Diamond and Silk aren’t terrorism, and the sisters don’t advocate violence. But if the comediennes got caught up in a content-constricting algorithm, they got caught up in it for a reason: They’ve pushed conspiracy theories from Uranium One to Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) supposed secret “gay lifestyle,” and during the campaign they stumped for Trump in an interview with a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier who insists that “Jews Did 9/11.”
.. Perhaps this messy history doesn’t mean Diamond and Silk deserve for Facebook to restrict their posts’ reach or prevent them from alerting their followers to new videos. Or perhaps it does. It’s a test case for a quandary that Facebook has been muddling through since last summer, when the world and Web exploded with revelations that Russia had harnessed the platform’s reach to sow discord with destructive propaganda
.. Facebook has struggled with the contradictory onus of remaining a “platform for all ideas” while filtering out ideas it deems too dangerous. But there’s little reason to think government would do better. And there’s a lot of reason to wonder whether it even ought to try.
Don’t Fix Facebook. Replace It.
what we most need now is a new generation of social media platforms that are fundamentally different in their incentives and dedication to protecting user data. Barring a total overhaul of leadership and business model, Facebook will never be that platform.
.. In Facebook’s case, we are not speaking of a few missteps here and there, the misbehavior of a few aberrant employees. The problems are central and structural, the predicted consequences of its business model. From the day it first sought revenue, Facebook prioritized growth over any other possible goal, maximizing the harvest of data and human attention. Its promises to investors have demanded an ever-improving ability to spy on and manipulate large populations of people. Facebook, at its core, is a surveillance machine, and to expect that to change is misplaced optimism.
.. If we have learned anything over the last decade, it is that advertising and data-collection models are incompatible with a trustworthy social media network. The conflicts are too formidable, the pressure to amass data and promise everything to advertisers is too strong for even the well-intentioned to resist.
.. the real challenge is gaining a critical mass of users.
.. Facebook, with its 2.2 billion users, will not disappear, and it has a track record of buying or diminishing its rivals (see Instagram and Foursquare).
.. Wikipedia is a nonprofit, and it manages nearly as much traffic as Facebook, on a much smaller budget. An “alt-Facebook” could be started by Wikimedia, or by former Facebook employees, many of whom have congregated at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit for those looking to change Silicon Valley’s culture.
.. If today’s privacy scandals lead us merely to install Facebook as a regulated monopolist, insulated from competition, we will have failed completely. The world does not need an established church of social media.
Google’s One-Time ‘Chief Technology Advocate’ on Making Facebook Likable
The superficial (though global and important) issue is that FB allowed its partners/customers to access/copy/appropriate the personally identifiable information (PII) of 70+ million people.
The secondary issue is that one of the thousands of these PII recipients [that is, Cambridge Analytica] passed the data to those who could weaponize it and use to against America
.. This is the drama of the moment, the ideas of “rogue application of data”, “improper handoff of data”, and “unintended usage against FB policy which therefore need to be strengthened.” You’ll hear noise about this when Mark Zuckerberg is questioned by Congress.
.. There may be grave penalties, but no matter what they are, they cannot undo what has already happened—the harm, the threats, the future uses of that PII.
.. The idea of “as before, but better,” which is MZ’s road show theme, could only work in a world where nobody who decides understands the core issues. Sheryl Sandberg’s sudden disappearance makes me wonder if perhaps this very issue is why
.. The new way—the Google / Overture / Amazon way—is for them to pay attention to what the user searches for (“how to stop neighbor’s leaf-blower noise”) AND to learn what advertisers care about (“I want leaf-blower-noise haters to see this ad”)—and then do a kind of dating service where the right kind of users see the right kind of ads.
In this model, perfected by Google, there is a very strict hygiene in place: the user’s behavior and interest is held in secret by Google and the advertiser never has a hint of it. All that happens is that the right ad is inserted in the right person’s webpage.
.. the advertiser has NO IDEA who cares about leaf-blower noise. All they know is that someone who Google thought would care about it, was shown an ad for it and then clicked on it
.. However that date works out, NO USER INFORMATION LEAVES GOOGLE.
.. The newer way, the one that propelled FB and MZ to wealth, is totally different.
.. This list is golden. It is more valuable to me than just having Google do an anonymous introduction. It means that I “own you” and can send you leaf blower ads, quiet lawn mower ads when I expand my product line, and so on. It means that I learn about you, and as has been clearly reported, I can know about your age, eating habits, travel schedule, phone and text use, the same for your kids, your neighbors, other leaf-blower antagonists, and so on.
.. This is marketing nirvana. It has made FB endlessly wealthy. It has nothing to do with any other web advertising company. The closest peers would be credit scoring companies, because their customers also get “the report on the specific user” rather than an “anonymous introduction to certain users.”
To be clear, THE USER INFORMATION LEAVES FB AND GOES TO THE ADVERTISER/ POLITICAL MANIPULATOR/ whatever.
.. There are just two choices:
a. FB stays in its send-your-PII-to-their-customers business, and then must be regulated and the customers validated precisely as AXCIOM and EXPERIAN in the credit world or doctors and hospitals in the HIPPA healthcare world; or,
b. FB joins Google and ALL OTHER WEB ADVERTISERS in keeping PII private, never letting it out, and anonymously connecting advertisers with its users for their mutual benefit.
I don’t get a vote, but I like (b) and see that as the right path for civil society. There is no way that choice (a) is not a loathsome and destructive force in all things—in my personal opinion it seems that making people’s pillow-talk into a marketing weapon is indeed a form of evil.
This is why I never use Facebook; I know how the sausage is made.
How the Government Could Fix Facebook
After years of allowing the world’s largest social network to police itself, Congress and federal regulators are discussing some promising reforms.
Typically, the FTC can only impose penalties if a company has violated a previous agreement with the agency.
That means Facebook may well face a fine for the Cambridge Analytica breach, assuming the FTC can show that the social network violated the 2011 settlement. In that settlement, the FTC charged Facebook with eight counts of unfair and deceptive behavior, including allowing outside apps to access data that they didn’t need—which is what Cambridge Analytica reportedly did years later. The settlement carried no financial penalties but included a clause stating that Facebook could face fines of $16,000 per violation per day.
.. “I predict that if the FTC concludes that Facebook violated the consent decree, there will be a heavy civil penalty that could well be in the amount of $1 billion or more,” he said.
.. “Facebook rejects any suggestion that it violated the consent decree,”
.. Daniel J. Weitzner, who served in the White House as the deputy chief technology officer at the time of the Facebook settlement, says that technology should be policed by something similar to the Department of Justice’s environmental-crimes unit. The unit has levied hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Under previous administrations, it filed felony charges against people for such crimes as dumping raw sewage or killing a bald eagle. Some ended up sentenced to prison.
.. “We know how to do serious law enforcement when we think there’s a real priority, and we haven’t gotten there yet when it comes to privacy,” Weitzner said.
.. Facebook has said it will introduce a new regime of advertising transparency later this year, which will require political advertisers to submit a government-issued ID and to have an authentic mailing address. It said that political advertisers will also have to disclose which candidate or organization they represent and that all election ads will be displayed in a public archive.
.. While she was at the commission, she urged it to consider what it could do to make internet advertising contain as much disclosure as broadcast and print ads. “Do we want Vladimir Putin or drug cartels to be influencing American elections?” she presciently asked at a 2015 commission meeting.
.. Even if it does pass such a rule, the commission’s definition of election advertising is so narrow that many of the ads placed by the Russians may not have qualified for scrutiny. It’s limited to ads that mention a federal candidate and appear within 60 days prior to a general election or 30 days prior to a primary.
.. Last year, ProPublica found that Facebook was allowing advertisers to buy discriminatory ads, including ads targeting people who identified themselves as “Jew haters,” and ads for housing and employment that excluded audiences based on race, age, and other protected characteristics under civil-rights laws.
.. Facebook has claimed that it has immunity against liability for such discrimination under section 230 of the 1996 federal Communications Decency Act, which protects online publishers from liability for third-party content.
.. But sentiment is growing in Washington to interpret the law more narrowly.
.. Jonathan Zittrain, wrote an article rethinking his previous support for the law and declared it has become, in effect, “a subsidy” for the tech giants, who don’t bear the costs of ensuring the content they publish is accurate and fair.
.. “Any honest account must acknowledge the collateral damage it has permitted to be visited upon real people whose reputations, privacy, and dignity have been hurt in ways that defy redress,” Zittrain wrote.