like scrutiny of advertisers: who, where, paid with which currency, and what is their purpose? Ride herd (this will take lots of personnel, but. . . ).
Try harder, Mark!
3
And you haven’t even touched on the massive social and mental issues facing children and teenagers as a result of Facebook and similar platforms.
10
Users want all of the freedom but not the responsibility, including Swisher, who continually blames tech for her social media ‘addiction’.
My life has improved since I deleted my Facebook account.
1
Yes, Zuckerberg’s naïveté was - and still is - a problem, but the rest of us are not passive victims. We have helped create this Frankenstein’s monster and we comprise its body. Without us, it would not exist and it would not behave the way it does. What do WE do about that?
I'm astonished that anyone believes social media platforms have earthshaking effects in the "real world." The "weaponization" of Facebook- seriously? Let me ask you, Ms. Swisher- has anything you've ever read on Facebook changed the way you thought about, voted for, or acted upon, anything? I thought not. Facebook simply lets us stay in touch with distant friends and relatives and watch funny pet videos. Quit blaming every thing in the world that bothers you on social media.
4
@Paul McBride So, because Ms. Swisher (and you) have never been influenced by anything on FB, that means no one has? And the only thing FB does is help people stay in touch with loved ones and be entertained by cute videos?
Perhaps you're not aware of the violence, hatred, lies, and horrifying bigotry that is regularly "shared" on FB. And apparently you have never met anyone who believes and is influenced by these posts. Lucky you. I've met many, and it's frightening how easily seemingly rational people are swayed by outright fabrication.
Ms. Swisher said nothing to indicate that she blames "everything that bothers (her) in the world on social media." She is just discussing one thing.
4
My friends have shown me their FB accounts. I know what it is.
I’m not on FB. Never will be.
If I want you to know what I’m doing, I’ll tell you.
Someone list 5 regulations that Facebook needs to have placed upon it?
A course in 20th century history would have been key. Too bad he didn't stay at Harvard long enough - I hear they have a pretty good course offering.
Maturity and education in the humanities would never change Mr. Zuckerberg's unfortunate leadership of Facebook as profit sadly too often trumps humanities "what ifs" when it comes to powerful speculative industries.
Did Mr. Zuckerberg commit a crime? Howabout 3 billion knowing counts of "invasion of privacy" for starters. Too rich to ever do time for just about any offense imaginable I'm sure.
I'm not on Facebook. Never was. Problem solved.
6
@N Problem not solved. Just because you don't read, believe, or post divisive, dangerous lies that affect behavior and voting choices doesn't mean millions of others don't post, read, and believe them. When millions of votes are cast based on the belief that Hillary Clinton won California because California allows illegal immigrants to vote, and that LA "cancelled" Columbus Day, and other such manufactured drivel, it's pretty clear your choice to opt out of FB doesn't solve anything. Drivel has always been out there. It's the sheer scale and speed of it that have raised the stakes so much.
Your post has a whiff of anger and seems to assume that because I don't have a Facebook account I am ignorant and unaware. There are a lot of other ways to be informed.
But at the end of the day there is a circuitousness to your logic that makes it nonsense. If there is drivel always out there, Facebook is not the only platform presenting it.
And if I opt out of Facebook, why can't you, and the next person, and the next person? Seems to me we might then be collectively on to something.
All the bellowing about "weaponization", a nice Pentagon CBW word, confuses the underlying message. After some extrication, it seems to come clear as: things said on Facebook are just terrible and need to be controlled. By somebody like me.
The author's dismissive prose and cavalier demand to thwart the expressions of others bespeak an utter ignorance of the disasters universally generated by exactly her project. Either that, or she just likes pushing people around.
So, what should we do with her incendiary and stupid ideas? The magic word is: Nothing.
We aren't sitting out here in FB-land on the verge of going critical should the secret naughty expression-weapon slither into the discussion. The Republic isn't in mortal peril because of the absence of state vigilance in combating what the Maoists used to call "wrong thinking".
We're out here, sometimes entertaining really awful, plain ridiculous, arguments. And, with a bit of contemplation and discussion, we discover that they are indeed silly, and move on.
Amazing! Dealing with all the filth makes us healthier! Well, most of us.
Sorry to plagiarize all this from eighth grade civics lessons.
Back to the adult world...
You don’t learn didlie at a dinner with academics. If you really want to learn and perhaps change, you know the joke, you have to want to. That means doing some work in the daylight hours, away from the Napa Cabernet. Facebook is a utility right now but one that’s trying to have its cake and eat it in the form of high profits and no regulation. Utilities get regulated. Stop. They act in the public good in exchange for their near monopoly status. Stop. Facebook as well as Google, Twitter, YouTube and some others need the other half of utility status, regulation.
1
I'm tired of articles that imply social media is like breathing, we must have it.
Sign off and walk away. It isn't necessary. In fact, at another time, in another culture it might be pointed out that it indicates a sort of cultural pathology-a sickness that pervades our view of ourselves.
I work in IT and have for decades. I don't have a Twitter account nor a Facebook account. It's a narcissistic waste of time. I have more important things to do with my days that sitting in front of a screen counting my likes.
All I have to say is better late than never, NYT. You finally hired someone who knows these poseurs and isn't afraid to hold them to account. Many of us have known and respected Kara's work for years, but the fact that CEO's tremble when they get her call will now become known to a much wider audience. Don't pull punches, Kara. So much of our sorry political state can and should be laid at Silicon Valley's doorstep, no matter how much they profess their ignorance.
4
The Russians basically try to exploit America's divisions along the lines of race, class, regions, etc. They have been doing this long before the invention of social media. As long ago as the 1930s, the USSR was exploiting America's racial discrimination to criticize capitalism and make America look bad in much of the world. The bottom line is that these fake Russian websites are indistinguishable from the websites of actual Trump supporters in the USA.
Another of the Ivy League’s ‘best and brightest’ doesn’t have a clue about what’s really going on. Too big to fail meets too smart to admit they don’t know what they are doing.
Facebook is such a weapon, because we have never put our shoulders into creating a platform to produce democracy, to learn its craft and form its societies. If we had, Facebook’s sins would have been negligible at worst.
If social media is the weapon, let’s use the Force for good.
As a long time user of the utility of FB who has broadcast family events to local politics to national politics and as a child of a a Holocaust survivor, I have left FB after realizing that I could not be a part of this propaganda machine. I get my news and commentary from newspapers, not from social media. When I read about giving Holocaust deniers a voice and then woke up to an argument about Alex Jones being on this site, I realized that I did not belong. I told my over 500 friends, that’s it for me. I already had lost friends and family in the great devide that was 2016 and the rise of lying-is-acceptable trump. I will gladly go back to a family type platform, hey I will take kittens all day!
51
Shorter Kara Swisher: Zuckerberg is not the smartest guy in the room. I like him anyway.
Makes me feel better about having finished college. I was exposed to ideas beyond my immediate career objectives, required to take some intellectual sidepaths, learned how to be intellectually flexible while determined.
"Weaponized" is obviously the wrong word here-- how about "commercialized"? Ms Swisher can't bring herself to admit that the profit motive lies at the root of the problem.
It's extraordinary that she would "have imagined that ... all the money and power he has collected, would have wisened him." The most basic common knowledge about capitalism, and about humanity, would indicate otherwise.
I never saw the attraction of social media, but nowadays, why any facebook/twitter/insta/snap user would believe what s/he sees is beyond me.
For the third time … now the fourth today. Online backstage censors having a problem? Don't like the truth or perhaps the style or just simply a violation of online NYT censor policy and guidelines?
Give me a break. It wasn't an issue with the Obama administration till Hillary crashed like an overdosed racehorse at the finish line.
Point of fact: NYT "weaponized" newsprint long ago, now digital too. Swisher's self-serving lecturing and ad nauseam finger-wagging--QED
Sad to see Facebook Derangement Syndrome spread to such an otherwise excellent reporter and chronicler of the Valley. And when Spotify purposely chooses (much worse) to host Alex Jones and his vile and hateful lies, they get a pass? Zuckerberg is hyper-rational to a fault (like "Because in theory there could be one person that sincerely believes it was not real, so like the Pope, who are we to judge and ban?") -- that's what got him into his Holocaust fix . But try Bezos the Younger (circa a 1996 Gartner Conference) who argued to an FTC Commissioner, Walter Isaacson and Lou Dobbs that the internet & AMZN should be flat-out above fair trade, anti-fraud or any law for that matter because they are inherently "self-correcting" platforms: if somebody lies, somebody else will expose the lie! Moderate Republicans for years let Rush Limbaugh and the like fertilize the path trod to power by DJT because it was beneath their dignity and nobody believed Rush but a bunch of rural rubes -- well those rubes, in 3000 counties, voted for that fake news 80-20. Rush was polluting our politics with hate long before the Russians got really good at social media, and where were you? Zuckerberg's a fair but too easy target for those in media who never had the sense or courage to call out the right-wing radio nativism that Russia now exploits: but radio is old fashioned, not as reputation-making as covering Facebook's sins (and getting the next book contract for "Bonfire of the Valley").
The problem is not that Mark Zukerberg failed to read Aristotle, Hobbes, and Hegel. It's that he was super clever at computers during a moment when NO ONE was reading enough philosophy, literature, and history. His genius at one narrow thing clawed its way into a hole in our collectively failing self-knowledge. Zukerberg, of course, capitalized on our vanity, which does not paint him in the best light. But this is a failure of culture.
It is ridiculous to blame the ills of society on FB. Sure, to fix the ills is much more difficult than attack the messenger, but does it really serve the society? If so, why wouldn't we ban all media that published the articles controversial problems? Let's pretend that there is no division in the country. Let's pretend that everyone has the same vision of the country. I guess for some people it is much easy. Never mind that nobody force you to use FB. Don't like it, don't use it. But no, some people just love to shoot the messenger.
Mark Zuckerberg, the sorcerer's apprentice.
The Left is still in denial over the election result. Beating a dead horse. You’re IN DENIAL. You lost. Do you think social media couldn’t be a factor in previous elections? Do you think the American people cannot handle the Information Age? Had Hillary won, this would all be a moot issue. But the Left is starving for control by the Government. They want to control and regulate the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, because the Left is the true tyrannical threat against The People. I hope you don’t feel my opinion here was too forceful or “weaponized.”
"He never anticipated that the platform also had to be responsible for those people when they misbehaved?"
Well in America any kind of "censorship" meaning fact checking or civility codes are considered taboo.
If the rest of the Internet was like the NYT forums the world would be a better place.
I’m not sure that more time, money, and power ever wizened an asshole, at least not the typ Zuckerberg seems to be.
I live and work in silicon valley, and I see it differently. This is science city. Lot’s a cool new things are developed here. We’re world famous. Except we don’t have much capacity to understand the unintended consequences of our actions. Engineers work very hard in math and science, and get the minimum in social sciences, political science, or history. Then it’s off to a start-up, and then to another. Work hard, make money (you have to, because of the high cost of housing here). Remember the music file sharing morality story of the 1990s. Everyone was doing it, because you could. Ripping off musicians and recording companies was ok. That was started in SV. I don’t remember churches preaching against it. A lot of intellectual property got passed around here, without much enforcement or pushback. Most of the silicon valley chip makers were founded using stolen research from the Fairchild company. I know, I have the data as a then young chipmaker. I chose not to be an FB member along time ago, because these concerns. We have an asymmetrical deficit in morality vs. technology.
I attended a college (as did Kara) where everyone had to take core courses including some humanities, AND where critical thinking was integral to the educational mission.
Struggling to understand Kierkegaard as a freshman, writing a critical essay on John Donne as a sophomore, or understanding the root causes of World War 2 might not be the skills necessary to work at Facebook or Baidu as an engineer. But you would hope that the CEO of a major US public company would have a little broader perspective. I am skeptical a few dinners will change anything.
2
As a college undergraduate I majored in Electrical Engineering, and I had to take a class called Engineering Humanities (taught by the way by someone who threw the discus for Austria in the Olympics). That's exactly the sort of class I think Mark Zuckerberg should have taken.
1
Zuckerberg was and is no different from from innovative entrepreneurs of earlier times. For example, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Ford and Rockefeller all revolutionized industry and the way we lived. And for all the good and wealth they created, they also wrought unforeseen and unintended consequences—new instruments of war, deadly fights between labor and capital, extensive pollution, the decline of mass transportation and the rise of the suburbs, as only a few.
Zuckerberg, Brin, Dorsey and Musk truly do not know the future ramifications of what they have created. Both the beneficent and nefarious creativity of those who use their innovations will determine how their legacies are written.
2
This is the best narrative I’ve seen on the massive problems posed by Facebook (Google, etc.) and a proposal as to the source of those problems. It raises the question:
Why is making choices about what can or cannot appear on Facebook (Google, Snapchat, social media generally) considered censorship when making those same choices by staff at a newspaper, or even in a TV setting, considered editing?
That Zuckerberg has considered his own darling a “utility,” an abstraction that can be seen as devoid of content, is telling. Ms. Swisher’s conclusion that this is a weaponizing of content is brilliant.
My inclination is to conclude, more forcefully than Swisher, that, yes, Zuckerberg (et al.) lacks needed historical knowledge, including knowledge of where the phenomenon we call ideology comes from (the French Revolution). We might also throw in the complications that derive from the very internet’s origins, the basis of social media generally, from a military setting, raising further questions about the effect of military technology on society itself. Zuckerberg and his high tech buddies are, indeed, in need of education.
1
Since Facebook has become, in Zuck's words "a utility", it needs to be regulated as such.
Given the rage for deregulation in the government we have, that's unlikely for now. But it will happen - after these years of social and political damage.
2
Facebook is being asked to not only discern the differences between arguments built on facts and those built on predisposed outcome, but also to discern the motivations behind the arguments AND then judge if those motivations are worthy, whatever that means.
First, the idea that Facebook should solve this is nuts. Asking them to try is dangerous, because it creates the idea that they can and should. Next thing we'll have software that purports the ability to go through your text messages and photos and find the bad actors. Not a good situation.
Facebook intimidates me and has since it came out in the 90s. It adds power to those already able to manipulate through images and ideas by giving them a platform for doing so. This is not an area where we need to bolster the power of the powerful. Nevertheless...
Facebook promises to make your life better in the same way TV does, only with the stuff of your own life. If producers of TV and movies cannot toe lines of morality because of the near impossibility to do so, how can Facebook be expected to reverse engineer this process and build algorithms that can recognize when things are posted with malevolent basis? We can't solve the forward problem, so how can Facebook be expected to solve the reverse problem?
We solve the TV problem by turning it off. Silicon Valley engineers solve the digital life problem with their kids by limiting their access. The solution to the Facebook problem is the same. Turn it off.
3
I don't think Mark Zickerberg has a learned a lesson. Let me say that in one sentence.
Anything that is free is ultimately worth nothing or is useless.
I love my interactions and keeping up with the news about my friends on Facebook. I would be happy to pay $25/year to keep my information safe from hackers and predators.
The current business model of advertisers muscling into my Facebook account or selling it to some shady company or used as part of any survey is unacceptable and appalling.
3
I wish more alternatives like this are discussed.
Fixing the social dynamics between groups of people is not Facebook’s job, it is the government’s. Regulate Facebook like a utility.
6
On Facebook, I write opinions. I share opinions. Others do the same. We often disagree. This is called The First Amendment. It is not a “utility.”
4
@Gordon
Yes, but opinions are different from facts. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, everyone is entitled to his opinions. Everyone is not entitled to his own facts.
Democracy can't work if social media blur the difference between facts and opinions. That's why FB is so dangerous. It's a tool by which bad actors drip poison into the American body politic.
Time to regulate FB the way we regulate the water company.
It seems he played a rope-a-dope defense with Ms. Swisher as superbly as before 40-some U.S. Senators. I say this as a Facebook user who enjoys using the platform to stay in touch with a small group of friends. Hard to see any "fix" that does not implode the market capitalization of the company. Who volunteers for that?
Never been on Facebook. When I heard it operates with "likes" and their opposite, I said, right, no way. Sheep. It's about sheep following other sheep.....
I prefer to make my own decisions.
6
Good for you. I'm in leadership position for a top 5 global eCommerace platform. The vulnerability goes back years... the Russians mimicked earlier troll actions on FBs platform. We were discussing in early 2016 who could be trolling propaganda on their platform.
I highly recommend the book "Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts" by Jaron Lanier. I deleted my Twitter & Facebook accounts and am a much happier, less hostile, more reasonable person today. Set yourself free! Do it!
16
They are classic in regards to the standard excuse of "we built this platform, but we're not responsible for how people use it".. Even having a rudimentary discussion on ethics with people in the tech world like Zuckerberg is almost futile. Look at how he reacted to criticisms about hosting (and the de facto legitimization) of Holocaust deniers. This isn't a government entity, this is a private sector firm with one and only one goal - profit. Despite companies' various slogans like Google's "don't be evil" once public with boards of directors, shareholders and demands for more and more profit those trite slogan go by the wayside. Technology, as wonderful as it and I should know, it's how I earn a very good living, has created a rate of change that government and people cannot readily absorb. That the utter absence of ethical standards with the industry giants allowed the likes of Alex Jones or Cambridge Analytica to exist and prosper. That Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al didn't shut down Jones after the way he used their platforms to torture victims of Sandy Hook is itself proof that their only motivation is profit. That isn't about some absurdly abstract notion of free speech, this is about not giving a platform to hate. If these guys are desperate to have this access let them build their own data centers, buy servers and staff it.
6
How couldn't people have seen some of these horrifying problems en route? Blinded by narcissism and bucks, and I'm just talking about the users... tools are only as good or bad as their operators. And add to that, no one has had to be licensed to be on Facebook, and it shows.
4
oh they saw it.... don't kid yourself. They had no bias to action and actively decided to ignore the hell they unleashed upon their user base.
Just get off Facebook. Election saved.
6
How long does it take to learn this lesson: fire cooks your meal or burns your hand. The humanities boys and girls have been spoiling for a fight with the computer revolution for a long time. The reason? The humanities folks are not as valuable to us any more. Their gatekeeper role is being threatened. What? We are trusting the people to have an unfiltered voice? The thing they miss in their Luddite mood is this: The computer revolution is not just another industrial revolution. It is a cognitive revolution that started in the 1700's. What is a mind? What is mental content and how is it individuated? There are new answers to these questions and they leave the humanities folks behind and they are scared. Where were they when the Arab Spring was wrought through Facebook? Time for these folks to wake up and grow up.
3
Huh? Humanities people are gatekeepers? I guess I need that explained. All the writers, actors, teachers that I know scrimp and save and bust their humps and just get by.
1
@timothy holmes
Oh, we were there. And we were there when when the Arab Spring was just as swiftly undone by the very technology that enabled it.
And we’re still there, though tenaciously. We know all about such questions as “what is a mind?” And you’re right: we are scared.
Aren’t you? After all, it’s not just literary and arts folks who know what a Faustian Bargain is.
1
Jack Balkin, legal scholar in information technology, privacy, and the First amendment discusses information fiduciaries and the future of regulating the sale of data w/o permission. Tim Wu developed the concept, if I’m not mistaken, and wrote an op ed for the NYT about it. Balkin dives into what it means ethically and for policy:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-empire-with-michael-kwet/id1399...
1
This topic is an easy one to decipher and come to a strong conclusion about, but Kara Swisher doesn't do that and it seems that she really doesn't want to. Removing political, factual lies from social media, strictly policing social media and then disregarding negative press about these actions requires concentrated effort. It definitely will result in reducing total usage and/or a 'negative' perception held by some of the public. And this will lead to reduction in number of advertisers and consequentially - advertising revenue. Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley CEOs will never do anything which causes them to lose a lot of money, which is their ultimate motivation. They justify it with fancy language and excellent marketing, but at the base of it all - the final truth is always about the dollars and cents.
3
For every high profile company, there are dozens of companies diligently working on many other things.
Mature companies like Facebook and Apple may be in the news, they are not what keeps things humming in silicon valley. They are the past, not the future. They make public stock investors rich, not silicon valley entrepreneurs.
There is no education in process, except in the media. Everyone else is busy working on tomorrow.
1
My recollection of Mr. Zuckerberg's answers to questions from Congresspeople and Senators was hilarious. He answered as if the problems concerning privacy were just bubbling up, when, in fact, the EU had been chasing after him for years on just that.
Naturally, none of our elected representatives seemed to know that his answers were contrived.
Based on that, I'd suggest that Mr. Zuckerberg is consciously amoral.
3
What about turning Facebook off?
4
Shut it all down. It's beyond repair.
3
The idea that these guys are doing all they can do to stop this insanity is such bull. If they just changed their business model to subscriptions instead of ad-based, it would immediately change the incentives for all bad actors. Unfortunately, that would likely lower their profits, at least for some time, and boy, we couldn’t possibly have that!
4
Zuckerberg, always a day late, never a dollar short.
8
For the record, I'm curious as to why whether you personally like Mr. Zuckerberg or not, and your subsequent feelings about him are a significant part of the story?
1
There is nothing else to do but regulate FB as it has become Zuckerberg's Frankenstein monster. He should work with Congress rather than against on this issue as we all know what eventually happened to the Frankenstein monster after all the villagers attacked late one night carrying pitch forks and torches.
I had to laugh out loud though at this paragraph; "At a recent employee Q. and A. I did at YouTube, for example, one staffer told me that their jobs used to be about wrangling cat videos and now they had degenerated into a daily hell of ethics debates about the fate of humanity."
FB and social media et al work with Congress and regulate and in the meantime get help from the U.S. intelligence agencies for all this hacker to hacker combat.
4
Unfortunately I was right about social media.
I said two years ago thst Zuckerberg was going to have his Oppenheimer Moment. It has happened and the entire human race is paying for it just like the nuclear arms race and M.A.D.
1
@Larry L
While agreeing with your premise generally, I’m not sure Z possesses the intellect or the morality to have his Oppenheimer Moment.
1
This article critiques the Facebook that Zuckerberg et al want you to believe it aspires to be. And offers as a solution that Zuckerberg et al just need to be more aware and better educated to fix it.
What nonsense. It is like beginning with the premise that the moon is made of green cheese, but that the cheese has gotten smelly. So all we need to do is make the smart people aware of the smell and have them find solutions.
But the premise itself is wrong. The moon is NOT made of green cheese. And Facebook is NOT what these charlatans like Zuckerberg want to tell us it is.
Rather, it is a very simple, obvious and cynical mechanism to extract oodles and oodles of private information from billions of individuals and sell it for a profit. That is ALL it is. It aspires to be nothing more. It has nothing to do with respecting or connecting people. It has nothing to do with fostering human relationships. It has everything to do with exploiting the gullibility of people and giving them useless fluff in return.
THAT is what Zuckerberg is about. Why is this writer fooled by the piety and ridiculous nonsense about wanting to fix what's wrong. Zuckerberg only wants to fix Facebook to the degree that it will help him keep conning the universe and exploit individual's private information.
Frankly, that this oped writer totally ignores this very obvious truth about Facebook makes her work unworthy of a middle school newspaper - much less the New York Times.
9
It is a utility and should be regulated as one.
4
Utility? FB is not utility. We can not live without electricity and gas and water. We can live just fine without FB. It is media and should be regulated as media
It's simple. Facebook and Google basically destroyed (er, I mean, "disrupted") the professional content industry, which used to hire thousands of editors, fact checkers, and defamation lawyers to vet their product before issuing. FB and GOOG should be required to get editors and fact checkers, real humans, not the robo algorithms that are obviously not doing very well. I wonder how many of the technology & society issues we have today could be resolved if we just hold these incredibly wealthy new companies to some old-fashioned responsibility. And subject them to the same longstanding media, antitrust, labor, and commercial laws.
9
On the other hand, all these fact checkers didn't stop professional media from peddle lies about WMD of Iraq.
1
Well, since he hasn't quite got a handle on it yet, he could shut down Facebook until he fixes the Russian problem. Just turn it off and leave it off until after the 2018 elections. Then do the same again from about a year before the 2020 elections.
The cost will be high to Facebook for the next few years as a result, very high, but surely that would be less than the immeasurable cost to democracy now being incurred. Plus, it might suddenly cause him to come up with better solutions and a bit faster.
By the way, a separate question, with Google setting up in China will they be building a version that the Russians can't game? Maybe we should have them set that one up in the US as well?
It's amazing how helpless a person can be when his / her livelihood depends on it.
3
I guess we should ban all media before election because they all are biased one way or another. Of course, we could not stop money from political campaign, but maybe we will be more lucky with news media.
I never really got into FakeBook - too many people trying to brand themselves as living the perfect life. My advice is to simply ditch your FB account and actually interact in real time with someone. It's so refreshing to interact in real-time with another human - either on a video call that you actually care for and who knows and cares for you. If your family and friends are far away - use Instagram to post pics and videos.
2
I propose we turn off Facebook, Twitter etc. for at least a week before elections. All social media sites dark. Then we might see some stars.
6
@WMG
Or venture out of Plato’s cave.
Interesting article. Given all the focus on Zuckerberg and Facebook, it's worth making the broader point that corporate America has never been a model of ethical responsibility. As the author notes, the tragedy in the case of Facebook is that the stakes are so high. And in Zuckerberg, we likely saw an especially unwholesome and perhaps toxic combination: youth, inexperience, incomplete education, cockiness, and a very fast rise to fame and astronomical wealth. Very few mortals would have navigated that combination very well. Zuckerberg did it perhaps better than most, but it still may not be enough.
2
Mark Zuckerberg has not exhibited enough convincing evidence to support the claim that increasing levels of connectivity and establishing digital communities through the means of Facebook has created a net benefit for the world. It is not clear that he has reckoned with the downsides brought about not only by the methods and tactics he is deploying but those which are inevitably created and inherent in his platform. Zuckerberg would do the world a great service by taking a step back, stop Facebook’s expansion, and at least undergo a deep analysis of its contributions. In doing so Zuckerberg should exorcise his grandiose utopic visions that appear to have not resulted from anything other than a naive and juvenile view of the world and recognize that his motivations, at the very least subconsciously, result largely from both his and his shareholder’s insatiable desire for profit and growth. In every explanation of his company’s public failures and oversights, Zuckerberg always imbues his rhetoric with the underlying assumption that Facebook can do nothing but expand into new territories, capture new users, and conquer new fields, while simultaneously characterizing this growth with an undeserved messianic flavor that is rootless and seems to have forgotten the fact that the world existed more or less effectively before he took the world’s information, threw it up into the air like confetti, and had the audacity to assume where all of it would land.
4
Yes, all very interesting and thank you for letting us know that Mark is not feeling so hot right now. At the risk of sounding like a scolding "I told you so" these problems really first emerged during the Ukraine crisis when the weaponization of social media by the Russians really took off. Ukrainians and those globally following events there were lonely voices in the wilderness pointing out something was very, very wrong but they were ignored. I remember a cocky young "security specialist" from FB dismissing my concerns when I chatted with him about it at a social event in SF. He had to google Ukraine to see where it was and what it was. Talk about lacking a rounded education. And Mark and FB ignored, or laughed off, Ukrainian government pleas to address the issue. This was all reported but considered of marginal importance affecting a country far, far away. So now we know how far and deep the rot has spread but it is even more important now to keep a laser eye on financing. The NY Times has done excellent reporting on the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-ru... and his role in Silicon Valley. Always follow the money, and the interests behind the money.
6
I thought it was American-supported protesters who brought down the legitimate Government of Ukraine. Funny, how at that time FB was not considered the problem, but rather 'voice of the people'. What happened now? You just don't like what the ' voice of the people' tell you now?
My intense dislike of 45 and his team is exhausting and has made me less productive as I closely follow their latest attacks on civility, democracy, education, the media, the environment, and the health care system. In deference to my daughter's 2005 request, I never joined Facebook, even though I was eligible back then. I can only imagine how much more stressful my life would be if I had joined or if I watched news on cable TV. To me, social media can be useful (particularly LinkedIn), but it has turned out to be toxic in many ways, with a profound impact on our future ability to remain united as a nation. Thanks to Ms. Swisher for her observations.
2
I guess I don't understand HOW Facebook would be regulated and WHAT it could do to combat bad users? Since the advent of social media, I think we're still getting used to the fact that EVERYONE's opinion is out there all the time, good and ugly. That's still new to humanity and we're still figuring out how to navigate radical plurality.
2
August 2, 2018
An expensive saga of the true happenings of Bat you, Bat man and the joker....
Now is right for Mr. M. Zuckerberg to critique script writings for the best or the worst that could, should, or may or may not happen to how our literate world has been violated by dark evil forces that damned the 2016 Presidential Election and not the casts of characters will pick of the pieces and bring in thinkers who's expertise needs to be taken and published as if in phf thesis studies to save ourselves from the hysteria of electronic chaos in need for regulation - surely
1
Good article. It still seems to me to understate the danger. I think the British television series Black Mirror, now on Netflix, does a better job of illustrating the danger of "social media" better than anything else I've ever seen. Warning: Wach alone late at night at your own risk.
3
It’s easy to take these baits given by tech industry. I consider myself a tech savvy person. Somehow had a gut feeling that something is very wrong with the idea of Facebook. Never opened an account on Facebook even though all of my friends have.
It was created as a tool to give a false meaning to ones life: a digital life. In the background Facebook sold all that digital life for huge profits. It’s like “prostituting” yourself, but in this case Facebook (the pimp) got all the $$. Plus I never want to look at my friends digital life. Probably I am a more earthly person, prefer to visit them or call them.
The only solution to stop this prostitution is to unfriend the Facebook and start having more “face to face” discussions. That’s the only hope for a more civilized society and un-Trump Mr. Trump. Good luck to all.
2
"a daily hell of ethics debates", and i have always had trouble just sitting thru committee meetings. What those people must be going thru now, and with a theme at places like Google of "how are we going to make money out of this?" Google as the largest advertising firm on earth routinely takes money from anyone promoting fossil fuel use--oil companies don't have to give them money, because with all the products promoted using oil, the oil companies can directly buy politicians and also fund their disinformation campaigns on global warming. As a go-a-longer, in the last election cycle, Google executives gave money to Ted Cruz, a climate change denier from Texas. They have these people in Texas (like Bush) because, after all, as an oil State only Houston and their Gulf Coast is going to be underwater from Climate Change.
Being Jewish i now sit thru Torah study. It's like a committee meeting, but with no purpose beyond enlightenment. You don't leave having to think about following some commandment to burn a woman for disobedience, or being swallowed up by the earth for disobeying one. Pity those in ethics hell discussions who must find a way to profit from aiding and abetting the destruction of the earth as we know it from global warming/CC.
Zero emissions paid for with a carbon tax (different politicians) would change this. I know someone that was recently arrested at Google just for suggesting that they put a climate change visual on their web page. So much for that.
1
It is a shame how we are all trusting a platform that is selling us (yes: I mean us!) to someone else. Just imagine: I am more Conservative, more Democrat more Green more Blue, Latina/o, Indian...it is Facebook that is pretending we are just so different. What are their criteria? What is their reasoning? They need to uncover what THEY have programmed about us about what makes us so different from one another that the Russians and others have been and still are able to exploit!! Is an “algorithm” constructing itself? No! IT people seem to be classifying us all the time. Someone sits there and says, oh Gee, she must be so Orange, I can sell that to McDonalds!
Tax marketing, PR and lobbying NOW! Big! Facebook is not keeping us together as they promised to, Facebook itself is taking us apart!
1
Welcome to the USA!!!
Have you rather fully apprehended our newest version of the USA?
We Be the Home of the Free: Free Oligarchs, Plutocrats... and soon many fully Fascist Americans - nay, say thee?
1
Every technology has a downside. Automobiles revolutionized travel and drew the world closer; their exhaust also pollutes the air, warms the Earth, and incentivizes sprawl. Nuclear power generates energy . . . and radioactivity.
What is happening with social media is really no different. Stitching together a global community where billions of people are free to communicate has the downside of making those people accessible to propagandists who simply want to watch the world burn.
Zuckerberg's creation reflects humanity, and humanity at scale is ugly. I couldn't stand to see my Facebook page overwhelmed with political content, so I cut my friends down to only immediate family. Even then the political opinions that were posted by my brother's friends on his page would somehow leak through. (There was a time when the members of the John Birch Society could only make their opinions heard by making photocopies of some screed or another, rather than copying and pasting their nonsense on the Internet.)
I don't know how Zuckerberg fixes Facebook. The problem is partly one of trying to fix humanity. Good luck with that. My suggestion is that he impose a limit on either the number of friends one can have, and/or create a limit on how many times one can post and where those comments appear.
Facebook is rapidly becoming the Buick of social media. Not all Facebook users are Republicans/right wingers, but all right wingers use Facebook.
1
There's a solution to all of this. Would some philanthropists please stand up and fund a non-profit Facebook look-alike? All the same features, but nothing for sale. No algorithms gathering your data--no data, no customers, no Russian trolls, no more ads. The whole world could be friendly, and fake news would have no where to go. It could be powered by donations, with the uber wealthy footing most of the bills--a small price to pay to keep democracy--and the human race--alive.
1
I think Zuckerberg and the other original developer (who left years and years ago) had a great original idea but I have no confidence that Zuckerberg had the capacity or capability to figure out how to moderate or fix his 'utility'. He always looks so over his head whenever he has to answer questions about what goes on there. He looks lost. I always thought it was creepy how so many people WAY overshared and how Facebook makes money off people who use by selling our private information. I've gone back to emails.
btw, a potential way to fix this is to require subscriptions: then they don't sell our data and then they will have a way to determine if an account if by a real person.
1
Never mind the persona of Mark Zuckerberg, use of the Facebook platform by malevolent characters, domestic or foreign alike, aligns the long term strategic interests of the country with leaders of Facebook. Whose interest is served by providing a free of cost PR megaphone to characters who impugn the good names of parents of Sandy Hook victims? Who benefits from using Facebook as a forum to rouse anger, fear and violent behaviors?
The reality is that laws to curb abuses of communications lag in digital age. So the true test going forward for Mark Zuckerberg et al at Facebook comes down to one basic conundrum. Will the drive for revenue growth “trump” broader societal imperatives. A related question is whether Zuckerberg proves capable of crossing the transom from entrepreneur to CEO of a maturing corporation—one who understands that credibility and reputation risk matter.
7
I was sort of negatively neutral about Marc Zuckerberg until I happened to see just a few minutes of his testimony on a link in the NYTimes. The first thing I noticed was that he has NO AFFECT . He is expressionless, regardless of the question or the attitude of the questioner, regardless of the answer he is giving. His voice is robotic, metallic, without inflection.
And his eyes are dead, snake's eyes, they remind me of the eyes of another public figure I couldn't bear to watch--Oliver North. I think any kind of close look reveals a terrible and simple fact about our Mr. Zuckerberg. He is missing some essential component of humanness. My strong impression is that there's no one home behind those eyes. I think a man like this is probably more dangerous in the long run than someone actively plotting evil.
If the technology he has created and exploited according to the simple rules of capitalism has gotten away from him, I find it hard to believe that he cares a great deal. He is a sharp young man who surely knows what to say on behalf of himself and his company. I don't believe one word of it.
11
@oldteacher You know what's really dangerous? Long-distance psychoanalysis.
@oldteacher
Thank you! Everyone says his senate appearance was a success for him. Instead, I think many people were bemused by that glassy-eyed stare, that hyper-awake expression that, come to think of it, is shared by Bezos and so many other brogrammers.
Excellent column. One fact that doesn’t get enough attention is that Facebook isn’t paid by the people who use it. It gets all its billions from advertisers and others. Companies give primary attention to those who pay to use their products. Imagine how Facebook would change its tune if it started to charge each of its users a monthly fee. Right now, in my opinion, it could care less about its users. That could spell trouble and invite regulation.
6
For me the more interesting part of the recent podcast was that the emotion that was missing from when discussing the uses of Facebook for terrible acts turned up when discussing border issues, something Facebook couldn't be held responsible for...so there is emotion just not when it is complicated by accountability.
And for all the good Bill Gates now brings, there is a similarly in the single mindedness in business approach with Zuckerberg, who cited Gates as a major influence.
I'd add to...our technology has surpassed our humanity, that silicon valley's power has far surpassed their maturity.
3
How on earth anyone thought that a sex-deprived teen would create a socially-responsible platform of human interaction, is beyond me.
14
Let’s hope we don’t have to wait till he gets “wizened” (dry, shrunken, and wrinkled ) before he wises up.
10
In a world where participation and abstinence is completely voluntary, we are the kudzu. Hate social media? Stay off it!
3
Wait a minute, why is it that she "actually likes him"? Did I miss that part? At best he's a misanthrope, at worst......
4
Facebook should be shut down until after the November elections, that the Russians cannot use the hub to peddle
vile and hateful propaganda that divides America,
and this will make the elections a little safer.
Facebook is rich enough to shut down.
6
@PropagandandTreason
Come on Zuckerberg show your patriotism and commitment to American democracy, and the real freedom of speech which is free from Russian
propaganda trolling.
Come on Zuckerberg - shut down Facebook until after the November elections.
2
excellent synopsis. bravo
Clearly, Zuckerberg's victory lap as the Harvard commencement speaker last year was premature.
6
Trump has weaponized twitter and consistently pushes past their rules that would get anyone else suspended or worse. Silicon Valley enables his horrible behavior and is offering nothing positive in return.
1
Ah if only Facebook didn't exist, surely the internet would be a more civil and thoughtful place!
1
He runs a profit making company designed to learn everything he can from everybody about everybody in the world so that he can "target" market to them. And some of that information that is gathered is harmless, clean and health and some of it is perverted and nasty. If you know everything about anyone you can sell them something, from baby diapers, to groceries, to cars, to guns to child pornography. That has become possible as computer technology has advanced multiple times over. Pandora's Box, the Genie is out of the bottle, Big Brother, etc. Maybe the 5th Horseman of the Apocalypse?
1
All you really need to know about Facebook and Zuckerberg is that, at the start, it was a cheesy fratboy way to view and rate Harvard girls' pictures. Sounds like Trump, doesn't it? ("oh, she's a 4 at most") Seems to me entirely un-ironic then that Facebook and Zuck stuck us with President Trump.
6
Funny thing, Trump and a growing number of Republicans want to build a physical wall on our southern border to protect us from people who admire America and are desperate to become part of America; all the while, Facebook serves as high speed highway for hostile foreign adversaries to come across our borders right into our homes to destroy our institutions, infrastructure, elections, democracy, traditions, society and even the rational thinking of many Americans.
Facebook is the super highway which terrorists can take without a passport, visa or scaling, tunneling under or going around a stupid physical wall. But hey, a physical wall may help calm terrified Republicans, make them feel more secure as they sleep at night with their collection of AR-15's and a dozen or so handguns tucked under their sweat wet pillows waiting for the mongrel hordes to swarm from their Trumpian dreams to the stoops of their front doors.
And allow one more nefarious avenue of America's demise: FOX and Fools and their like legion of purveyors of misinformation, flat out lies and hatreds. This disease of the 1st Amendment helps spread the viruses pumped into America via Facebook.
Trump wants to build a wall while the real enemy is already inside America, continues to arrive by the nano second. In fact, Trump invited them in (to which Republicans responded, "Oh! my that sounds naughty but nothing to worry about"). And those arriving via Facebook have not come here seeking safety or a better life.
7
"... they [Faceboo, Google, Twitter] were built to work exactly this way."
Indeed.
Moreover, as Kara notes, Facebook like Google is a utility, i.e., a natural monopoly. Monopolies have more power than regular companies, and make larger profits. At present, monopolies are essentially unregulated and unchecked.
Facebook, Google (including YouTube), and Twitter are behavior modification machines which control our behavior by manipulating resentment, rage and anger.
When Facebook et al. are weaponized, a bad actor uses the darker emotions to control the behavior of the targeted victim by coopting the unnatural power of a natural monopoly.
The connection to the Trump cult is indisputable. Trump feeds these dark emotions to his cult, and they adore him for it.
1
At this point it's irresponsible and negligent for anyone to continue to have a Facebook account. It concerns far more than just yourself and whatever narrow personal satisfaction you might derive from your account. By continuing your account you are tearing at the very fabric of our society and saying that you don't care. Please leave Facebook now.
10
The only people that have "weaponized" social media are the users themselves. Nothing says you have to use FaceBook, Twitter or any other platform.
3
When I moved to France fifteen years ago and became an expatriate I left behind as much of America as possible.
When Facebook appeared on the scene as an American invention I included their website in my exclusion.
I reserve my human contact to actual face to face encounters in my community when I venture outside the home. I can't over emphasize how more rewarding it is to speak to people in person. Having to learn a new language concentrated my attention on the quality of the human interaction.
These fifteen years of my life away from America have been the best years of my life!
9
The Facebook platform was developed as a way to rate the women of Harvard. The schools database was hacked, student photos were rated against each other. There were obviously a lot of people hurt by this activity. Facebook will continue to manage peoples lives but they must remember every choice you make on the platform is used to profit Facebook. It devalues your opinions by using them for profit. If you avoid the rabbit holes Facebook is useful to connect to family and friends. I still use it but not as my primary access to the internet.
2
Facebook and Twitter MUST crack down on ghe misuse of their platforms. That means a person's identity and cpuntry of origin MUST be identified on all posts. There should be no anonymity and strident, emotionally abusive posts (bullying) and use ofnad hominems MUST result in an actively enforced lifetime ban or long term (12 month) suspension of that account. Enforced by financial penalties and even jail time. There may be a minority of abusers, but they poison the environment. Without a penalty for abuse or strident ad hominem emotionalism, these sites will continue to be a repository for the worst of human communication.
Webster's defines W'izen" as: to become dry, shrunken, and wrinkled often as a result of aging or of failing vitality.
Methinks the writer thinks it also means to inform and educate... as the kids would say,"Facebook fail."
3
It's time to shut Facebook down. If we can't control the catastrophic damage it's doing, the good it may do is absolutely irrelevant.
1
The bad people got connected. It won't be fixed until you can get rid of the bad people. We know this is impossible. So perhaps we can get rid of Facebook.
3
Missing from some of the comments as well as from the article: Facebook is built to addict you. As in, they build it to keep you on the site as long as possible. So it's hard to claim that average people are making informed decisions about how they use Facebook. I read in one of the comments that "no one compelled anyone to use FB". I'd say no one compels you to sign up, yes, but FB absolutely compels you to stay.
2
ANY THING that has the potential to make massive amounts of $$ for a few will eventually get twisted into a "whatever brings in the most bucks" unless that entity is regulated. FB is media, and should be regulated as all media companies are, and held accountable.
3
Zuckerburg, Sanders et al have sucked out all the money they could possibly need for the rest of their gilded lives. Just shut the damn thing down. Oh, and Twitter too.
9
Zuckerburg is an unlikable person if the movie the social network is any indication. He stole the idea to begin with. Facebook sucks but to regulate it you need smart legislators. Did you see old Orrin Hatch make a fool of himself when Zuckerburg testified before the Senate committee?
5
Silicon Valley destroyed the world. Bookstores, travel, Main Street, privacy, national security, social skills, whole industries, the record business, Hollywood. You name it. It started with the personal computer in the 1980s. Everyone got addicted, fast. The internet -- OK, some of it has been fun. Much of it has been stressful. I concluded that true happiness lies in logging off of everything. I got rid of smartphones, email and websites wherever possible and am moving back to a life made up of hardcopy, landline, snailmail and face-to-face social interaction. I may not get there -- we are stuck, after all, and here I am blogging -- but to the degree possible, I am going back to the old world. It was so much better. Near the end of his life, Steve Jobs visited a distant country and commented sadly that everyone was holding an iPhone. He lamented the sameness of the world. But for 30 years we have had to listen to these computer people lecture us all on what great visionaries they are. Maybe the lectures, at least, will end.
16
Oh! I want to thank(!) you just so very much for your fantastic and concise words! They are resonating all across the Atlantic. You and what you are writing is what I have come to love about your country many years ago and what has been painfully missed out to address these past years.
2
@ps I have been moving in the same direction, after recently getting into some nasty wars of words online. I was so angry and bitter at whoever for whatever opinion, but I found that these same people don't begin to get under my skin offline. Who needs to manufacture animosity? It sure made me miserable.
I come from the Hasidic community and I visit a Hasidic shop today to inquire about a kosher phone - the ones designed to be the opposite of addictive. I wish we could start a movement of people who take it offline. I'm often the only/near-only person on the train car without earphones/screen and isn't sleeping.
1
"It was a classic Silicon Valley engineer’s roll-up-your-sleeves answer, which leaves many cold when it comes to, say, the manipulation of democracy."
Well, yeah, what did you expect? You went to an engineer and said, "The machine you have built is creating problems." His response was, "Hmm, okay, I need to fix that."
You can criticize him for not doing enough to carry through, or for failing to understand the problem, or for not being proactive enough about catching the problem before it got out of hand, or whatever. But who cares if he gets emotional about it? What does that accomplish?
1
As a Facebook user, I want Facebook regulated like a utility. We need European style regulations.
10
“But let me also say that he and Facebook, the huge social network that he started in college, have been working humanity’s last nerve for far too long now.”
Really? Because I don’t have Facebook and - if you can believe it - I’m still a productive, well-informed citizen.
Come on - let’s stop shifting blame. A country that depends on an online toy for essential social, political and economic functions deserves what it gets in return.
5
Maybe we should just shut Facebook down for a while - at least through the midterms - until they figure-out how to manage the monster they've created.
It's a bit intrusive, sure, to be imposed by executive order or other governmental direction, and it could set an unfortunate precedent. There will be cries of censorship. But too much hangs in the balance.
('ere long, it may be a matter of time before governments start censoring the content anyway...)
Facebook should have plenty of cash to get-by for the next several months or so. And to my recollection, our lives all go along just fine before Facebook had even been invented...
4
@BD
Exactly! When too much hangs in the balance free speech, property rights and any other freedoms getting in the way must be suspended up to and until "progressives" get their desired result.
This is silly. I assure you Facebook is not the root of all evil. And I say this as someone that avoids social media like its the Plague.
Facebook works because its clientele make it work. No one compelled anyone to use FB. Its just a platform without editorial oversight. Just like the NYT opinion pages. No need to endow it with mythic powers.
Furthermore, the refrain that no one saw this coming is disingenuous at best. Plenty of us did. However, people have decided that they want their lives to be centered around flash over substance, talking incessantly about issues they have scant understanding of and unabashed celebration of being unaware and ignorant.
I promise you, if it weren't FB, it would be something else. 56 million votes would have still been cast for someone you might not have preferred.
79
@ripvwinkle. I know plus.google.com or linkedin do now have as many users as FB, but their systems are safe.
You make some excellent points however; Thanks.
@ripvwinkle - Uh... both the NYT editorial page and the comments section HAVE oversight.
3
@ripvwinkle I disagree: Facebook may not be the root of all evil, and its users undeniably play a key role in how they decide to use the Facebook platform. Still, all technologies materially affect the conditions within which people live and use those technologies, whether it be the phonograph, the automobile, or social networking sites.
2
I always come away from articles like this one feeling smug. I have never used social media. Neither has my husband; from the outset, we both saw in social media what we objected to, writ large, about the internet: the mindless, lemming-like surrender of personal privacy. As we are with Trump supporters, we have always been mystified about what it is that makes otherwise intelligent people so susceptible to the siren song of making one's personal life a public property. Why aren't people at all circumspect about such things? And how is it possible to know so little about history that you can't work out the downside to Donald Trump? It's hard to feel optimistic in the face of such things. Sign me - #nosocialmedia.
10
Nobody needs FB. I quit 2 years ago, don't miss it for a second.
Trolls/ Russia (and their imitators) are just weaponizing it to Destry democracy.
And Twitter not far behind.
Even IG is starting to be cesspool of ads I don't want. I'd rather pay service fee than get propagandized to.
3
Facebook's biggest problem is that Trump won the 2016 election, had that not occurred no one would have a problem with Facebook.
4
"Weaponization" of free speech is the perfect characterization.
When Zuckerberg announced last week that he wanted to allow Holocaust Denial postings, it was on the grounds that he was doing something for free speech, as if he were a government obligated to protect it.
That was disingenuous. Government is not obligated to give a forum for Sandy Hook denialism or 9/11 conspiracy theories in order to protect free speech. But FB is not even a government: it is a business that finds itself routinely giving a megaphone to some of the most weaponized speech around. It should be both accountable and financial liable for damages that result from its role in that destruction.
The answer is congressional legislation that establishes a minimum level of FB responsibility for damage mitigation and clean-up.
3
@Sequel
Who defines that speech is "weaponized"? Is any speech that does not conform to "progressive" dogma "weaponized"?
Unfathomable that Zuckerberg cannot or will not admit his role in this situation. He's a grownup running a huge worldwide enterprise - let's stop making excuses for him.
3
This shouldn't shock anyone. As Facebook grew, the conversation was always centered around the fact that Facebook had all of these users but no way to monetize the growth. They quickly realized, that what they had was personal information about their users and that they could sell access to them. There is nothing about their business model that is benevolent. Zuckerberg sells his users like McDonalds sells hamburgers.
4
The Zuckerberg story reminds me of all those science fiction stories I read as a kid, especially some by Robert Heinlein. Three blind mice. Silicon Valley is filled with two-legged blind mice that are out to find what they can nibble on for profit. We see in his quest and his business model a young man among so many of his ilk that lacks a true sense of history and morality. For him and his corporate confreres it's all about expediency and personal power. Any pretense to enabling millions to communicate on a social platform must be tempered by his quest for Big Bucks through advertisers. He wanted to get as many eyeballs on screens to convince advertisers to list with him. He has been successful but at the same time he has attracted a lot of flies and rats that exploit the platform for their nefarious purposes.
1
Ms Swisher, thank you for this thoughtful and right-on-point op-ed. It is indeed humbling to see how internet dialogue--at the outset so innocent (eg, the WELL)--has been weaponized in ways that stagger the imagination (eg Q-Anon). We can only hope that Mr Zuckerberg's education goes from the application of engineering constructs like not getting 'the same things wrong over and over again' to the tough decisions that we now need to make to shore up our democracy. It will take more than sitting around with a bunch of academics.
I go to Facebook daily and have done so for years. I have never seen a divisive ad or anything out of the ordinary. Sometimes I get ads for things I’ve shown interest in. Nothing that I find alarming, weaponized or whatever hysterical adjectives Kara Swisher uses. I’ve never met anyone who has seen these widespread weaponized attacks on democracy. I’ve never seen any major news outlet show how they negatively influenced people. The data from Facebook shows $150,000 spent during the 2016 campaign and, recently, 32 sites taken down. Hardly a massive propaganda attack. Maybe I’m not a target or missing something but this looks like a manufactured crisis. I’d like to hear from other commentators about weaponized Facebook ads they’ve seen that attack our democracy. I suspect this is like the Loch Ness monster. Everybody talks about it but no one has seen it.
3
Why would Mr. Zuckerberg spend his time weeding out fake news, when he can make money from ads, freely-given user data, clickbait, funny or hateful memes and gazillions of page-views?
We have all met the Facebook-product - and he is us. We have also met the enemy of truth and decency - he is also us.
1
Sorry, neither Mark Zuckerberg nor Larry Page nor any other tech mogul should be acting as society's nanny. They offer what people want.
It's just so much easier to point a finger at a fall guy (especially a rich arrogant one) than it is to point a finger at ourselves. I, of course, don't mean ME. I mean all those deplorables out there to whom I assign this, that or the other judgmental label.
52
@J. Cornelio Society needs laws, rules and boundaries. It's very easy to follow the monied titans which invariably means following debased and degraded ideas that bring down nations. Point is regulations need to be put in place to prevent the vary things we are embroiled in right now. Britain has taken action. Why can't we?
1
@J. Cornelio: I don't mean ME either, you snarky person, you. Made me laugh. Thanks.
...get behind me satan
Kara, did you really expect a privileged White male to get a clue? Zuckerberg is part of the most privileged class in America so all of these "negative consequences" as a result of Facebook are trivial to him because he won't be affected. The same is true for Twitter's CEO, who is equally clueless. Stop looking for the people least likely to care about these consequences to mitigate the damage their "creations" have wrought!
2
Sure, Zuckerberg is to blame for the cesspool that is Facebook. But it is the users who are to blame for its continued existence. If you have a Facebook account, you are part of the problem. People should stop complaining about it if they're not willing to do anything about it.
2
I'm confused what exactly the damage is? I think Facebook itself is negative, but I have no illusions that Zuckerberg would agree. Kara Swisher's hope that Mr. Zuckerberg would acknowledge the problems is somewhat bizarre to me. Perhaps the problem with an unlimited free printing press is that the most passionate an prolific voices get the most attention. Without the human editor, quantity consumes quality.
Facebooks problems are existential. You can't take some of it and leave the rest of it. If you think connecting people, and allowing people to comment, and share news, it is hard to imagine that there is a solution.
Holocaust denial has been a part of American culture, and perhaps some parts of European culture for some time. As has conspiracy theorists, and all types of wingbats and yahoos. I don't blame Facebook for these types of behavior, but rather I blame Facebook for devaluing proper media. Facebook has even pushed some formerly respectable media to go faster and become closer to fake news. But that is literally their business model.
This is an important piece, and hopefully more ethical people from inside Silicon Valley will weigh in publicly. What goes unsaid here is that MZ came out of the gate lying, with a half-stolen idea born of gutter misogynist inspiration and lust for billions. That he and and "leaders" of other "change the world" companies had little thought of the havoc they could potentially welcome to people's lives follows. Change does not mean improvement. MZ's effect on the world so far has been as destructive as the liar in chief in the oval, even if his intentions were not as malevolent. What will stop all the lying?
1
I for one would have no issue if Facebook just disappeared tomorrow. It wastes too much of people's time. I have a Facebook account but seldom logon. Years ago I assumed that letting Mark Zuckerberg have everyone's personal data to try and make money on was not a good thing. But its worse than I thought.
Can people who want to read real news just go to a newspaper's website and read the news. Better yet buy a digital subscription as journalists would like to get paid for their work. I see no need to read news on Facebook or Twitter, etc.
I just realized how one-dimensional Mark Zuckerberg is.
1
Methinks that Facebook and other sociable media like it need to be shut down several months (even better, years), before any polical activities, to everything other than the 1 or 1 sharing of personal happenings that have only pictures of cute kitties and doggies and aardvarks, and any other apolitical animals, including human babies. A violation of free speech, you protest? Not really ... you can state what you want on a non-easily mass broadcast medium such as an e-mail, a fax, or, even, post a hand-written letter to express yourself. Oh, and do not forget to muzzle that crazy fox thing.
3
Social media is DESIGNED to make money for its creators by underming our shared democratic values and replaching them with tribal warfare. As Edward Abbey described the American economic model, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell." And billions of people around the world are addicted to smart phones because exploiting addiction is what Apple is all about.
2
@Jay David I have a smart phone (Android), and use it 90% of the time as a phone, less often for texts, very little for Internet. Oh, and I read books on it when not home and I have a Spanish-learning app. I don't think I'm "addicted" to it. It's just useful.
Good for you... unfortunately you are in the 1% minority. PS. Nothing to do with you income level.
I couldn’t agree more, but in all fairness I think it should be noted that we were the guinea-pig generation as far as the Internet. It seemed so bright and shiny, and everyone jumped in head first. Who could blame us? Shopping, knowledge, instant communication, all without moving from the desk, the future is now. Who would have thought it would lead to a family of four sitting silently at a restaurant table all staring at their individual phones? Who among us is that prescient? We might also blame the people who took us from dial-up to wireless to 5G for our ills. The developers are culpable, but so are the users, in a relationship like heroin dealers and addicts.
Now we know. Now maybe we can wish there had been deeper thought and classes on Internet usage. Now maybe there will be.
2
If Zuckerberg is serious about protecting US democracy he should shut down Facebook for US users for a month before the election day of 2018, take the revenue hit for the good of the society.
6
This article filled up the space but ignored the 800 billion dollar gorilla in the room: Faced with a choice between limiting users who perpetrate lies and socially harmful alternate reality theories which would cut down the size of its market and ruin its reputation as a wide open platform, Mark Zuckerburg chose the money. He put his financial goals ahead of his ethics (always a hard choice for some...).
I think it is a character flaw, not a problem of youth. He is, after all, now past 30, has two children, and has done the public offering. He just lost both his chief counsel (leaving at the end of the year) and his head security man.
The rats are leaving the ship. I think it may actually sink.
If enough good, moral, ethical people, uninterested in money for the sake of money alone, leave the site, then Mark may be Lord of a much smaller universe. Being Lord is even more important to him than the size of his Universe.
It's hard to be critical of such a charming young (?) man who is disarming in so many ways, but he made the choice to go with Russia not the US Constitution. He's just another right wing money-mad computer nerd. Facebook needs to join MySpace and Yahoo on the racks of failed digital geniuses. They were not so smart after all - just thought they were because of the size of their IPO's.
4
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it” Zuckerberg didn’t know that he was going into a form of journalism, but he knows it now. History teaches us that every US election has had its share of what we now call disinformation since the first days, even Washington wasn’t immune. The media back then was broadsides and newspapers which published anything and everything. People believed what they wanted to believe and the race to manipulate people’s emotions was on. Over the years the medium changed but the manipulative messages continued.
Yes, the press graduated from “Yellow Journalism” to high ethical standards, but not all papers. The same is true of radio and television as they had their crisis moments. The new electronic media is now being tested by the same forces that want to use whatever is available to manipulate the way people think. Add to that fact: we are now in the Post Freudian age and we have the manipulation down to an almost exact science. We know how to use just the right modifier, noun, verb that will spark the reader/listener’s emotional core. In this realm emotions carry the day, not facts.
2
(Continued) What is happening is just another version of what happened before. The French Revolutionary government slandered Washington and Adams and other governments followed. It took Americans a while to deal with each of these foreign intrusions. Yet, we also have our own internal problems of political parties and groups with an agenda that spread disinformation internally and our elected officials aren’t above twisting the language or distorting the facts in order to elicit the emotional response they want from their base.
The users of Facebook could end the problem, but they actually like the emotional twisting.
Much like many sycophants of our present existence this reporter is infatuated with MZ. Almost as much as MZ is infatuated with himself. Somewhere in our dim past there is word for this, I just don't know what it is. The driving motivation of MZ is the same driving force possessed by many individuals of his rank, power. For MZ power manifests in money, read greed. Ms. Swisher is revealed in the article photo of her subserving MZ, he above, she bent and smiling. It is rather pathetic in this day and age of #me that even this newspaper of some repute doesn't understand the imagery of subservience. One observes on a workday morning in San Francisco the worker bees all arriving at the allocated white elite bus stops (near his fab new digs) to go and build MZ's empire of money. Has anyone ever asked MZ how much he made from the debacle of Cambridge Analytica? The answer to that may belie the lack of transparency in Facebook's initial response to this scandal. Sadly for Ms. Swisher and all of the other followers this particular empire will collapse on itself eventually, after all MZ, like the rest of us, is a mortal.
2
Facebook is just a reflection of its users and civilization overall. It’s a service that no one is forced to use. Facebook did not create the problems of a culture divided. Forcing Facebook to push what people see as ugly in society to the underground doesn’t make society a better place. When will people learn that suppression has dangerous consequences.
4
@John As a Jew, I would rather see Holocaust denial out in the open. You don't air out a fetid room by closing the windows, but by opening them to let in fresh air.
My absence from Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, what-have-you isn't noticed by anybody but me. My absence doesn't make a quark-sized dent into Zuckerberg's money.
As I write this sentence, I am aware of the self-contradictory nature of announcing this on a media platform. I will, however, indulge in it anyway-
I'm a random, free, unfettered neuron among trillions of the enslaved. Now, that has real meaning; come join me.
3
The best response is for people to stop using Facebook.
4
“I certainly did not see it coming, either, when I first met him, in the fall of 2005, although in hindsight the signs that he would get it really wrong were right there in front of me.” The blindfolded leading the blindfolded. I never liked Mark Zuckerberg and the fetishization as a wise beyond his years God-ling leading humanity to the best of all possible worlds heaped on him by those that should know better than to do that to a young and impressionable human. Facebook and Trump’s rise is directly linked to people with power and influence abetting them, then washing their hands of complicity once the ever present initial negatives are too painful to ignore any longer. Trump has already muted me on Twitter. Can’t wait to be banned from the NYTimes comment section to even things out.
Facebook is a sand castle beside the sea.
They are simply an electronic bulletin board.
You can do it all elsewhere and the younger folks already do.
They are relying on force of habit to maintain participation, or the weight of capital by buying the competition (Instagram).
They are not innovating. The offer nothing new or even improved.
I've read the most pretentious assertions about this company in the press, but this is only trying to sound relevent by rallying around big money either pro or con.
I repeat, they are not the future: they are simply an electronic bulletin board.
4
Ms. Swisher seems to want to make Facebook and particularly Mr Zuckerberg responsible for what society itself isn't made responsible for (because it can't be made responsible). Facebook is indeed a powerful platform for the good, the bad and the ugly. At the same time, it's not only Facebook. Let's toss in smartphones and instant communications, sprinkle in some cable news, add a dash of twitter and , hell, spice the whole show with the internet. It's all out of control, Kara, and even if Mark and his gang are involved all the way up to their bank accounts, and you're the judge (Hang 'em! Guilty!), who is the Police? Are you (is she?) suggesting that Facebook police itself? Do you (does she?) want the guv'mint to do the job? Fact is, nobody is going to get social media under control. It's society [that is], stoopid.
3
Two "explanations" of Zuckerberg's too-slow response to this crisis:
1) simple greed
2) the consequence of a lifetime of living in bubbles--economic, educational, geographical, etc.
The author's comment on not being exposed to enough of the humanities is also spot on. Are you listening, funders of educ?
2
Yet another tech geek who should have read Frankenstein. And a host of other humanities texts about the complexity of ethics. Couldn't be a better argument for the absolute necessity of the humanities, especially in a technological world.
6
If I was trying to influence people through Facebook, the Feds would be the least of my worries. The big problem would be distinguishing myself from the zillions of loonies already posting there.
2
Get rid of Facebook. There is no way to control it and it is Trouble. I never used it very much except to fight neoliberalism and that was a loss and look where we are. I feel the US is failing and Facebook is no help. In fact it will hasten our demise.
I had much the same reaction to the gossip on FB and laughed at how pathetic most lives are but I thought. This won't help. These people are not friends and they are not nice. How about picking up the phone and forgetting this website. Now I don't use it at all because I lost the password and can't get into it which is a blessing for me. I don't believe a word Mark Zuckerberg says about his innocence. He's a hustler and let him me by himself. In other words Reject him.
1
Great column. Living in the Silicon Valley bubble is not a healthy place to manage FB from.
No, Mr. Z. and his investors are not naive',they are really only interested in world domination and the monies that come with it. He really don't care 'bout nuthin' else.
2
Zuckerberg was a naive, spoiled kid then and he is a naive, spoiled kid now. He thought that money gave one the ability to understand human nature. Spend a day in any local courthouse - that’s real life with real people, and not the cloistered little world he has always lived in. We citizens are paying the price as Zuckerberg stumbles into growing up.
Much the same could be said for Google, Microsoft, and even Apple, though Jobs did seem to have a clue.
1
Then your question is why would anyone want Zuckerberg to be part of the solution.
4
Water is a utility. What would be the correct action if some people kept poisoning the water supply? Electricity is a utility. What would be the correct action if hackers blacked out parts of the grid? Or maybe Facebook is more like the telephone system? We would be outraged if Ma Bell was listening in our calls...but we enthusiastically share our personal data with all kinds of actors on the platform, from advertisers to political parties. Zuckerberg has said that FB is a tech company, not a media company. And malicious actors are utilizing its technology to do harm, and "poising the water supply". What is the correct action?
4
No one seems to remember that the original purpose of facebook was to eliminate risk from acting out the juvenile fantasies of its creators.
Let's say that again for emphasis:
Facebook was created to eliminate risk from acting out the juvenile fantasiesof its creators.
We are just beginning to realize that Facebook and social media have destroyed our privacy as well as our dependence on reliable and accurate reporting of news and our desire to seek the truth.
1
It is the BUSINESS MODEL! Ms. Swisher, you obligingly glide by addiction to the money and power as explanation for Zuckerberg’s refusal to change the business model. (Of course, we shouldn’t overlook his primary loyalty, to his investors.) Other commenters suggest user subscriptions as a more appropriate way to fund a utility. So, we should excuse him because he is an undereducated techie? Come on!
Robert Simpson
1
Every day, I grow more and more proud that I have never been on Facebook. Never saw the appeal. What a life-eater it seems to be for so many. Not to mention that I've seen of Facebook is more often than not inane. I don't care what you're eating, I really don't care what your kids are doing.
Struck me from the start as something the implications of which would not be realized until it was too late.
So here we are. Yet another reason people need to get their face out of their phone.
1
"The medium is the message" - Marshall McLuhan.
"The platform is the problem" - NOT M. Zuckerberg, NOT anyone in Silicon Valley.
“We have met the enemy and he is us” - Walt Kelly. Forever and ever, until the world ends.
1
I was the nurse manager of a college student health center when Facebook made its first forays into public consciousness. I remember, because we had a number of women coming to our facility in distress after being "shamed" online by this strange and disturbing phenomenon. Zuckerberg created Facebook for that purpose, as I understand. Maybe he has grown up and as a father now understands the harm and hurt he caused. But I would consider it just desserts if the world gave him and his poisonous brain child the boot.
I thought in free society we were allowed to read anything we wanted.Even lies or falsehoods.
2
After so many years as a cheerleader for (and beneficiary of) tech, glad to see the education of Kara Swisher.
"...he was a computer major who ... did not attend enough humanities courses...?" Definitely. All tech, no social responsibility.
"Or was it because ... the relentless positivity of Silicon Valley, where it is verboten to imagine a bad outcome?" This is a patently false and ignorant statement. When I began working at HP in the early 1980s, many software engineers (then called Programmers) were already joining an organization called American Engineers for Social Responsibility. Nearly every "programmer" I worked with then in my lab at HP became member.
We were already then discussing our responsibility to society because the work we did could contribute directly or indirectly to various Cold War issues.
At HP, engineers were told to always consider "What If" so that our software products did not kill, maim or ended up hurting our customers from all walks of life; from medical personnel to service members to business people.
Many of us in Silicon Valley were already actively looking at social issues and assessing our roles and our responsibilities.
Please do not "blame" all of Silicon Valley like we are a bunch of uncaring drones. That is at best ignorant and at worst socially irresponsible and no different than Trump inciting hatreds against media.
9
Good move, New York Times. Kara Swisher's two excellent podcasts (Recode Decode and Too Embarrassed to Ask) help me navigate learning about the fascinating but fraught tech world.
2
The internet, Facebook, other social media?
It appears to me worldwide, and even in the most advanced democratic nations, that the concept of political democracy not to mention free speech is a myth. It was a myth prior to the internet, but now we see how much of a myth when the internet, which allows each person to transmit "voice" from home to the world, is spoken of by virtually everyone as a major problem, even considered analogous to firearms, and needing to be controlled.
In other words, prior to internet a person was considered as having free speech, even though of course with little power to actually broadcast it, but now that the internet enables a person to actually realize free speech, it's suddenly considered analogous to a weapon platform and we can predict that because the technology will not go away the result will be that what will depart is free speech and democracy will increasingly be exposed as a sham.
America has various concepts politically considered hallowed, concepts such as liberty, democracy, free speech, that every person has rights. But every time a piece of technology is developed that increases the power of the citizen in these areas, guns for liberty for example or internet for free speech, it becomes "problematical" and we call for regulation. Because technology will never stop advancing we can only conclude that what will be compromised are all our sacred concepts with respect to America, the political conception of America itself.
1
Can we please stop imbuing wunderkinds of tech with special powers just because they created some whiz tech app that is valued at zillions?
There was ZERO reason to believe MZ could be a CEO of a global phenomenon. He exists as such because he holds 60% of the voting rights - not because he's the best person for the job.
12
What I'm really afraid of is that in 25 years or sooner, we'll be having the same conversation about artificial intelligence. Only it will be much, much worse. We never learn.
231
Based on my age and the ages of my direct ancestors at death, I will be dead within 15-20 years. And I can't say that I will be sorry to go. A decimated and overpopulated planet lacking most wildlife species, in which human tribes engages in constant, low-level warfare, filled with a billion migrants, is not a place I would like to live.
@A. Jubatus
That's what we will have AI for. Human learning will become irrelevant then.
@A. Jubatus, BINGO!
The most effective way to get MZ to do anything is for its users to disengage, either entirely or reduce their time.
Meanwhile he continues to compound the problem by not replacing their head of security, instead aggregating into the individual teams. That way there's no ONE person accountable.
Just as we prevent campaigners at our polling placing, we should require Facebook to shut down 30 days before each national election.
Finally, Ms. Swisher should write a column about the disappearance of Sheryl Sandberg who has only leaned back as far as possible during all of this scandal.
11
For a democracy to survive, it must have a free press. "Free' not in the sense the Facebook is free, but free in the sense that the press is not beholden to any person or corporate person, place or thing.
And the word "Press". It is was meant to be thought of as a singular noun, as in, "I own a printing press." Press in the sense that words like "fish", "shrimp", and—more to the point —"water" can refer to plural entities. A free press can never be a single voice—Facebook's or anyone's—it has to be a multitude of voices.
Money and technology are co-mingling to the degree that one, as in not many, person with virtually unlimited wealth can poison a local election to the point that it is controlled by someone far enough away to not understand in the slightest what issues need to be addressed in say a Wyoming, local election.
No, democracy needs to be abundantly plural. The few who don't think that right, should remember that a crowd can always guess with more accuracy the number of beans in a jar than Mark Zuckerberg.
4
Maybe Facebook users need to take notice of their own habit, and lower their expectations of the founder. The platform is about selectively sharing, or boosting egos—calling attention to achievements: “look at the great trip I just took” “ what my beautiful, smart kid just said/did”, “and here’s a great cat video I just found”. From what I’ve read, Zuckerberg hasn’t grown up either.
9
Zuckerberg would do well to read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars. The chapter about the Athenian navy’s campaign against the Spartans in Sicily would be especially appropriate. Anyone that has visited Syracuse and viewed the inner harbor and learned about the fate of the Athenians would respect the need to be more cautious, even prudent, rather than overly optimistic and naïve in their decision-making. On a visit to Syracuse, my wife and I could see where the Spartans and their Sicilian allies entrapped the Athenian fleet in the inner harbor and cut off its escape. They forced the soldiers onto land and into battle which the Athenians lost. We also visited the quarries outside Syracuse where Athenian survivors were made to quarry rock until they died of exhaustion. Zuckerberg should have studied more history.
To quote the bard of Baltimore H.L. Mencken – For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Many people think there are easy solutions to complex problems like disinformation campaigns. Our president is one of them. And for those who like conspiracy theories, Mencken’s myth of the bathtub, published in the “New York Evening Mail” in 1917, shows how gullible even educated people can be who fail to fact check a newsman’s commentary. Zuckerberg and company should study it and its long life. In fact, our president and his advisers would do well to read it in the context of understanding the impact of Russian disinformation.
9
Social media develops into Mob Media in the age of the Trump regime. Trump has set the role model for this with his daily outrageous statements and tweets.
The number of his falsehoods is itemized and analyzed in the book “The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year”, by Amy Siskind.
And our TV cable news degenerates into a Reality TV political mini series, with every tiny daily development magnified in detail before anybody even knows its significance, just to give TV pundit panels something to fill up air time 24/7.
All under the guise of upholding 'free speech' and exposing truth. But it’s creating its own reality that then creates public opinion.
It’s like the election fund raising chain. The media tracks the highest fund raising candidates for office, and they get the most media attention, while the lower fund raisers get less. The public reflects this in polls, then this leads to more money donated to the highest fund raisers, then the polls reflect this in popularity.
It’s a vicious cycle, that undermines our democracy.
The underlying poison of legalized big money politics is avoided.
4
I feel that they're starting to be more transparent to head off regulation. Europe is cracking down on tech and Democrats and made it clear that if they're ever in a position to do so they plan to heavily regulate these companies. It's less that Facebook et al have woken up to the dangers present on their platforms, and more of an effort to try to protect their bottom lines.
3
We are all getting an education. How many of us really saw it coming? I just read the NYT review of Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallow’s”, which was published in 2011. The Times criticized Carr’s pessimism vis a vis the internet because “the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind.”
We were all so naive and optimistic — all of us.
But at a time that we all should be getting an education in the humanities — especially media ecology, we have reduced the conversation to demonizing Zuckerberg or fearing the Russians. We are still not having the important conversations about how social media is changing everything and how we can reasonably approach that. Shutting your Facebook is good and well - but does nothing; Times readers are a minority and those here who are off Facebook (kudos) are going to be the exception unless something drastic happens.
People will stay on social media so long as their presence is rewarded socially or financially - no matter how pithy the bubke rewards are. I remember a time when drawing attention to yourself had zero social value - so folks didn’t draw undue attention to themselves. But now, one can reasonably hope to draw enough attention to themselves on social media and “go viral” and be told they are “famous” and to actually make hard cash off of it. So long as these rewards are built into the model, we will continue to spiral. This is the conversation we need to have.
6
This very clear and intelligent analysis gives me a feeling of joy! About a very grave subject. Thanks for your lively review of Silicon Valley's culture and morale.
2
Mark Zuckerberg attended Phillips Exeter Academy. The school's mottos are: Non Sibi ("not for oneself") and "Knowledge without goodness is dangerous."
Mr. Zuckerberg clearly learned some lessons well: he got admitted to Harvard. Other lessons, those rooted in Exeter's mottos, he seems to have missed or forgotten in his quest for success.
105
The Havard Business School developed and has promoted the idea that economic growth is not based serving human need or the cause of Progress, but rather on constantly forcing people to buy new and "better" technology because new is always "better."
Let's not forget both his parents are human service workers; children of counselors and therapists are often well adjusted. Still, the lot of human beings would eat their way into a dungeon if left to their own; regulation is always necessary for the equilibrium to take us forward.
Facebook's business is built around the concept that it is a passive conduit for others to communicate rather than a publisher of the content on its site. Right now the law seems to support that interpretation. But what if the law held Facebook accountable as the publisher of the content on its site. What if Facebook were responsible for libel when it publishes the lies of its users. What if Facebook were held accountable for damages attributable to the spread of misinformation? Under those circumstances, I'm willing to bet that they would much more carefully scrutinize the contents of what they publish. And my question is, why shouldn't the law hold them accountable?
9
@Bill EXACTLY right. Central to the issue is whether they are accountable.
@Bill
With the GOP in charge of law enforcement, it's not hard to see where this suggestion would lead, Bill. MSNBC and CNN would be charged immediately. Probably the NYT also. Fox would be found "fair and balanced."
What a pleasure to read this column, written by someone who truly understands the digital medium and thus has the credibility to sound an alarm about FB and other platforms.
5
Are we ordinary folks able to see these supposedly malicious Facebook postings so we can decide for ourselves how misleading or subversive we think they are? Just asking.
1
For Zuckerberg a platform to post denials of The Holocost or Sandy Hook is beyond reprehensible. It is a total abdication of responsibility.
13
Utility? We need water. It would be very difficult to manage without electricity and gas, for those whose homes use it, in the typical first-world home.
Facebook, on the other hand, is not a necessity. Want someone to talk to? Invite the neighbors over, join a political party, attend a house of worship. Want to know what's going on in the world? Buy a newspaper or subscribe to a magazine. To listen to music, turn on the am/fm radio.
I'm sick of hearing these techies and their minions go on about how they will try to make it better. It is now up to us. Close your accounts. The weapons only work when you open the gates and let them in.
16
How can any American still have a Facebook account, let alone spend one nanosecond feeding this unnecessary toxin? Swisher articulates the present, past but not the unknowable future of social media that 24/7 feeds off the worst corners of the human brain - the immature, arrested development and undeveloped areas that mirror those of the undeveloped Zuckerberg. While Boomers and prior gens were schooled in human history, growing up with strong family and peer groups, something happened in America to produce fragmented and disconnected narcissist Millennials that crave the chimeric drug high of hyper mediated black holes. With all their flaws, Boomers are optimistic but also misanthropic enough to grasp the obvious: The one dimensional myopic Zuckerberg has crafted his own bro kingdom with his own delusional authoritarian rules. And that's not a hospitable place to live.
Anyone can learn code and build a website or even platform. If history speaks to the present, and it increasingly screams at us, then the larger issue is what the heck happened to Millennials that they grew up so needy, socially awkward and minus the basic educated understanding that masses always genuflect to illusion but that pride, indeed, goeth before a fall.
One point of Swisher's: "That’s because it was based in the idea that Facebook was essentially benign." Zuckerberg is like so many males - benign themselves but striving to be seen as essential. He's a poisonous tech variant of the "empty suit".
2
I have only one gripe with this article. Swisher may "like" Zuckerberg, but this article uses descriptive terms that carry a very heavy implication of maliciousness. Zuckerberg should be held accountable, but this article goes a bit far with its analogies.
Consider the term "weaponized." To say Zuckerberg weaponized social media would be to say he took something relatively harmless and converted it into something intended as a weapon. But it is humanity that saw a communications platform, filled it with lies, purposefully spread those lies we enjoyed and proceeded to gorge ourselves on rage and bigotry. #bebest
Or there's the term "arm's dealer." Arm's dealers sell a product designed to be harmful. If it can't be used to harm someone, it's not working properly. That makes comparing Zuckerberg to an arm's dealer a dubious analogy. Zuckerberg is no more an "arm's dealer" than Albert Nobel, who created dynamite, to save lives in demolition, infrastructure projects, etc. (much safer than straight nitroglycerin). OTHER people decided to make it a weapon, something Nobel had not properly considered and regretted. Einstein regretted how his work was used as well (and would probably tear his hair out at today's state of affairs), but he did not "weaponize" nuclear physics and he was not an arm's dealer either.
Zuckerberg's power over Facebook means he has a responsibility to try to prevent it from being misused, but he never "weaponized" it. Humanity did that.
8
@Matt "Weaponized" seems to be the term du jour. It seems like every reporter needs to find a way to squeeze it in to his or her story. It's everywhere.
Having viewed Mr. Zuckerberg in the public arena lately, and his quizzical attitude to serious questions, I see a very flawed and flagrant attitude to the problems at hand. It's as though Facebook has never solved a true problem, ever. His magic company is under scrutiny, and he still cannot fathom the depth of the problem. His response remains shallow. This is a man-child wielding a weapon of immense power and destruction. Instead, his reaction is disdain. I do not have faith that he can lead FB out of this mess, at all. It's beyond his comprehension.
10
Is Zuckerberg really that naïve or is he playing naïve as a front as an explanation to avoid these issues because they would impact profitability?
I wish Swisher had expressed an opinion on this. She is not naïve.
4
@DJohn He is a geek from a professional upper middle class suburban New York family who had inordinate financial success very young. There is not much, if anything, outside of his own class/society growing up and now wealthy in silicon valley that he has experienced first hand. So yes he is that naïve. He sees other experiences much as many see tv shows and movies about poor people, foreigners outside of his comfort zone, other ways of life.
1
@DJohn
Just as likely as not he ain't naive so much as a disingenuous Midas who willingly contributes to the Plutocracy and oligarchy growing like kudzu.
How many more years do you wish him to enable him
to destroy America together with President Russia and the Russian Republican Party?
I often go to the comments posted on politicians' Facebook pages. It's pretty easy to identify trolls/fake users -- usually they post a vague picture of themselves wearing hats and then their actual profiles show little if any history and to the extent there is one, it's all commentary, no posting of anything to do with their lives. Surely Facebook could find these easily and remove them?
2
Ignorance that something untoward or unexpected might happen is often thwarted by one simple trait: Morality. For years Facebook saw the bullying, cruelty, and criminality within its pages and did nothing. Money has always run Facebook; it's been the primary driver since it took off. Morality took a distant place; a long way behind collecting and selling peoples' personal and often sensitive data for Facebook's enrichment.
There's always been an unwritten rule in the tech field: Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Facebook forgot that, even if it ever had that ethic. People complain about government's keeping track of people. That's nothing compared to what Facebook has been doing. And still, most people could not fathom the full depth that Facebook reaches into their private lives, which goes far beyond a few photos and likes.
Facebook took advantage of people's gross ignorance of technology. They knew they were doing it, yet did it anyway. No morality. And there is now no way for those people to know who has their information or how it will be used against them tomorrow or in the future, or by what country. People already do not get jobs, or lose their jobs, because of pictures or posts they wrote years ago, stored in sites employers and landlords use to check up on people.
Delete your stuff now. All of it. There is nothing that be trusted on the internet.
4
“You’d have imagined that all this time, and all the money and power he has collected, would have wizened him.” I can imagine a bit of shriveling as a result of the passage of time, but generally money and power tend to promote a more robust aspect.
1
Funny, but the reasons given in the article seem to skim over 'money'. Too much discussion of 'changing the world' etc. etc. and not enough about the cash. FB, and the other companies like it, are making more money than a person can even imagine. The way I see it, that's the engine that drives the train. You can overlook a whole lotta problems if that kind of money is rolling in. Just like a drug dealer overlooks the havoc his product causes, Zuckerberg overlooks his.
7
First of all, I do use Facebook, so a mea culpa is probably due. I have always however striven to avoid the sorts of terrible, race to the bottom behavior that has characterized all too much of the activity there. The combination of both the ability to carry on conversations with people you've rarely/never met and the immediacy of the exchanges seem inevitably to bring out the worst in some people.
More often, when face to face, we temper some of these impulses from an understanding that if we behave badly we may get punched in the nose, or suffer the cold disapproving stares of third parties within earshot. Of course not everyone is deterred in person either, and we can witness that anytime via the self-made surveillance culture we've constructed. I wonder whether regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would have been thrilled beyond their dreams by this phenomenon.
An an engineer evaluating this system with the premise that it isn't solely intended to be evil, the observed issue manifests as "excessive noise". This could be mitigated two ways. By reducing such noise, which is often considered as effectively censorship and results in a worse condition than the current.
Or we can try increasing the "signal". Any of us can do this, by carefully considering what we post, and by rigorous adherence to respectful interactions with others. Someone suggested acting online like you're speaking with your grandmother. Basically just observing the golden rule.
29
@Michael Miller You're gonna want a band-pass filter with that amp, lest you producer louder noise.
@Michael Miller
"Someone suggested acting online like you're speaking with your grandmother."
The problem is not the postings of those people who observe that rule. It is the postings of those people who do NOT observe that rule, which is the majority. And there is no workable way to get them to observe that rule.
Unless Facebook were to implement a mandatory 24 hour review period after which the user is presented again with their post and asked specifically "Are you sure you want to post this?"
Of course, Facebook user number would plummet by 90% after that and ad revenue would follow. Because ads all depend on impulse. The more impulsive the person writing poorly thought-out posts, the more likely that person is to impulsively buy things s/he does not need.
3
@Michael Miller: That's some great advice there.
Surely you can see why Mark might not want to issue a public expression of grief or culpability, given the monstrous potential for litigation.
3
I think the miasma of Facebook et al. was best described by Samantha Bee as “our techno-hell”.
4
When U.S. government officials get Facebook and other social media to remove content -- is that censorship? For some time U.S. government officials have been pressuring social media companies to do so. Many people support this suppression, including otherwise reputable newspapers, unwittingly supporting , or sometimes demanding, censorship.
The First Amendment promises free speech and press, but that won't stop them from pressuring social media companies. They give us the form of free speech and press, nor the substance.
3
@Ted Jackson: Yes, that's censorship.
One thing I have observed about Zuckerburg is that he has never been, in any conventional sense, employed. He hit the jackpot at a very early age and since then, hasn't ever had to answer to anyone. Far too young then and maybe even still, to understand that someday he will have to answer to himself, much less what has become more and more obvious, he's going to have to answer to humanity sometime and the sooner the better.
I'm on a summer hiatus from Facebook. The only thing I miss is Bloom County. If Breathed fixes the time lag on his website, I doubt very much I will go back. Frankly, I just do not miss it.
6
@Let the Dog Drive: MZ has 60% of the stock, but as the majority shareholder he is subject to the stock price and angry shareholders if his actions or lack thereof drive the price down. Or did you forget how capitalism works?
@KarlosTJ: and as the 60% owner, he can simply ignore angry shareholders - he is in control.
Not that the board or shareholders would ever go for it, but Isn't the solution, ultimately, to make FB a paid service? 2+ billion users at $1/month should cover it's operating costs, I would think. No ads. Problem solved.
10
@SNA ... At $1 a month, it would go from 2 billion to 1 billion almost immediately, but point taken.
2
@Bruce yeah, revenue would drop. Just seems like the ad-based business model itself has not been given enough scrutiny or criticism. Zuckerberg has repeatedly showed disinterest in pure profit, e.g. plans to give away his fortune when he dies. If he cares about society as much as he purports, he should consider a business model shift, rather than more bandaid solutions.
For anyone who's studied the history of technology, that Facebook would end up delivering not "global community" but a vast array of unexpected and unappetizing consequences is hardly surprising. What's surprising is that intelligent people like Ms. Swisher (whose journalism I much admire) didn't see it coming. Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman and Langdon Winner are among the relatively recent writers who recognized where technological power almost inevitably leads. Before them the likes of Jonathan Swift, Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson (later Emerson) and Henry David Thoreau were among those who raised the alarm. The tragedy is that we as a society have bought into the utopian fantasies of the technophiles who keep telling us that the more machines we invite into our lives, the better off we'll be.
34
@DougHill As a follower and contributor to Silicon Valley related journalism, Kara Swisher was the very first journalist to identify the Russian threat on Facebook and to confront their executives about this. It was so early, in fact, I wondered if she had evidence.
1
@Doug Hill: Yes, kind of like the 2014 movie "Ex Machina." Makes me shudder every time I watch it.
I have no social media presence. I am a 40 something professional and parent. My life is great without social media. Why do we need social media? Why do we subject ourselves to this unhealthy habit so others can profit? I recommend disconnecting.
88
@Chris NYT comments are social media.
I think you have properly understood the situation. Unfortunately, “social media” is better understood as Mob Media. Any crazy clown can quickly attract a million people to follow and fight for his or her delusion. QAnon is the latest manifestation. When some crazed world view acquires this level of acceptance there really is very little that can be done. Society unravels.
What is worse, I think the threshold for disaster is probably much less than a million.
31
@RM....Yes, Mob Media, in the age of the Trump regime.
Creates it's own reality that then influences public opinion, etc, etc. Then amplified on TV cable news daily, leading to more reactions and actions.
Question: how could all of this meddling have happened, without the active facilitation provided by the Internet and unconstrained social media?
It’s a question few seem to want answered.
Many liberals criticize conservatives for ignoring ‘the obvious’ conclusion that it is the gun, not just the shooter, which is to be held responsible for firearm injuries and deaths.
Time for consistency then: I would like my fellow liberals to cease ignoring ‘the obvious’ conclusion that it is the Internet, and not just the hacker, which is to be held responsible for this current threat to our democracy.
You want gun control? Fine, then you should have no issue with Internet regulations as well.
I have feeling this suggestion will not be well received, however.
12
@Erik L. I think you are right on - including the idea that gun regulation includes gun IDs and tracking of all transactions and since we are reaching across the aisle - the regulation of all weapon plans and 3D gun plans from the internet. Now take it one step further and move $200B from conventional defense spending and into cyber security at the federal, state, and local levels. Will conservatives buy in - doubtful.
4
@Erik L.
This is a false equivalency, though--and I am no defender of social media. The difference, of course, is that regulating the internet can quickly devolve into who is controlling the message ( a la China or other controlling interests). Also, the Internet was not expressly designed to kill things. The tool has another purpose. Guns, while certainly used and enjoyed by some people for target practice, have always been built to kill things. So....I sense that this is an axe you have to grind, rather than an actual point.
2
@Alexis Hamilton How literal do we want to be? Guns were undeniably developed as weapons, yet there is also an undeniable military origin to the Internet, developed by ARPA to provide command and control after a hypothetical first nuclear strike… so this communications capability could be used to kill those responsible. It is an unfortunate fact of history, as Jared Diamond might aver, that the desire to kill others has spawned a good many innovations, and the Internet is no exception.
Yet swords can be beaten into plowshares; much more obvious application in the case of communications technology, but unique. Guns may put dinner on the table, or they may be used to hold up a store, or worse. The Internet can be used to bring joy to distant friends/relatives keeping in touch, or perhaps amusement in the form of cat videos and video games, let alone the business opportunities, and countless other positive applications. The Internet can also be used to steal identities, destroy lives, cyberbully people into self-harm, or perhaps to control the drone which, yes, kills people.
Both technologies are tools, and how they are employed makes all the difference; the tool doesn’t know and cannot care whether it is used for good or destructive ends. Yet in both cases, the ends are facilitated by the tool: no gun, no shooting, no Internet, no Russian hacking. Also, no axe to grind, just statement of objective fact. I merely suggest both tools should be subject to sensible controls.
Kara does not understand what the thing is. Facebook, Twitter, etc., are the complete disintermediation of communication coupled with elimination of time and distance between speakers. Everyone in the world can hear everyone else at the same time. Not figuratively. Actually. In any previous century, I suggest, if the same instant global communication appeared, the same result we see today would occur. The genie is out and about. When technology has removed all barriers then society's options are: remove the technology, or fix the speakers. Stop or impeded the flow. Or create awareness of the result of instant global communication. Neither is likely to happen until human consciousness evolves. If it can.
9
@Joe No, all of those new systems are still mediations, especially when they pretend to be transparent. And they do not eliminate time and distance between speakers: they increase our capacity to delay and be absent to each other (Evidence? Family life, any busload of people, restaurants, cars and texting, etc.), in exactly the same proportion as they allow us to be "immediate" and "close" when video conferencing with our children or grandchildren or friends (provided it is a continuation of real, loving, physical presence). The new techniques are not fundamentally different from ancient temple systems, including the one in Jerusalem, where proximity to the gods that gave hope for a better life was managed by specialized priesthood via sacrifices and prayers.
2
@Joe
Um, yeh, you don't seem to understand who Kara Swisher is. There are few people with the credentials to deep dive and write on this subject.
Every generation creates and enjoys a new medium. A salient issue is not just what toxic mess Millenniums have created and embraced with their witless participation trophy egos predicated on the premise that everyone on the planet is interested in them, their dog, what they ate for lunch, etc...but what this will spawn with Gen Z who are currently in elementary and high school.
Facebook's failures are but the tip of the iceberg, within an industry which has not merely lived with, but thrived upon denial for too long. Only a few years ago, an article like would've been unthinkable, certainly in this venue anyway: Silicon Valley would surely lead the way to the betterment of us all. What could go wrong?
Many stories lately have bemoaned the QAnon conspiracy theory evolving beyond the net. It reminds me of Wilson and Shea’s farcical tales of the Illuminati from the 70s. These were masterful satires, constructed from historical set pieces with an air of legitimacy: secret societies, esoteric/occult authors like Crowley and Lovecraft, with winks to iconoclasts of the era drizzled throughout. It was anarchical performance art, and the stories took on lives of their own, beyond the authors’ wildest dreams; many people to this day fnord believe it all to be true.
Early Silicon Valley true believers were convinced that such manipulation would not be possible in the age of the Internet. Surely, such conspiracies could never bloom in a world where everyone had the truth at their fingertips! Sighs.
Since 2016 we have seen the effect of all these ‘inconceivable’ schemes, and the vulnerability of the medium to manipulation and malfeasance. Yet the discussions are always very matter of fact, as one might describe how a murderer dispatched his victim with a bullet, yet only casually mentioning the gun.
The Internet *is* the gun. It is time to control it.
12
@Erik L.
The internet is a medium. What needs regulation is businesses on the internet. Same as will be the case with business utilizing the next medium in another decade or so.
1
@Margot Colloquially it is a medium, technically it is a protocol; wire fraud does not require a business.
Zuckerburg’s refusal to see the full scope of the problem inhibits Facebook from searching effectively for a workable solution. It’s also how almost every other public company CEO and/or Board of Directors addresses serious problems - deny, deflect, minimize. The idea that the buck truly stops here, with full acceptance of responsibility by corporate leaders, is a notion of integrity and adulthood whose time seems to have passed.
6
@Rill Zuckerburg's comments and control are different from every other media in that he totally controls the whole web site and the whole company because he controls all the stock even though he does not own all the stock. (He's smarter at intricate legal maneuvering than he is at media or social media.)
He was seriously at fault in the run up to the 2016 elections and he avoids being chastized for it because gullible reporters like Kara Swisher - sigh, blush - find him so boyish and attractive and rich. He betrayed the United States by not informing the FBI of Russian Intelligence operations on Facebook to swing the election. I know this from watching his legal staff and Zuckerburg being interview by Congress on TV. Why don't NYTimes writers know it? They are charmed by Zuck's boyish persona and - let's face it - stupid.
FB is free speech. Like all news, once invited, it is the option of the user to keep it or stop it. I read the NYT not the WSJ .If I happen to see the WSJ, or FOX News or hear Limbaugh or O"Reilly, I realize it is my responsibility to myself to separate the fiction, deductions and unsupported conclusions, as is or was with Clinton, Obama, Saunders, and MSNBC. Let's address the ignorance, racism, evangelism, and imperialism, in and facing the electorate.
1
Mary Shelley published a book about this in 1818.
8
If we are surprised to find out that Facebook got weaponized... Will we be just as surprised to find out that AI will get even more weaponized? Is this 'guided missiles and misguided men" 2.0?
Is this more of the willful denialism that historically gets lazy democracies into deadly and disastrous situations?
1
@WJKush Wait until your Tesla drives you straight into a truck entering the highway from a side road in broad day light with no rain...or wait that has already happened.
Don't permit driverless cars ever. It's just to save money for rich people and put people who need money out of jobs. And all computers are subject to sudden failure, mis-programming, electrical glitches, humor error, and electrical storms on the sun.
We don't need to go to driverless cars and we should not do so.
1
The intentions of Mark Zuckerberg and others regarding Facebook are irrelevant. Whether these people are good or bad, well-intentioned or not, is irrelevant.
The fact is that the algorithm that drives Facebook is the profit motive. Everything is subservient to that, just as the market fundamentalists say it should be. It is the engine that drives the amoral machine that is Facebook. As long as humanity has outsourced its morals to the free market algorithm, our long-term future is very poor. There needs to be controls on the algorithm -- the horrible "regulations" that the right-wing market fundamentalists abhor.
4
With his stock, FB, still down, seems like the price of his education so far is around 100 billion!
5
I can't believe that someone this organization composed of tech gurus said: "Hey, Mark, you know we are really vulnerable to bad men/women intent on writing bad things."
1
Facebook, Google and their imitators must be held accountable for the damage they've done. And they must be regulated.
They knew from the start that they were manipulating human psychological weaknesses, consumer inadequacy, and the deep need for ego fulfillment.
They are the same old marketing parasites and vultures—dressed up this time in "tech".
It's time they paid the world back for the lie.
And it's going to take more than an awkward, sideways "sorry" from spineless Zuckerberg.
9
In the same manner that Trump did not create divisiveness in America, or for that matter racism, misogyny, or nativism, but merely provided a very public and “acceptable” outlet for such things, Zuckerberg did not create fraudsters, manipulators, and truth deniers, he merely provided a universal platform for their expression. I am not convinced that Zuckerberg (or Musk or other techie billionaires) really gets it yet. I think all these tech boys have fallen in love with themselves – their creations, social power, and wealth – and do not appreciate that the ruthless, amoral, and greedy opportunists of the world have already hijacked the entire operation. Is the situation even fixable? I have no idea, but my guess is probably not.
10
@Jason Shapiro
Of course the "situation" - editing - is fixable. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle (to a lesser extent...) does it every day!
Since time began, media has had to be edited. Putting "social" in front of the word "media" does not change the obligation to make sure that lies are not perpetrated and aimed at certain folks in certain places to overthrow the rightfully elected government of the United States by an enemy foreign power!
This is not as complicated as many responders make it out to be. But first Baby Boy MZ has to step up to the plate and spend a few billion dollars out of his hundred billion company.
1
Facebook IS a utility. A lousy, private utility. It was never about anything but money.
9
Excellent article. Facebook is the kind of thing a young man would invent. And now, we're all stuck with a tool that uses us. While imperfect, government regulation is the only answer; certainly not the marketplace or Zuckerberg's ethics, or lack thereof.
2
@Sara - Or, people could just not use Facebook. Period.
1
The "move fast and break things" bro-dudes simply don't have the maturity to understand what they're doing and why it's harmful. We've given them the keys to a vehicle they can't possibly control, with no leadership or vision or guardrails.
7
@Elaine M
They have the maturity, but greed outflanks maturity every hour of every day.
Increasing AI is simply the latest face of the vast transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the upper, coding classes.
@San Francisco Voter I disagree that they have the maturity.
The only person greedier than Zuckerberg is Trump. Why would Zuckerberg do anything about foreign powers meddling in his own government’s elecions? Why would Trump? For that, they would need morals, a sense of responsibility, and patriotism.
3
It is time to shut down Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg created it when his brain was on the cusp of full development. It was an effective tool for a socially inept young man.
Over the years it has inadvertently shaved down peoples' social skills.
Unfortunately Mr. Zuckerberg lacks the life experience and intelligence to move forward on the issue of safety for our elections. It is time to shut down Facebook and move on.
10
Yes, you wonder if Zuckerberg stayed in college long enough to read Frankenstein - or learn about the Tuskegee experiments - or hear anything at all about the dangers of letting words become weapons to incite mobs, lynch mobs, euthanasia, genocide, etc etc etc.
What colossal naivete! And Swisher is right, for it still to persist 15 years on is just utter arrogance, fed by wealth and Silicon Valley solipsism.
In his insulated self-adoration, Zuckerberg comes close to Trump. In the damage he's let happen, through systems he constructed and regulatory negligence he slipped past, he's actually worse.
Let's hope that being slightly smarter than the bloviator in chief, Zuckerberg will, however, be able to change.
Then again, We the People and our legislators could just change it for him. For both of them. And the Russian horse they rode in on.
25
@T.L.Moran Kara Swisher's notion that Mark Zuckerburg is just naive is wrong and plays into his Boy Wonder persona myth.
Zuckerburg is from a well educated, upper middle class family. He excelled in school well enough to be accepted at Harvard. He knew the humanities by going to good private schools and by being Jewish (The Talmud).
Kids in kindergarten know right from wrong. Zuckerburg is arrogant and covets being Lord of the Manor. He could make more money without editing lies and misinformation for ulterior motives. It saved him a lot of staff and programming costs.
Going after bad as well as good actors maximized the number of Facebook users - essential as ad targets to maximize revenue.
So Mark chose not to eliminate bad guys and lies from his site. Deliberately, according to Congressional interviews of his legal staff. He knew the damage he was causing.
He's a grown man with a life long control of one of the largest web sites in the world.
American public media - WaPo, NYTimes let their readers down by not publicizing Russian interference during the run up to the 2016 Presidential election. They were thrown off by the stale meat of Hillary's 31,000 emails - and old topic.
Probably the Clinton's got $100 or $200 Million through their political and charitable actions. The Trumps gained billions and is using Donald's Presidency to steal billions more. Our old fashioned media needs to up its game and quit being such pushovers.
1
Like all else in existence, Facebook has dramatically compacted an miniaturized a society that was already there.
The grandparents were a postcard away, if you wrote one. Now they are sending hearts on Messenger and looking at your friends. They don't love their grandchildren any less or more.
The weirdo were there too, but you seldom saw them, as they were scattered across the country, not gathered for a beer in the comment section.
Fake news - the real kind like QAnon - was also there, but in misspelled mimeograph newsletters, not on colorful Facebook pages with legitimate looking typeface and logos.
I have more empathy for Zuckerberg's dilemma than Ms. Swisher has. Regulating speech, whether by government or by wealthy millennials, is a perilous proposition.
The solution is complex but begins in schools, from the earliest ages. Not charter schools with no accountability or transparency. In public schools, run by educators, governed by local citizens. They can learn media literacy, the principles of journalism and where to check for the truth.
A well-educated citizenry can distinguish news from propaganda. Such people can look at Facebook and distill the nonsense from the informative.
Back in the day, when idiots were separated by miles instead of milliseconds, we could walk by the National Enquirer in the local store and just chuckle.
I'm very wary of trying to control civilization by ordaining a few people who can pick and choose for the rest of us..
6
Delete your accounts.
Stop allowing yourselves to be made into a product for a ruthless corporate juggernaut.
Take back control.
36
I'm failing to see the point of all this hysteria, if you don't like it, don't use it. That's what I do.
4
The point of all this hysteria is that FB has become a very effective tool to manipulate gullible, badly informed people to help an obviously unsuitable man to become US president. That is a lot of damage.
2
@Mark F All of those of us who live in the United States or any where influenced or affected by actions taken by the US government are affected by Facebook.
You cannot escape it no matter whether you are a Facebook subscriber or a desperate citizen trying to restore democracy in the US.
2
I've been following this story casually, so I don't know how evasive MZ has become. But I can't fathom what Ms. Swisher wants, with her "gangly as you'd think" snark. Media have been weaponized forever. Absolutely everybody saw the alt-Right coming as it lumbered downstage, and noted the trolling that drives the well-meaning away from every platform. This "Silicon valley created a monster" narrative is deeply unhelpful. Even trusted and self-acknowledged media publishers (read CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN) got played in 2016 and became hapless transmitters of vitriolic nonsense (read the Trump campaign).
Is there an answer that MZ is resisting? Yes. Official censors moderating everything on Facebook. Is anyone, including Ms. Swisher, owning that plan or any other? Nope. Let's get serious.
7
@Charles
Zuckerberg cannot have it both ways any longer. Utilities are regulated, as are businesses. There are laws for each. Facebook is one or the other.
4
FB was unfairly targeted by politicians. Dealing with the attacks on American democracy by Russia and other hostile powers should not be the responsibility of private companies (no matter how large). The feds should be leading the charge, with private companies and individuals doing their part. But I see no willingness on the part of the Trump administration to tackle the issue. Once again, the go-to response is to yell "Obama!!!!!!!!"
2
@John All media companies, social and otherwise, have a social and moral purpose not to perpetrate lies and misinformation to overthrow the United States.
There is freedom of the press, and freedom of information. But there is not the freedom to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater when there is not fire - because it can lead to mass crush to get out which can kill and mutilate people.
The same thing holds true for social media as for any media - an obligation to make sure that information spread causes no harm. Zuckerburg reneged. So did the NYTime reporter. There is no difference in ethics and law between social media and traditional sources of media.
3
Frankly, I think Zuckerberg, and others, should be considered pariahs in the tech community, for their obvious intention to use Facebook's members, but suggesting that they were only trying to unite people, and do good deeds for all. Lipstick, on this pig, is not doing the trick. I don't know why anyone is still buying this phoney baloney, or using their "service." Seems risky, at best.
35
“Mr. Zuckerberg stuck with this mix of extreme earnestness and willful naïveté for far too long.”
Yeah but when it comes to Facebook, aren’t the vast majority of its users all “guilty” of this? I’m reluctant to pin it all on Zuckerberg, even though it’s his baby.
The real dilemma he faces, and how he will ultimately be judged, is how willing he is to forgo ever rising profits and share value for the good of our democracy. And that’s because, yes, these malicious uses of the “utility” have enabled bad actors to do untold damage to one of our most cherished democratic institutions, free and fair elections.
Maybe he is still as arrogant as you describe. That doesn’t relieve him of his responsibility as the CEO. But it seems another article is called for, discussing what, if anything, our government is doing to detect and stop such practices.
This is one of the costs of living in a country that values free speech. It’s ok for two people to hold different opinions on the same subject and “talk” about those opinions on social media. It’s not ok for people to create fictions out of whole cloth and publish them with the intent to harm our democracy.
It’s a very difficult challenge. Zuckerberg is responsible for correcting it, but so is our government. To date, Zuckerberg has done far more than our own president to uphold and protect our constitution, even though that responsibility pretty much all belongs to the president - who to date has done nothing.
3
@Hey Joe The editorial challenge to Facebook is not inherently different from the editorial challenge to every non-social media company: the need to perpetuate the truth not fictions.
Facebook does not start from 0. It starts from what edited media already does - like require paid ads to be labeled "paid ads."
There are software fixes for editing which are quite effective. Facebook is cash rich. There is no excuse for Facebook not cleaning up the lies and directed misinformation on its web site intended to overthrow the government.
The IRS has heuristics to identify tax cheats. Facebook has a lot more operating funds than the IRS (I think...need to check that...). Facebook has no excuse for not cleaning up its content and stopping the use of the web site to throw elections in the US. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal do it all the time - on a tiny fraction of the budget for staff which Facebook has!
We are continually blaming others for our own failings. This is part of the 'nanny' state we have let into our lives the past decade or so. (I speak from the left not the right) FB to me is a place to send emails to people who don't check their regular email addresses. To believe or even to read it for current events is an absurdity beyond the pale. Anyone who uses this platform for their news, or for information, other than what their grandmother ate for breakfast, deserves the increased ignorance, intellectual obtuseness, and vapid thinking FB creates.
3
@boji3 Because of the way in which the Facebook site was setup, maintained, and generated profit, no user is exempt from being exploited by misinformation. All users have all of the information they generate on every digital device in their lives acquired by the Facebook servers.
You need to learn more about how Silicon Valley monetizes its innocent pleasures like keeping up with friends and their new baby photos...
1
Says they've weaponized social media, civic discourse and 1st amendment. Maybe.
But what's really weaponized the 1st amendment is the Supreme Court decision that corporate/billionaire mega donations to our elections are 1st Amendment-protected "Free Speech." We the People have little defense against such a political weapon. Could we get an op ed on that someday?
And I'm curious--- what is the difference between Face Book comments and NYT or W Post reader comments on the issues/events of the day?
This is an interesting op ed, but too wordy and over written. I thought our media talk was getting shorter in the age of FB and Twitter. Maybe op eds are actually getting longer.
3
@Meredith This op ad article is entirely too soft on MZ.
Three chances and you’re out! Mark Zuckerberg used my data unwisely one too many times. And lied about it. Cambridge Analyticta was a huge step too far...and the bad news keeps coming.
I will never again trust him and his companies to do the right thing. It’s time for the government to regulate these giant behemoths.
It’s likely too late for us users. Our data is spread all over the Internet. It is a full time job staying ahead of it and attempting to delete as much as possible. What are we to do?
It’s time to disengage.
Click. Click. Click. Unwinding from Facebook is a freeing experience. Try it for yourself.
23
Apparently I'm one of the few people on the face of the earth who never had a Facebook account, despite the entreaties of a few friends who used to tell me how great it was. Really? What's so great about posting vapid comments that are truthfully of no interest to almost anyone else - and what's so great about pretending to have seemingly multi-hundreds of "friends" who you've never met? Frankly, the whole thing seems like Junior High School-level behavior.
12
@Susan L. There are billions of non Facebook users. Facebook has about 2 billion users. There are 7 billion folks in the world. Therefore, there are 5 billion non-Facebook-users.
I also am among them. But I have observed first hand how dumbed down Facebook tends to make its devotees. All that convenience for their own wills and beliefs!
The only way to save our democracy, keep our water drinkable and air safe to breathe, while also preventing the planet from burning up due to climate change, etc. etc. is through better EDUCATION. Far too much time is wasted on FB, Twitter, etc., and too little time spent teaching (and practicing) critical thinking. We are now a nation of impulsive screen viewers who are proving Goebbels right: "If you repeat a lie often enough," he said, "people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." Even more so on Facebook.
12
Add to paragraph nine, where you list cultural functions or resources “weaponized” by Zuckerberg, please add, “He commodified personal lives and details like an identity thief to pander to advertisers who badger their audiences on every digital channel until they are drained by the relentless sales.”
Bring adverts back to Washington’s forehead at Mt Rushmore? Let’s. Put tea and salve cream on the White Cliffs of Dover? Sure.
This selling of ourselves and our “content” (always watch what euphemisms hide) will continue to monetize our lives into Zuck’s bank account until we get tired of being sold.
3
Kara, thank you for telling it like it is. Too many reporters, even in the reputable news media, get caught up in the hype of Silicon Valley and end up drinking the Coolaid lest they be left out of the loop or be denied access.
11
@PK Kara totally glossed over the Boy Wonder's pecadillos! She certainly did not "tell it like it is."
Social media is not different from newspaper media. Both are communications among people. Both have an obligation not to perpetrate lies and overthrow the government of the United States.
Facebook knew they were perpetrating lies, knew that the Russian government was behind the lies (ads were paid for in rubles!!!!!) and failed to act. The FBI should go after them as well.
Kara gets to the heart of her beef later in the piece. Zuckerberg should have known and prevented the Russians from posting the exact same garbage all of the troll farms in Eastern Europe were doing using clickbait posts (much like ReCode) to drive traffic to sites where traffic exploited clueless advertisers. What Russia was doing was totally indistinguishable from what the trolls were doing that Summer and Fall. There were all kinds of articles about troll farms in Moldova etc getting paid by driving traffic with politically charged posts. Somehow that has all been forgotten during this Russian witch hunt. Methinks if Donald Trump would have lost, Ms. Swisher would have zero issues with Facebook. It's alarming to watch the left scramble to regulate speech and platforms. They want conservative voices silenced. Facebook is in a tough spot with the speech police, under the guise of concern about Russian hacking. At least Ms. Swisher is now on a platform where her agenda can't go entirely unchallenged.
3
Actually, I always laugh when I read reports about the high tech industry and the interpretation that reporters have about it. I have worked in high tech software, both in startups and in established companies, since the mid 1980s, and the truth is that all good tech companies "disrupt" by taking mostly existing technology and positioning it in a way to take revenue away from existing players. Think UNIX systems displacing mainframes, Internet Explorer replacing Netscape, LINUX replacing established UNIX players, Amazon web services replacing traditional IT functions, Uber replacing taxis. In each the new winner takes money / revenue from the old established loser. The problem with Facebook is that its business model is ad driven, and highly automated (guaranteeing high profit margins vs. low margins when you use lots of people). The business model is to take user data which is freely shared by the users and sell it to advertisers that place ads. Facebook today could stop most of the abuse by third parties if it simply would verify identities. The issue for Facebook is that this might cause significant revenue loss. So, it's not that this can't be fixed, it's that the company suddenly might not be as profitable any longer. Only regulation will fix this. Just like fuel efficiency standards fixed the rampant car pollution we experienced in the 1970s.
19
@Brian Will I also had the same thought -- "Only regulation will fix this". But, in my mind, I go a bit further. FB might (might, I'm not sure that verification is simple) have the power to stop the interference (at cost), as a publicly traded company, it has some obligation to do so without suddenly becoming unprofitable. So, it seems to me, FB and the other companies should get behind the regulatory fixes, which would oblige them to make the fix, without suddenly ceding the space to someone else.
3
@Brian Will Great comment by Brian Will about the computer industry and how it monetizes existing info using 0's and 1's.
There is no way we can pass protections for any thing until we have three branches of government with Democratic majorities, including the Supreme Court.
America can get this done by voting, but the voters need to learn what's going on so they can vote in their own interests.
1
@blueaster The FBI and Russian intelligence have a lot of software which would be helpful to Facebook. Cambridge Analytica and Robert and Rebekah Mercer are also experts on this software. It's out there. Facebook needs to use it.
It's all about money - increasing costs and decreasing profits.
Isn't it possible that Zuckerberg knows that Facebook has a limited life span and needs to extract as much as possible before people move on? The corporate behavior of this company seems to be consistent with that theory.
10
If a mere fraction (let's say 200 million) of you Facebook users (in the fullest sense of the drug abuse term) agree to divide into 4 teams and then each go dry for one week per month, Facebook may make an earnest attempt to fix their problem. But apparently FB users don't have that initiative let alone capacity, even though the platform itself provides the perfect platform for unionization. Nope, can't do that because we're talking about addicts, people who actually get hostile to innocent bystanders being harmed by addiction and who'd like users to fix their problems.
4
@Doug Bostrom
Wow, just wow. I am a regular user of FB and have re-connected to people I went to grade school with and friends who moved away. Without FB that would not have happened. I am not "addicted" to it and you generalization that the users are addicts is utterly ridiculous. There are people who are on it 24/7 I am not one of them and neither are the people I connect with. Please keep your blanket statements to yourself. It's offensive and off base and quite frankly uncalled for.
"The Social Network" was the movie about Facebook. Roger Ebert said, "..the film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive."
If a film was made about Facebook fomenting the biggest domestic crisis since the Civil War, the movie would be bigger than the aforementioned and "All the President's Men" combined, and then some.
An MSNBC person recently called Facebook, "a Frankenstein." History will hold Zuckerberg and Sandberg accountable.
Going into the 2018 election, it is foreseeable that Facebook could further wreak havoc on democracy. For Facebook management not to take drastic actions now would be criminally negligent.
9
@Wordsworth from Wadsworth, if the "Social Network" movie was even half-true, the havoc wreaked on democracy and the crisis are all thanks to then-Harvard president Larry Summers refusing to bring accountability for Zuckerberg's arguably deeply unethical actions in the "birth" of Facebook.
3
FB should take the biggest part of this well deserved blame, but social media on a whole all of them reddit, tumblr, pinterest, IG, twitter, youtube acting completely oblivious and basically interpret 1st amendment any which way they want.
How is it possible that someone like Alex Jones (InfoWars) dirty ugly conspiracy theories have a platform on FB and others social networks?
Isn't obvious that freedom of speech should not equal freedom of hate speech, freedom of spreading lies and misinformation, that what they do very successfully in Russia, Turkey, NK, China, Venezuela , etc...and now using our social media platforms to annihilate every democratic institution that we still have.
With our gullible sometimes naive, overworked and unsuspecting public disinformation spreading like a wild fire.
Here is the question shouldn't social media be regulated according to well working
model of MSN with high standards of reporting. How come this mega rich company allowing their own created products to have a free uncensored wild ride on a WWW ?
Very important to have this conversation and take as our life depends on it.
Because it really is.
6
Zuckerberg does not speak the truth.
10
That's what happens when arrogant children think they can do grownups' work.
4
Everybody loves to hate Facebook. Nobody is forcing anyone to be on the platform. It is people who give the platform its power and only people can take it away. If everyone can suck up and go without their addiction to Facebook, the platform loses its power. Remember Yahoo? Yeah, it used to run the world once until people turned elsewhere for their fix.
2
I don’t get it. When, as happened this week, some minor baseball player is discovered to have made some stupid tweets when he was a teenager, he has to apologize abjectly and frantically to keep himself from being thrown out of his profession and becoming a nonperson. Al Franken had to resign from the Senate because he allegedly patted someone’s fanny, and because of other allegations that were never investigated. Many of Franken’s past colleagues (and a lot of the voting public) tried to save him, but it didn’t work; once accused, he was toast.
But Zuckerberg endangers western democracy with Facebook, and he doesn’t even get a slap on the wrist? He’s barely lifting a finger to keep the Russians from stealing the 2018 midterm elections. His cooperation at a congressional hearing was half-hearted, at best, but nobody seems to care, because he’s a dynamic young innovator and CEO (and cute besides). He’s still admired for playing in his Silicon Valley sandbox, without regulations and regardless of the consequences.
This is disproportionate; it just isn’t fair that some get the social death penalty and others aren’t even touched. I don’t care whether Zuckerberg winds up in legal trouble or not. But if he doesn’t put on a full-court press to clean up Facebook (or allow someone else to do it), then he deserves to be a nonperson, not the hapless baseball player or Senator Franken.
31
@Constance Warner Thank you, thank you, thank you - for straight talk! Just my thoughts as well.
We are not alone. Facebooks 18% drop in value on the stock market last week is an indication that we are not the only people concerned about Facebook's long term future. Investors in its stock are also getting cold feet.
Those are numbers that can actually carry some weight with MZ and the Facebook Board (including Peter Thiele). Officers leaving Facebook are also selling their stock...
1
@Constance Warner: Agreed. I saw this on the news the other day and was blown away: "Facebook is in a state of constant deletion. The social network released its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the first time on Tuesday, detailing how many spam posts it's deleted and how many fake accounts it's taken down in the first quarter of 2018. In a blog post on Facebook, Guy Rosen, Facebook's vice president of product management, said the social network disabled about 583 million fake accounts during the first three months of this year -- the majority of which, it said, were blocked within minutes of registration. That's an average of over 6.5 million attempts to create a fake account every day from Jan. 1 to March 31.Facebook boasts 2.2 billion monthly active users, and if Facebook's AI tools didn't catch these fake accounts flooding the social network, its population would have swelled immensely in just 89 days." from https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-deleted-583-million-fake-accounts-in-...
@Constance Warner
Facebook endangers democracy? This claim warrants evidence - not just that there are trolls, but that they pulled in people who weren't already going to vote their fears.
You want to know what really endangers democracy? An ignorant electorate.
And when you can lose by 3 million votes but still be declared the winner.
No one has the answer to these concerns. The reality is that social networks were introduced to provide a new, instantaneous social forum for the sharing of thoughts and ideas, but now we know how easily they can be used for propaganda and the spread of divisive messaging.
I don't believe there is any solution to these problems without infringing on the original purpose and value of these platforms. We cannot expect Facebook, YouTube or others to take public responsibility for the censorship of the content they carry. That's our job, now and forever, so if you suspect that the content you're seeing is intended to mislead you, it's your responsibility to decide what to do, not Facebook's.
4
@Randomonium
There have been a few articles written lately about how these companies are using techniques for manipulating /"addicting" people to using their sites. While it is certainly true that,as with physical addiction, an individual can stop, we don't, generally, condone someone who is providing the means for the addiction. Putting sugar in front of people constantly is likely to lead to their eating it, even though the "choice" to do so remains technically theirs.
@enhierogen - This is what keeps people drinking Coke and our democratic government from deciding if they should sell it or you should drink it. It's our decision, and once we know that sugar and caffeine are addictive, we have to be the ones to decide.
I would add another thing to this insightful critique. Companies like Facebook, Uber, and Google became the mammoth, outsized entities they are because of the economic model in Silicon Valley.
Venture capitalists are willing to invest billions in these potential "unicorn" companies––but only on the expectation that the company will go forward with a take-no-prisoners mentality, wiping out all competitors and expanding to a global scale. Any CEO who seemed unwilling to conquer the world at any cost would not succeed in luring the really big investors.
In that kind of economic ecology, the pressure is simply immense to throw out concerns regarding ethics and the public good. It's not coincidence that Zuckerberg has so belatedly started talking about these destructive aspects of Facebook: he is addressing them only because the uproar about the destruction is starting to threaten the bottom line.
He has not been naive; he has been holding out as long as he can so as to justify the company's extraordinary market valuation. For all its talk about helping humanity, Silicon Valley is rooted in the most predatory aspects of capitalism. Nothing matters but accruing profit at the largest scale possible.
45
@Nancy B - An additional component of this destructive economic model: Facebook's ownership structure. Like those owned by founders at many other technology companies today, Zuckerberg's shares come with outsized voting rights, cementing his control of the company for the foreseeable future. Under the best of circumstances, it has always been difficult to fire an under-performing or insensitive CEO, but in Facebook's case it seems nearly impossible.
4
@Nancy B
Yada, yada...
So we forgive Mark, right, because of the pressure this poor man has endured.
What that leaves is aggressively overhauling Silicon Valley's, and America's, perspective on business, curtailing corporate rights and privileges, and instituting a desperately needed round of robust regulation and oversight throughout the system.
And moving profit a little way down the list of priorities.
I'm good with that.
You're right, though.
He has not been naive: he knows exactly what he's doing, and doing it with gusto and intent. Which makes his smarmy mea culpa and lying rationalizations all the more creepy.
2
I've reported many fake memes to FB over the past few months and guess what? Nothing. They've yet to be removed. Others here have said the same.
If they refuse to do the light lifting and remove the low hanging fruit (the very obvious fake memes), I don't expect they'll do much of anything else. Perhaps they don't care or they don't have the staff to do it. Or both.
17
Ms. Swisher's insights on the industry she has covered for over a decade are fascinating. But she has left out a critical component to this gordian knot "how we got here"- capitalism. And reaching into those old college classes in history, economics, and politics, I don't mean the Adam Smith kind with a marketplace that existed in the context of a community (instead of the post-social-media vice versa) - but of the malignant, unregulated sort, where the fraying of democratic checks on the market began decades ago, while bankers evolved from boring managers of "utilities" to gamblers, the decline of worker protection and money increasingly bought access to power through systematic, deliberate policy changes. What kind of society has people with a *billion* dollars when so many have nothing? What could you even do with a *billion* dollars except horde it and clamor for more like an unchecked cancer? Sure Silicon Valley was started by dreamers of utopia. So were inventors of pharmaceuticals and builders of widgets. It is the same, repeated story. This voracity for clicks and "monetized eyeballs" in the context of a deeply unequal society brings us then to our philosophy and literature classes--a tale of greed. FB, youtube, etc, despite their brilliance and idealistic workers, live in that same marketplace, courting advertisers, politicians, despots the same with lax reflection because those powerful algorithms were built to optimize only one value: money.
45
Dee--Boy, Howdy! Excellent comment! "Malignant" is the best word, I can think of, to describe Zuckerberg's money manufacturing invention. I doubt that he was ever a "dreamer," except "I wanna be rich; how can I game the system, and take advantage of the unsuspecting?"
3
Good piece by Kara Swisher.
She is mostly always spot on the pulse of the tech world.
I have worked in the "Valley" off and on for a long time.
I've seen Zuck clones and wannabes for decades.
Zuck asked Swisher if she thought he was an A**hole.
He's much more than that.
He's a plagiarist and digital thief.
He had to pay off the Twinkle toe twins for stealing their code other wise FB never would have floated.
Zuck is right about one thing, FB is a utility and it should be regulated and taxed accordingly.
Personally I have never used and will never use FB.
I find it a dire excuse for social engagement.
I do see the utility in business brand extension.
One poster wrote, its the users that are the problem. That's skirting the real issue. Like Kara Swisher wrote, the platform bears enormous responsibility.
This is a byproduct of when eyeballs become the only the currency for pigs at the trough investors.
30
@Futbolistaviva
"One poster wrote, its the users that are the problem. That's skirting the real issue."
Please continue, what then is the real issue if not those who give the medium its power? Are you saying that advertising is the real issue? Digital communication? What, exactly, is the real issue if not the ignorance, biases, and credulousness of the users?
2
@BlueWaterSong
There have been a few articles written lately about how these companies are using techniques for manipulating /"addicting" people to using their sites. While it is certainly true that,as with physical addiction, an individual can stop, we don't, generally, condone someone who is providing the means for the addiction. Putting sugar in front of people constantly is likely to lead to their eating it, even though the "choice" to do so remains technically theirs.
@BlueWaterSong
You still don't get it.
Like I said the platform bears enormous responsibility and yes even the ignorance, biases unmitigated greed and credulousness of the lords who invented and rule the platform.
I guess you don't understand how platforms create tools to ensnare users.
Hope that helps......
I've never understood how SO many people couldn't understand the full implications of Facebook. But then, by age 30 (a while ago), I'd read every novel written by Phillip K Dick. The moral to the Facebook story: When "thinking outside the box" it pays to consider both utopian and dystopian positions.
252
Simple answer: just shut it down
9
@Vic
Agree 100%. JUST STOP USING IT.
1
@Vic
Why shut it down? Because you don't like it? Never used it? How about people expand their horizons and knowledge and realize that not everything they see on FB is real or the truth. If all of you people get your news from the internet I pity you.
First let me say I've never been on FB and never will. I have always thought this "cute" college dorm room game//stunt, gizmo was for kids and it has never grown past that. Until now, when the bad adults in the room have taken it over for their own purposes, far beyond what a t-shirt wearing college kid thought his toy would ever do. It was a toy, gone bad. And we who now seem to think it's God, the Oracle, the Fountain of Knowledge, are stupid. Really? How could we ever think a toy is the Truth. So all you people go for it, the toy grows up badly, the kid gets filthy rich on your dime, and what do you get? Not much, nothing of value that I can determine.
15
@just someone
I'm not a Facebook user and consider it dangerous and vicious.
However, many lonely people rely upon it daily as their main social connection. It has taken the place of a lot of human to human contact.
1
Facebook is a media company and should be held to the same standards regarding the content it publishes as the other media giants. I believe Facebook should be held accountable and act accordingly -- it certainly has the means to do so. On a separate note, so glad to have Kara Swisher at NYT. These are complicated and nuanced issues, and Kara is uniquely situated to lay them out for us, even if they don't satisfy the need for simple black and white answers and directives. With her deep knowledge of the industry, history, and people, there is no journalist better at holding Silicon Valley's feet to the fire and educating all of us in the process.
22
@ldw97
I find Kara Swisher naive, not very knowledgeable about computer programming and bots, and way too soft on Mark Zuckerburg. Aw, shucks, he's just a boy who doesn't know much about the humanities because he left Harvard after only one year.
The amount of humanities you need to know to be admitted to Harvard is far beyond what most Americans know.
Kara Swisher is a swooning teenager when it comes to Mark Zuckerburg. He must have paid for lunch...
1
Why are "daily ...ethics debates about the fate of humanity" a description of "hell?" I guess what Sartre said may be true: Hell is other people. Well, I guess that as usual, the company in hell will be more interesting that the population of the counterpart.
31
@Silvio Nardoni Hell is other people who "like" superficial solutions to complex problems in a platform where like-minded people can can amen one another for their folk wisdom.
I recognize that not all people on FaceBook fit that description. But there are enough to create the appearance of a universal zeitgeist.
Facebook was originally formed on promoting links and likes, which is provably addictive and sucks information out of users. Then it went public and became a machine for delivering eyeballs, which necessarily forces collection and sale of information as private as possible. Then they launched app development to battle other takers and the cell phones, which allows unrestricted use of that information and addiction. Then they launched the fabric, which brings denser recognition and surveillance tools to the mix. Somewhere in that mix, they launched sale of targeted ads with anonymity and impunity for the purchasers of those ads.
And now we have a monster. But the monster wasn't built on gee whiz wonderfulness that is the public face of Silicon Valley, no matter how many walks or podcasts Kara Swisher does with the supposedly naive Mr. Zuckerberg. A lot of it was ruthless. A lot of it was provably demeaning to the people who used his creation. A lot of it was intentionally slanted in favor of no accountability for the people who paid for and used the information Mr. Zuckerberg's company collected, against those whose information it really was.
All this has been wrong for a long time, and some of it was done knowing it was wrong.
This isn't the education of Silicon Valley and Mark Zuckerberg, it's the exposure to the world of a culture which pretends it doesn't know anything that would cost it a buck.
30
All of the things the bad actors are able to exploit and weaponize with Facebook are also the core concepts of Zuckerberg’s business model. So anything that changes will have a direct impact on the bottom line. Facebook is generating billions in ad revenue due to the precision of its micro-targeting algorithms which work quite well. Unfortunately it appears that many of our aging politicians in DC are clueless on these concepts. It all goes right over their collective heads. Mr. Zuckerberg may have to destroy Facebook in order to save it. On the other hand, interest in Facebook may trickle into oblivion soon as the next new shiny object takes its place.
2
The big STAR "inventors" in SV are higher-ed drop-outs, self-assessed too-smart-to-bother-with-college individuals. The engineers in SV who work for these stars are privileged, curated, pride-of-the-family individuals, large majority being prized males. The absolute righteousness is pretty much inherent.
4
While I like many things about this article, the use of "weaponize", even once, is unfortunate. Its meaning has evolved into "used something in a way that I do not like", and it is the last descriptor in the escalation hierarchy before resorting to profanity or all capital letters. Of course, since almost everyone everywhere is writing to maximize attention to their issue or stance, such "escalation" has zero impact on anyone who has a different or undecided view of the issue.
These companies did not turn electronic posts into weapons. They were, however, happy to profit from the activities of various forms of bad actors and to keep as much as possible away from authorities. "Utilities" seems to fit - a willfully ignorant provider of a service. Better and easier than a giant email distribution list for sharing jokes or dubious political assertions, but frankly not all that different.
When new industries evolve, we have often ignored their social consequences. Mining damaged land, heavy industry caused pollution, painkillers caused widespread addiction. Did these industries all have amazing benefits? They did. Does that mean we should not have acted differently? It does not.
Social media will always be a "Wild West", and someone should take steps to reign it in. The obvious and technically easy step is to refuse political ads and to advertise that any political content is of unverified origin. Craigslist cut its "Personals" section; Facebook can step up and cut politics.
4
This is appalling. Having made billions, Mark Z now has an ethical duty to sink billions into security and saving our democracy.
4
Zuckerberg is in way over his head. The platform has gotten away from him and I don't see anyone taking things seriously enough to get it back.
His phony naivete is a product of self-preservation and corporate greed.
It's a broken spigot spewing toxic ideas and information into our daily discourse and like an oil rig despoiling a landscape or body or water, it needs to be capped until it can truly be managed.
60
My mother was a big believer in paper letters because, when viewed as an opus, they proved (displayed or tested) the character of the writer.
Is writing code similar?
Perhaps we are all beginning to appreciate that corporations like Facebook display their fundamental values in their coding.
Compare the values Zuckerberg displays in his interviews, for which he's been forgiven because he's young (of course time changes that ... and have his displayed values changed?): arrogant, intellectually callow, focused on "winning" by enabling thugs and bullies (but always describing baby photos and smiling grandparents), and with no evidence of character, honor, moral rectitude or integrity about recognizing how his invention is destroying us all.
I'm thinking Facebook should get a "time out" -- at least until more thoughtful grown-ups figure out how to get it under control. Yes, many folks will be (somewhat) inconvenienced ... including the Russians. How much do we care?
12
I don’t want to generalize, but most of the people working in Silicon Valley won the “Life Lottery”; they have smarts and they come from good families that had the ability to afford PHD’s from UCLA, CalTech, MIT, etc. What this winning brew lacks is the common touch, true empathy and an understanding of the nuances and complexities of human life. You simply can’t properly learn about those things when you are being groomed for dominance in the world of ones and zeros.
Before the “Tech Boom” there was a reason being called a nerd was a disparaging term because it meant that you pursued certain topics at the expense of being immersed in the ups and downs - the adventure- of life. Why climb a mountain when I can take a picture of it and share it amongst my friends that see the world the exact same way I do?
The fact that so many people share their lives on platforms overseen by such people is frightening.
18
@Dudesworth As someone working in the Silicon Valley watershed, I have experienced winning the California lottery. But it's real estate not just computers. The real estate will always be here with the great climate and thriving economy - science and art combined, and the great educational institutions. But the computer aspect will be supplanted or equaled as little Silicon Valleys start up from Kolkata to NYC.
All new technology and manufacturing has its golden, heroic period and then subsides or becomes widespread. We are in the widespreading period now.
The new area for interest must be preservation of the remaining natural environment and environmental resources such as fish, air, and fresh water. And every place must start perfecting their knowledge and reponse to global warming to save the earth and us in it.
To bad there isn't a web site for saving essential things rather than selling stuff we probably could get along without.
1
Good piece. Good hire.
Facebook helped elect Trump. What else do you need to know?
2
Ms. Swisher is thoughtful and writes well, and has the singular virtue of admitting she isn't perfect. The latter is an astonishingly rare attribute among denizens of the technoworld. And yet.... "Move Fast and Break Things". "Privacy and Honesty are outmoded concepts". "If people die because of what we do, that's just the price of building community worldwide." All of those come from the mouths of Facebook senior management, including Zuckie. How can anyone profess to be surprised when things go bad?
4
I must agree with other readers here: people "are" the real problem, not the platform.
How many people do usually produce interesting content (for you, not themselves)? Facebook could be regarded as a microblogging tool.
But people has used it as "look how cool my fake holidays have been" weapon against everybody else.
People (and companies, accordingly) have perverted social media platforms into Personal (or Corporate) Marketing Platforms.
3
Utilities are regulated.
31
@Tiler And journalism is as well, with a code of ethics and standards that reputable journalistic establishments struggle with in the margins but not as long established ground rules. (And yes, the margins have become bigger, but they are still margins.) When technological companies claim that these debates are new or claim "daily hell of ethics debates about the fate of humanity" this reeks of hubris and inexperienced youth. You are not new to these debates tech people and Silicon Valley, and you will find that the borders of the answers are the same as reputable journalistic entities have come up with over time. For example, see Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
By any standard, podcasts or videos of Alex Jones are a no-brainer, they are not truth and in fact cause direct harm to others, take them down.
Why is Mark Zuckerberg being left to divine what to do all on his own? Set up a panel of experts to advise the government in terms of establishing appropriate rules/regulations/laws to moderate platforms like FB before it is too late. Does it take a Harvard education to figure that out?
10
@Blue Moon
"...before it is too late..."
We're way past "too late", and new rules or regulations intended to put the toothpaste back in the tube are not likely to succeed.
As I see it, what started as a semi-innocent, nerdly prank (to rate the hotness of fellow students) grew into a cynical advertising enterprise based on selling user data. That's why I never signed up for an account.
FB executives seem, finally, to be taking some responsibility for the way their platform as been used. Good. But it's hard to see how Zuckerberg et al could have predicted, for instance, abuse by Russian trolls or intelligence services, and harder yet to imagine what good rules or regulations would do at this point, other than lag behind the latest developments by a few years or a generation or two of technology.
2
There was nothing difficult about predicting that Facebook would be used to distribute false or incendiary content. There was nothing difficult about predicting that a terrorist would use an airliner as a missile. There was nothing difficult about predicting that painkillers would create an epidemic of addiction and the related criminality. Many people find it way too easy to just say "oops" after the fact, or lack proper incentives to act with caution. That this is a common error or character flaw does not make it any more excusable.
1
Zuck's sluggish reactivity is the very opposite of innovation. One of the most common engineering sayings is, "When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail," and yet, as often as the Silicon Valley crowd says that, they still keep falling into the trap. Clearly greed is encouraging them toward the easy solutions and easy money. But as engineers - not to mention, supposedly moral human beings - they should be ashamed of their technological laziness and lack of vision.
26
I vote for "weaponized" as the most overused word of 2018.
6
People never respect things that are free. Facebook users have never had to pay a fee to use the website, and as a result no one respects it. As soon as you charge a fee for an internet service, its quality goes up. Angie's List? Better than Yelp. Spotify? Better than Pandora.
If Facebook decided to start charging users for their membership, I think you'd see the discourse start to improve pretty quickly. Not to mention you wouldn't have to worry about how much dark money those pesky ads are laundering.
4
Haunting!
Of the Facebook founders, it may have been the Angel Investor - Peter Thiel ("Godfather of the 'Like' Button") who best understood the power of social media platforms:
'If we take Rene Girard’s mimetic theory seriously, the consequences for the way we think about social media are potentially profound. For one, it would lead us to conclude that social media platforms, by channeling mimetic desire, also serve as conduits of the violence that goes along with it. That, in turn, would suggest that abuse, harassment, and bullying – the various forms of scapegoating that have become depressing constants of online behavior – are features, not bugs: the platforms’ basic social architecture, by concentrating mimetic behavior, also stokes the tendencies toward envy, rivalry, and hatred of the Other that feed online violence…'
3
Spot on.
Zuckerberg is getting praise (from legislators) for agreeing to take down some accounts. Why? He doesn't deserve praise. He deserves out contempt. The reason they are doing something about the trash that they allow on their platform is their profit. Zuckerberg lost $16 billion dollars of his own personal wealth last week. He didn't just get religion. He is doing what they can to stop the bleeding.
8
Facebook should initiate a "Facebook Prize", to detect bad actors, with a $10M award for detecting say 10% more than they are currently. Put the collective power of the world to solving this problem!
5
Facebook was created to allow a totally free exchange of information, with no limits on content or ideas. A noble, high ideal it was, something worthy of a college aged nerd.
Mark Zuckerberg might have been the smartest person in the room, but he's probably never been the wisest in the room. He put into effect a communications system of unprecedented power but with absolutely no moral limits.
Like an anarchist, who having achieved his purpose of eliminating all forms of government, then complains the bad guys are winning, Mr. Zuckerberg expresses surprise that the bad guys have overrun his creation.
13
@L.E. Mark Zuckerburg is also a skilled actor.
All utilities, including Facebook, must be regulated. End of discussion.
The good news is that Republican lawmakers can be persuaded on this point. Let's keep pushing!!
4
I used to think these guys were naive, but no longer. You can track down the vicious suppression of any idea they might police themselves, that was overhead, and not to be tolerated. I just got a note that Facebook will donate $5 to a charity for my birthday. What a bunch of guys so thoughtful.
There is a touch of irony here in that the administration will separate Latin children from their parents as part of a “zero-tolerance” policy to control the borders, but will not lift a finger to prevent the hacking of our electronic media to support far right-wing political causes. Sorry Judge Ellis: collusion
4
Much of Silicon Valley's model is to disrupt, meaning they would build upon an idea without much insight into the long term consequences of that idea. Take Uber, or ride sharing, in general for example. San Francisco is now overly congested with cars because everybody and their siblings are coming into town from far away places to drive so they can make a fast buck. But neither do Uber nor Lyft care because their employees are shielded from the spectacle they've created by eating free lunches in their companies' cafeteria, never setting foot into the city they've decimated with their disruption. The same can be said of Facebook. None of these ideas have made a world a better place. We were fine before them and we'll be fine without them.
7
...plus: they never intended to make this world a better place. All they intended for can be read in Marx’ “The Capital”. What is “new” to their “economy” is to avoid the middle man that might coincide with your very neighbor (or you).
I know Kara Swisher focuses on technology, but I'm not so sure this is much different than many other colossal companies/industries where the profit machine rolls on for the owners & investors, but negative impacts (environment, job losses, hollowed out communities, decline in civil discourse, etc) get socialized to society at large. This seems to be de rigueur for 21st Century capitalism.
2
There's a rich history of mediums that were used to influence all sorts of social, political, economic, etc phenomena. From Marat's tabloid, "Ami du Peuple" during the French Revolution to Goebbels' use of the radio in the 30s/40s to Obama's Tweets... some good, some not so much. Is Facebook or other similar platforms really that different? While I'm very indifferent towards Facebook & Zuckerberg, it seems this is yet another example of wrongfully shifting blame away from personal responsbility and towards something else. This is no different than in 1792 - either you choose to read AND believe or you seek multiples sources. The unwashed masses will be swayed either way.
58
@Robespierre As a historian, I agree with you. However, there is something to be said for the magnitude of Facebook. It is fast, global, and with a format that allows it to be so highly saturated with information and disinformation that it is an original beast, something apart from the other platforms for propaganda that you mentioned. I think that is why we are having this discussion. Also, as for the “unwashed masses,” many people, of all socioeconomic and education levels only rely on one source of information and can be easily manipulated. I’m sure that phrase was used more to add drama than anything else, but I would be wary of its meaning.
1
@Robespierre No different than 1792? There are obvious qualitative and quantitative differences in digital communications and social media like Facebook.
Facebook and Twitter have reached a critical mass so that now Ma and Pa Kettle constitute their very own national broadcasting company. And many of them are under-educated, benighted, racist, and unedited.
Yes, the unwashed masses have always been swayed. The difference today is that they are the ones doing the swaying.
2
@Robespierre Personal responsibility is a fine thing in theory, until you take into account that personal irresponsibility has to be paid for by those around you.
1
I would like to ask those here who are piling blame on Facebook for social ills, exactly what action of theirs earns your blame? It's an honest question because I've never used Facebook so I don't know. I have a hard time seeing what they do besides facilitate communication in ways that allow biases to be exploited. Kind of like every other medium from newsprint to radio to television to every kind of social media. And especially advertising payloads. Is there something unique about the way Facebook exploits and profits off of this? To me all of these media are used in this same profiteering conflict-baiting mode by lots of corporations, of which Facebook is one. This seems like scapegoating - just wanting to have someone to blame instead of facing the societal issues that create fertile ground for this exploitation, which has been going on for millennia.
10
It is very telling that Zuckerberg would use the term "utility" to describe his creation, so let's see how good of a utility Facebook actually is. Ordinary utilities are constructed to provide some simple and consistent service to subscribers, like clean water, low-pressure natural gas, electricity at a predictable voltage, and so on. What they deliver is controlled very tightly, which is why we don't usually have to worry about sewage coming out of the faucet, severe variations in voltage, or anything else that could be harmful. Real utilities worry about that for us.
Facebook, on the other hand, is just as good at delivering targeted misinformation as anything else. If the public water utility operated this way it would allow anyone to pump whatever they liked into the system without checking anything until enough subscribers reported a problem.
So Facebook turns out to be a lousy public utility. Zuckerberg liked to present his creation as a content-neutral connectivity provider, but that misconstrues what it actually delivers, which is an elaborately personalized information feed, a publication for which the publisher can't take responsibility. There are too many inputs to keep track of.
I fail to see how this design can be redeemed.
9
How very timely and pertinent this article by Swisher as we face another election and knowledge of others at work to influence beyond their legal or other means but by subverting the rules of the game. Or the rules heretofore among gentlemen of the Fourth Estate and others w/in the Western/enlightened nations. Yes, all were naive along w/Zuckerberg, and still are as we move into CARS W/O DRIVERS and other so-called future innovations w/blinders firmly attached. Quite sobering. I liked the comment about the lack of the humanities as part of Z's Harvard "education."
1
I don't disagree that the education of digital CEOs is happening late and on the world's dime. I have a couple of recommendations to add nuance to the discussion.
First, danah boyd and the Data & Society Research Institute have done excellent work documenting how these problems aren't new. There are research-proven strategies for dealing with media manipulators and bad actors. There's a wealth of lessons on ethics, philosophy, technology, and media that we can work with right now - some countries are leading by legislative example to protect privacy, stop hijacking of the news, and protect elections.
Second, "Twitter and Tear Gas" by Zeynep Tufekci offers a different take on digital media's runaway weaknesses - and strengths. The people who leverage these technologies include activists, resistance fighters, grassroots movements of all kinds of causes - benign and malicious and everywhere in between.
My final point is that we're all getting an ethics education on the world's dime right now - and there's no reason to be passive about it, waiting for CEOs to get it right. We are participants in the digital media landscape: creating, sharing, manipulating, filtering, customizing, and also having influence and a say on how technologies are made, used, changed, regulated, and discussed. Whether we're employees, freelancers, or social media users, we can't afford to wait around for others to learn ethics and hand it down to us.
5
I do not "like" Zuckerberg or facebook, BUT this is a service that several billion (!) people want. Social media somehow is being held to higher moral standards than main stream media. Consumers have to be educated and aware that just as Washington Post is Jeff Bezos's paper and WSJ is Murdoch's, Facebook can be subverted by wealthy individuals. It would be fantastic to have a media, web-based on paper-based that is free of bias, but this seems impossible. How do you achieve that? Who will be doing the regulation?
9
Facebook is defining how we view a technology platform's role as Entertainment Provider vs. Vital Communication hub. The Phone was 98% communication with a 2% Dial-a-joke type entertainment value. TV, Radio and Movies were 100% entertainment platforms. Facebook blurs all lines and we have not found our footing. Not being on Facebook means limiting one's ability to communicate with certain groups and organizations. Relying on Facebook for news is irresponsible based on known gaps in due diligence. Every person must be responsible for their own communication and entertainment universe. We can no longer just plug in a phone or turn on a TV and just drift.
3
A fine take but there's also the responsibility of the users - those millions of people who willingly turned over their digital DNA and information intake to a man whose callow narcissism and greed were the subject of a major motion picture EIGHT years ago. His "privacy" tools? Still an intentional maze.
The salmonella risk was written all over this free lunch from the start.
33
I agree with the thrust of this article; to add to it, I recently read about Zuckerberg fearing 'first amendment problems' (not an exact quote, but the spirit is correct), if Facebook tried to regulate its content.
This is entirely wrong.
The first amendment doesn't apply here. It applies to Congress, not Facebook. Facebook can change the rules about posting content anytime they want. Zuckerberg could change the rules, and he should.
34
The problem is so huge and potentially harmful, it requires a huge solution: from September 1 until after the election, the only thing Facebook users will see are postings from their friends. No ads, no sponsored pages, no nothing. Just stuff from friends -- human friends. And you can't add friends during that period.
I really don't care what the effect is on FB's bottom line. American democracy is more important.
109
@Brian Prioleau
I have serious doubts of the short or long term efficacy of Facebook's new 'n' improved tools to "help" users track and better control their Facebook addiction. It is Drucker 101 that the goal of every company is to make money via retention of old customers while gaining new customers. I also have serious doubts that Americans under the age of 45 can or even want to kick their habit. We might just have to call it day on them and work to wean Gen Z off the false e-verse of social media with in real life connections. Everything else digital is either commercial or predatory, with a relational buffet of actual information sites.
@Margot
Yeah,the stuff is happening already, the election is like 93 days away. It is power tools and chainsaws time. No automated "scurrilous content remover" is forthcoming, though I am sure they are working it hard. The real problem is incentives: They make lots of money from ads, etc. during election season and it is hard to say no. So we have to say it for them, and enforce it with an ad embargo.
Just as we can't rely on charity to address all our nation's ills, we can't depend on business people, however involved, to fix the problems they made.
Government acts for the people (in theory). Government regulators should take care of these tech and data problems.
49
What a bland and uninteresting piece which goes nowhere in terms of an opinion either way. Zuckerberg, has proved to be a ruthless exploiter of Facebook members and therefore society at large on a global scale by monetising information about Facebook users and needs to be called out for that. There is good reason why regulators are considering how to pull Facebook in to line. Zuckerberg will continue to promise reform and obfuscate the issues to defend and expand the money making machine. The answer may be to force a change of business model which bans the sale of any user information in all the various forms available (irrespective of consent) and forces Facebook to charge a fee to users. That will make it operate like the utility Zuckerberg thinks it is.
67
@CRW Swisher could have condensed the whole thing into these two sentences: Mark Zuckerberg is naive, always has been and hasn't changed much at all. He's put us in harm's way and we are in huge trouble.
4
The unhappy truth of social media is that we've remade communication to reflect what this brilliant but unformed manchild thought the best mode for human interaction. It was the best mode, for him. For the rest of us, not so much. Sure, Facebook and company have been worse than negligent, dazzled by their own creations and indifferent to consequences. But it seems to me there's plenty of blame to go around, requiring us to consider just how much responsibility we as unquestioning consumers share for the outcomes.
41
@Nancy Lederman A few years back I started a facebook page to chat with friends. And for that, you propose that I and my friends are somehow responsible for facebook having become a vehicle for electronic warfare against the United States? You need to fill in a lot of blanks to make that argument comprehensible, much less forceful. But, gee, if I'm responsible for destroying democratic ideals worldwide, I do apologize.
It makes a great deal more sense to hold facebook, not its "members," responsible for facilitating the Russians' criminal use of the platform to alter US election results. Facebook could have sought to counteract the Russian attack for the benefit of the country. Instead, for the sake of Zuck's bank account, facebook ignored what they later admitted were clear signs of foreign interference in the 2016 election on facebook. And they're still not coming clean about what they knew. What is plain is that they felt no duty, no incentive to report suspicious activity to the FBI or try in any way to correct the problem.
Facebook, the entity that profits from and has the power to make remedial changes to the social platform, must be held responsible. Facebook members had no power to counteract an attack that they were not even aware of.
@Mark Smith Mr Smith, I appreciate that you're doing just what I asked, considering (and in your case, rejecting) any share of responsibility. I also have a facebook page, for posts from my friends and family. At the same time, I have refrained from adding any "likes" to commercial and corporate sponsored posts. To be clear, I am not exempting Facebook from accountability for its multiple failures but asking the separate question of how our collective uncritical use of the platform has enabled some of those excesses. I do think it's an issue worth exploring.
@Mark Smith
Use email or write real letters to each other. Facebook is for the lazy and the casually "connected".
Facebook, Twitter, Google (and the internet, for that matter) were not designed to facilitate meaningful communication between individuals. They were designed to turn human communication into a means to the end of making a few people a lot of money. When all communication is centralized so that it can be monitored and monetized, it can also be shaped and manipulated. Unless we're willing to use the power of democracy to choose and shape what technology will do for the common good, it will continue to use us for the purposes of others.
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@Martin, agreed. In the digital age, there will be many ways for mass, immediate communication.That seems like a fact that goes beyond FB. We, the users-- not MZ-- created this, and thus the responsibility is primarily ours.
1
While we're at it, why not regulate the newspapers too? Haven't they been "weaponized" in more or less the same way that Facebook has been?
11
@No Name Please News organizations have editors and standards. Any fool with an opinion can be heard and seen on Facebook.
3
No, they haven’t.
1
@No Name Please You can reach a newspaper via phone or letter to the editor. You cannot reach Facebook via phone or letter to the editor to contest a story ( the parents of Sandy Hook have been trying to reach Facebook to take down slanderous content about them for five years now.) Newspapers hire and pay reporters to produce content, which is actually expensive. Facebook gets all of you to produce content for them for free.
6
I don't like Facebook, never have much. Only used it to get pics from friends for a trip to Africa. But I wonder about the blame we are putting on"Zuckerface." If I sell a car at my lot and the person uses it to commit a crime, should I then start looking into the lives of the people who buy it to decide if they are worthy of the car. Am I off base here?
I think Facebook is the bane of the human race, but I don't get to choose what my children and grand children do to amuse themselves.
5
Excellent essay, Ms Swisher. Unfortunately, Zuckerberg is a self-inflicted victim of "too much, too soon." Of course he is brilliant, a creator, and an innovator. But his EQ has never caught up with his IQ. Power and money has reared their ugly heads and has wrought upon this as of yet immature and arrogant individual a pragmatism that lacks humanity, humility, and, I dare say, ethics. Zuckerberg is now married with children. Yet his priorities seem to be affixed at relentless self-promotion and self-glorification. Harsh words, I know. But he created what now seems to be a monster, perpetrating the very hate which is consuming the occupier of the Oval Office and sadly this "president's" very supporters who exploit and pollute social media...to wit Facebook and Twitter.
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@Kathy Lollock
My words to describe Zuckerberg so far are actually: ambitious and lucky. Nothing more. How he handles the future for (t)his company will determine whether or not he is indeed "brilliant, a creator, and an an innovator".
3
@Kathy Lollock Zuckerberg is a narcissistic megalomaniac. Plain and simple. You insult true geniuses- ie Nobel Laurette's - when you put his name in the same sentence with brilliant, creators, innovators. He's a money grubber to the core.
I invite Sheryl Sandburg— as well as Zucker erg & other top execs—to REALLY “ lean in” and be unrelenting in tackling more of the problems of Facebook.
The cost to our security and the social well-being of people is presently too high.
13
I am more convinced each day that Facebook is not only wasting my time and manipulating communication with my real friends, it is also a platform for anyone to invade our lives with misinformation that have no consequences to the liars that create a large scale social mess for all of us. Mr. Zuckerberg is a rich guy, may even be a nice guy as you say, but he has gained his status at our collective expense and his company has no concrete plan on how to repair the damage and put a real end to this cycle of bile. What a tragic legacy.
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He didn't weaponize the platform, and I am no FB fan. We did. Humanity with all its foibles. What perhaps we need is a good old fashioned defamation suit or two which actually fines individuals for behavior which defames.
Why has everyone also forgotten the old adage "You can't believe everything you read." ??? Is social media user created content "speech"? Or does it take on the characteristics of "broadcast media"? These two things are regulated very differently. We need to ponder what category it belongs in as a platform. But before we assign blame to Zuck, we ought to look in the mirror. He didn't create the content.
15
Thing is you know, if you never use FB or any other similar internet social media, you do not have a problem. Never used it because it isn´t necessary. I live in a cave and gathering kindling and killing a boar or two is all that is required. Who parades their lives on some social media site that steals your data to make them rich. Perhaps Trumpistas. Certainly not people with a brain.
14
@Gitano By influencing naive voters, Facebook influences everyone by influencing the election of an American President.
The impacts are different. Facebook affects its own users in one way - by making contacts through social media often more important than contacts between real people.
But Facebook also has the impact of mass media - by influencing public opinion and the opinions of voters particularly targeted for their weaknesses and registration in swing districts in swing states. Donald Trump won the election for President in 2016 by only 70,000 votes in three swing states which were critical Electoral College States. That's how he beat Hillary Clinton who won 3 plus million more popular votes representing 3 million more voters than Donald Trump had.
This is so well known, I suspect that Gitano is a Russian Bot.
2
@Gitano Incorrect: you can have problems.
I don't use facebook, but I was given an account in my name when someone wanted to share baby pictures. I have been identified in other people's photos, so my picture is identified in all kinds of places I know nothing about.
Facebook maintains cookie surveillance of almost all my online activity, or so I have been told. For example, some newspapers allow comments via facebook. I don't send any that way, but facebook will know when I read one of those newspapers. I think of it, perhaps wrongly, as Five Eyes on me all the time whatever electronics I use so long as they have some kind of internet connection.
Since I am not planning to destroy the Western world, not even a little bit of it, it doesn't bother me much.
Google I find actually useful. When I use gmail or chrome I find I get ads that actually help me find what I was looking for. I use both of these google services for that reason alone.
And you think we are going to get AI right? Man weaponizes just about every major technology.
Ruin the earth's climate with fossil fuels? Check
Fly airplanes into building? Check
Ruin pristine environments like Mt. Everest? Check
Robo calls, phone scams? Check and Check
I almost forgot guns. Check
How dare anyone think we can control artificial intelligence when our intelligence can not even control ourselves.
85
Facebook is a virus. Richard Dawkins, in the original definition of his word "meme", described the way ideas can reproduce and invade exactly like bacteria. Some are good, some are bad.
Facebook was not 'weaponized'. It, and its founder are simply doing what invasive, and sometimes predatory, species are programed to do.
I would add that the 'meme' of unfettered capitalism is as destructive as any virus, the only difference being that for biological invasions we take antibiotics, while for invaders like Zuckerberg and his monstrous website, we bow and marvel at his 'success'. We're learning the hard way that the success of the predator comes at the expense of its victims.
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@Sera
Communism/Socialism (no difference -- communism is the natural logical evolution of socialism taken to its ideological extreme) has killed millions and millions and millions of people. Capitalism, while not perfect has lifted more out of poverty than any other system on this earth.
@Sera
'Successful Predator'..........exactly. He put on a shirt for Congress , guess he likes the power to rule the roost in his own den.
1
"They"are Robber Baron Malefactors of Great Wealth Corrupt Moral Degenerate Prideful Predatory Lovers of Money named Adelson, Bezos, Koch, Mnuchin, Putin, Ross,Trump and Zuckerberg.
While "We" are on the "They" menu and the "They" safari hunting trophy educational socioeconomic political exploitation mission.
Losing their millions and billions is like us losing a penny here or a nickel there.
"Stay woke. Don't let them catch you sleeping" from " Redbone" by Childish Gambino and "Get Out" by Jordan Peele.
7
Excellent article, and a well expressed and insightful accounting of the state of things. Facebook and YouTube have become commercial platforms for what were once creative outlets for human expression. Now the "big three" plus Twitter have become platforms for a much darker side of humanity. If the CEOs of these behemoth companies do not carefully and vigilantly regulate their platforms, the results could be disastrous for many of us and for the health of our country. Yes, free-speech is immensely important, but then, so is the health of our democracy that protects it. Zukerberg and his ilk have a critical responsibility to manage the monsters they have created in the free world, or else, an entity like Facebook will fall prey to even more malevolent actors who have ill intent to push democracy to the edges, planting the seeds for chaos, confusion, and totalitarianism.
29
Zuckerberg is one of the biggest villains of our age. Truly as amoral as any chemical company, it’s just a different kind of pollution.
95
Actually, Facebook monetized social media - it was users and ad-buyers who weaponized it...
And - while the Dowd-like literary tête-à-tête intimacy is a cute narrative construct, telling the story of Facebook without mentioning the actively-sought-out Russian investment is like telling the story of Woodrow Wilson without mentioning his screening - and loud approval of - "Birth of a Nation" in the WH...
The ironic thing - in (no longer so) young master Mark's trove of data is more insight into every human developmental and social malady than the Hubble could gather about astrophysics in a decade...
Even situations where a situation has self-remedied or healed or a therapy has been effective...
If he enabled HMS to study the data instead of fringe politicos - it'd be more valuable to them than a $1B endowment...
But - it's human nature to take the money and run...
8
Facebook is a for-profit communication platform that somehow claims to serve a public purpose. The result is obvious: money, dark or otherwise, can easily take control of its audience by simply making use of its built in commercial advertisement structure. The solution is obvious: create a strictly non-profit platform. Yes: a government sponsored Web based public space. A public space run by us, not Mr.Zuckerberg.
17
@Davide You could easily swap out "NY Times" for "Facebook" in your post.
2
@Fern
Jefferson articulated why you are wrong about that. Pretty sure even Putin understands the difference. ;-l
Zuckerberg is first and foremost an American. That his platform is being used by nefarious governments and people should be a priority concern to him. This is the means to wage war. Cyber-war is WAR.
He prides himself as being the smartest person in the room, but casual users of his technology are often victims of it. He should be more aware of user intelligence and experience.
I have been a software engineer for over 30 years, and in my opinion and in this business, this is a security defect.
This society is too quick to reward innovation, but never expects it to grow up and mature. His influence is too out of control, and he needs to take leadership and fix his broken application.
137
@Just Live Well
I agree in sentiment, but would argue that he needs to be taken out of leadership and his application broken (up).
1
@Just Live Well: I totally agree with everything you said. It is almost criminal the amount of negligence these social media companies have allowed on their platforms. Money, status, power - all more important than protecting the democracy we all live in. Decades ago, I briefly lived in Exeter and delivered pizza for Dominos and always dreaded going to Phillips Exeter because the kids were snot-nosed entitled brats who acted like I took too long to get there, generally tended to be rude and NEVER tipped.
The point that Zuckerburg weaponized Facebook for purely economic payoff and expanding his market seems accurate. Steve Bannon masterminded a strategy of taking advantage of the Facebook and social media to unleash a tidal wave of ugly bigoted propaganda. Which worked. But the sneering reference to Russia then saying, pardon, but I mean the people who actually used Facebook to help Trump.
5
In the final analysis, the model is the problem.Clicks = advertising $. The latter is responsible for almost all of Facebook's revenues. The pages placed by bad actors make people rich.
The great fear for Zuckerberg is that nation-states assume a China-like control of Facebook and YouTube.
Facebook's/Zuckerberg's primary fiduciary obligation as a publicly traded company is to its shareholders, not to anyone or anything else.
Zuckerberg, in an effort to buy time, has positioned himself as a martyr between a rock and a hard place. He'll say whatever must be said to placate concerned politicians and journalists.
But see above: the model is the problem. There is no solution that at once serves societies well and doesn't cost Facebook, et al, a lot of money; if not their very existence.
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@Taz
On the other hand, if Mark does think of Facebook as a utility, he shouldn't mind it being subject to some degree of regulation, as all utilities in democracies ought to be.
And one of those regulations is a limit on what can be charged and monetized--in other words, a limit to price gouging that is always a temptation with monopoly or near monopoly.
4
@Taz
Part of the solution is for other online corporations to not link to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, as well as use of those and Google analytics.
Even when I find myself disagreeing with her, Ms. Swisher always appears to be striving for a grounded analysis. But for someone who "likes" Zuckerberg, her description isn't flattering. The country doesn't owe its collective courtesy and good will as a response to unmistakable callowness and indifference. The laddishness, naked greed (how's that free speech working out in China?), and self-serving equivocation are obvious, and have been for awhile. The damage has been enormous, and there's still pushback, justification, and half measures.
44
@Blair You can "like" Kim Kardashian.
If Russians really used our technology to meddle in our elections and were instrumental in getting Mr. Trump elected, I think they should be patted on the back for an amazing achievement. Maybe a big loss for us but we shouldn't blame Russia for taking advantage of our uneducated masses.
10
@Ugly and Fat Git
The Russians pat themselves on the back plenty; they don't need us to do it for them.
What's important to understand is that not a single of these Silicon Valley movers and shakers started their enterprises with any considerations for or against democratic evolution -- or devolution. It's all about how their high tech creations can 'change the world,' but mostly in ways that benefit them. While they may give some of their gazillions in profits to worthy nonprofit organizations, the fact remains that they see themselves as outside (and above) any traditional modes of governance, and honestly have little if any real social conscience. It's all about them, and always will be -- until we the people just dump them as long as they stubbornly remain so intransigently undemocratic and closed off in their self-serving and self-aggrandizing capitalist silos.
25
Don't be fooled by the wide-eyed, aw shucks demeanor he cultivates. No one becomes a multi-billionaire without knowing EXACTLY what they are doing. FB is simply a monopoly that has to be broken up. Since at one time he thought it was a 'utility', let's regulate it like a utility and allow the public more control over it.
47
@REJ I think you can become a multibillionaire without knowing exactly what you're doing.
@REJ
It would be interesting to see a B-school case study on whether (or how many) multi-billionaires knew "exactly" what they were doing before achieving their exalted status. My guess is that few had more than the vaguest idea when they started, and that those who had specific plans found that things worked out differently than they supposed.
@REJ
Kinda, sure, maybe.
How would you regulate it? It is all speech. Would you propose a bureau of censorship? So your posts on your page would be subject to review? By some person somewhere based on some criteria developed by someone with an intent to somehow do something??
And "broken up" like what, so some people are put on one corporate platform, call it Fake.com, and other people end up on Truth.com and then... what, exactly? They would be somehow "separate" in terms of what? They would necessarily have to link up and communicate and the same folks that exploit data and put up ads and content would just have to do it twice or three times, but it would be the same stuff. So what do you accomplish? Just a couple/few more listings on the stock exchange and a few more owners? That's going to solve the problem? And again, utilities are utilities because they provide essential services. Some people can live off the power grid, but most of us see it as critically necessary. A hospital needs power, critically. We all need water. We all need voice communication, even these days. But NONE of us NEED social media. It's a toy. Just walk away from it. Just delete your account.
2
Good article; thank you. From its inception Facebook was a propaganda tool of patriarchy, used to compare and rate women’s appearances. It’s never too late for remedial classes in humanities, history and ethics. Also, he needs to hire more editors with backgrounds in journalism, people who are trained to spot propaganda and call it out.
101
@An American Moment: let's not forget that all of those guys need major empathy and insight therapy, too. They may be the smartest guys in the room with their genius IQ's, but their emotional intelligence is in the toilet.
The answer is simple: quit Facebook.
81
@Anne and that's wrong. Quitting Facebook entirely, like quitting LinkedIn entirely cuts off certain communications/knowledge people need nowadays. It's like telling someone not to own a car, travel in one, or travel on any other motor vehicle. In today's world that's not realistic.
What's realistic is to be skeptical of what's posted, to refuse to engage trolls, to do your own research. When I was in school back in the dark ages before computers, we used to use card catalogues to find supporting reports. We learned the differences between primary and secondary sources. We also learned a healthy distrust of self proclaimed miracle workers such as Trump. But that was a long time ago and people today prefer not to ask questions or, if they are asked, to quash them as unpatriotic.
There's nothing wrong with disagreeing. There's plenty wrong with using hate speech, sending death threats to people, and slander. Unfortunately this seems to be what the predominant form of communication is for an unpleasant minority in America. They are verbal terrorists.
4
@hen3ry
Uh, no Hen3ry, it ain't a necessity. Not at all. It is addicting. And they will make it seem essential to your life but it ain't.
Before the tide of comments flow in with shouts of agreement, a few things to consider.
First, this is a FREE social media site that only operates because people want to use it. You can lay blame on the site for "weaponizing" our culture and the Constitution, but remember that this is only possible because you log in every day. Somehow I have managed to live my life without ever starting a Facebook page.
Second, consider the old saying that "you get what you pay for." Do you know why I don't read the free subway newspaper? Do you know why I don't read the China Daily when I travel to Shanghai? These are news sources that I can't trust, because at the best they have an inherent bias, and at the worst they are designed to insidiously influence my opinions.
Same with Facebook, same with YouTube.
115
@Austin so if a man comes along with advertises giving out free addictive and dangerous things to children or anyone who can figure out how to make a fake account and with no accountability except to the advertisers, and after the users are hooked and addicted, ,and many of the young shamed humiliated and dead or suicidal, its fine because YOU ARE ADULT ENOUGH? Facebook is no newspaper...that is about as far a reach as anyone can make. Facebook at its best is a society polulatity competition and on many levels open sourced to any criminal activity, it has abosulutlye NO SAFTEY at all.
2
@Austin
Excellent point. It's the same with politics. We have Trump because a LOT of people choose ignorance over reason.
I have been flabbergasted at the level of ignorance posted on Facebook by friends and family. I have de-friended and basically stopped reading all Facebook posts because I don't want to hear the thoughtless opinions of people I know...and I don't really care what they ate for dinner. My opinion of many people in my life has been lowered because of what they do on Facebook.
Just stop consuming ignorance. We have a choice.
He was never a deep thinker. He never will be a deep thinker. He's a computer nerd devoid of any nuance. He built his career and fortune on the gullibility of people willingly giving him their personal information. Monetizing that information was and is his only goal in life.
346
@Mic p
And? So?
It's a corporation. He was a founder. It's his toy. There was no requirement that he be a deep thinker. He never made it a secret that he wanted to monetize data. It's been very successful by any measure. The guy's a bazillionaire. It is all perfectly legal. But it is also perfectly evil.
So WE need to be the deep thinkers and get off of Facebook. WE need to take that responsibility.
7
If you read the article in today's Times about which groups are being targeted and co-opted, you will see the preparation of a very dangerous Russian internet strategy. They are clearly preparing to act as classic KGB provocateurs, in order to create street chaos that will discredit progressive politics, and drive voters toward the Trump movement.
11
When radio was released into the modern world people thought it would solve all our problems. The same was said about television. When the internet became available it was repeated: it will bring people together. What has never been answered is how. How does seeing that 10% of world has a better life than the rest help the world unless there is interest on both sides to improve things for 90% of the world? Envy is a powerful feeling. In our current world, generosity, tolerance, empathy, and a willingness to help, are not.
Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media have evolved to eclipse letters, phone calls, and journalism. These platforms give every person a voice from the most humane to the most psychopathic. And people being what they are often gravitate to the loudest voices which are not always the logical or most humane.
Technology cannot replace human interaction. Human interaction allows us to understand each other. Technology has been deployed to eliminate humans at the cost of our humanity. It has allowed rumors to be enshrined as truth, made it impossible for people to have civil discussions because it's simpler to hit send than to check information. Nasty doesn't begin to describe the atmosphere created by some users of social media. Unfortunately their "rudeness" is ruining things for the rest of us who may want to have a conversation without trolls.
184
@hen3ry
Or, to put it another way, everything needs at least a little curating, a little respect for hard-won expertise.
Up to, and especially, including human beings themselves.
6
@hen3ry
" .. Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media have evolved to eclipse letters, phone calls, and journalism .."
Oh, really? 40% of Americans are not on FB. Telephones have 95% market penetration.
Do the math. It will be enlightening.
3
@hen3ry
Having read so many of your thoughtful comments over time, hen3ry, I just wanted to thank you in light of this particularly eloquent one for your own contributions to elevating the tone. I also know from your comments that life has been far from kind to you at times, and yet your humanity rises above.
The problem is not the social media, it's the users. You invite everyone in, and everyone comes. What did you expect? It's like throwing a party with free booze, and opening it up to the world.
209
@Jonathan The problem isn't that everyone gets a voice. It's that everyone gets an ANONYMOUS voice. Make people accountable, with identification, for their participation in these social media and see how fast the problem is ameliorated.
2
Lost in the noise of all the fear mongering about Russia and Trump and "weaponized social media" is all the quiet good that Facebook has done for so many people since its launch and still continues to do for them.
Facebook is huge and powerful because people like it; it provides a service that appeals to its users and it's an important one: it keeps people connected in a topsy-turvy world.
What percent of activity on Facebook is devoted to destroying the United States of America? How many clicks are devoted to sparking a civil war that will rip apart the US and make Russia the Supreme Ruler of the Solar System?
I exaggerate to match the tone of most of the social media critics lately who have been given a soapbox in the media.
I'm fairly confident that the vast, vast majority of activity on these sites revolves around posting pictures of graduations, concerts, vacations and to simply liking and discussing workaday things.
Facebook has flaws but they're the same flaws you'd get anywhere where there's a large concentration of people: right-wing/antifa rallies, frat parties, drunken Super Bowl parties, youth sports games...the list goes on and on.
Keep things in perspective.
19
@LR
News flash. People were sharing pictures of graduations, concerts, etc before Facebook and other tech platforms existed and it worked quite well. I, and I would venture to say most people, never needed Facebook, Twitter, etc and still don’t except for the fact of their adoption as entry platforms by lots of businesses and services. If all social media did was promote and impose a narcissistic view of the world on society that would be bad enough. But the techies naïveté and willing blindness to risk in pursuit of massive profits has unleashed true danger. Sorry but the trade off for the “quiet good” isn’t worth it.
12
@LR Your point is a good one, but I think the key thing here is that even if the percent of "problematic" FB use is small, it critically undermines the context of an open, secure society with a reliable democratic process. I can personally attest to having used FB for over a decade, it started out as a way to enjoy everyone's dog photos and now there are deep political and social rifts among friends and family as the platform is deliberately used by agents (foreign or otherwise) to increase that division and chaos. FB didn't make our society divisive, but it is being used to increase it as well as undermine trust in the democratic process, so I think it is appropriate for the company, citizens, and policy makers to figure out what is happening.
2
@LR Re: "Lost in the noise of all the fear mongering about Russia and Trump and weaponized social media is all the quiet good that Facebook has done for so many people since its launch and still continues to do for them."
The problem is that that "good" is virtually non-existent. That many, or perhaps even most, people have been brainwashed to believe in that "good" is, indeed, a significant part of the problem (or, as one might simplistically put it, "the bad").
2
Unfriend Facebook today.
Let little Mark Zuckerberg learn something about humility and American democracy; perhaps he'll grow up one day and learn that the world and society is more important than his stupid toys.
285
I think at this point, it's pretty obvious that Facebook must be regulated. The problem is that those who would need to impose regulations are not the most tech savvy in the world. Facebook has been ruthless in its business practices. They often change the rules on a whim. These "whims" can often cause the companies that depend on them for "clicks" to go under. Whether its breaking it up, treating it like a media company, or something else. The status quo is not acceptable.
165
@Scott Treating it like a media company? If only. Fox News is far more dangerous and consistently dishonest than Facebook. Facebook is a reflection of a diverse, often ill-informed or malicious individuals. Fox News is a deliberate propaganda machine.
Neither Facebook nor Zuckerberg intend the negative things that are happening. Fox News intends every evil moment of their bile.
Why aren't we having a national conversation about that?
4
@Scott Those who would presume to regulate it are the people we really need to look out for.
1
@Scott
Oh my goodness. At the end of the day EVERYTHING on Facebook amounts to speech. So regulating that is just a bit problematic as it opens the door to censorship beyond Facebook. And it would require some agency to have oversight, which means it would be politicized. Imagine if "trump" was able to install that person. Nothing could go wrong, right?
As to rules, well they are a private corporation and can make up any rules they want and change them at any time. And you users agree to that as a condition of having an account with them.
So just get off of it. Ignore it. Self-censor by deleting your accounts. If enough of us do it will become irrelevant. We can take the power away from them.
4
Disasters like Facebook's effects on our democracy occur when Silicon Valley tech geeks and entrepreneurs are uneducated about the social sciences and the humanities. They act as though technology is an unalloyed good that is somehow separate from society. That, of course, is no way to understand technology. Perhaps Mr. Zuckerberg should finish his undergraduate degree, and perhaps take a few courses in history and political science.
379
@Chris Rasmussen
I don't care what Zuckerberg does in terms of his education. It's entirely unimportant. What is important is for people to delete their accounts.
6
@Chris Rasmussen
FB is a capitalist corporate entity designed to make money, and it operates within the law. You're deluding yourself if you think anything else matters.
Humanities at Harvard would not help Zuckerberg. Harvard first trains you to be neurotic and aggressive, then it sends you out into the world to make money (generally starting with professional school). When you're happy and comfortable, they have an amazing alumni network used to extract money from you. Harvard helps you, then you're expected to tithe back to Harvard. And they will track you down (better than the IRS). You will only lose them if you literally go off the grid.
Unfortunately noble thoughts will get us nowhere. Enforceable regulations/laws are all that count.
@Chris Rasmussen
"Technology" includes EVERYTHING that other primate species don't have: language, story-telling, tools, clothing, agriculture, etc. Are you focusing on only the most recently developed technology? Because really, technology is the story of humanity.