An Ugly Truth

Authors: Sheera Frenkel & Cecilia Kang

I always enjoy a read that criticizes Facebook, so immediate points for the subject.

For those who keep up on the news, have watched The Social Network, had a Facebook account (emphasis on had hopefully), and followed the US presidential election, a good chunk of this book will be content you already know.

That doesn’t mean its a bad book. It’s nice to have a timeline and detailed recap of Facebook’s continued failures. Failures isn’t the right word as it implies that Facebook tried to be a moral company, but failed. In reality, they didn’t even try. They have consistently misled the public on how much data they capture and what they do with it. They’ve performed large scale experiments on their users such as this one. Their platform has been used for organized disinformation campaigns by players such as the IRA and in Myanmar, stoking up genocide with anti-muslim campaigns. Facebook employed just one Burmese speaking moderator to review all of the horrible content being added to the platform in Myanmar. Myanmar is home to over 100 languages. They were slow to investigate these issues and when facing heavy scrutiny, would provide the barest possible information.

Facebook has been predatory and bought up or forced out competition. I believe they have stifled innovation because of Zuckerbots unquenchable thirst for dominance. They are dominant, but not because they have a brilliant product. Yes the product was revolutionary all those years ago in the early stages of the internet, but I think we can all agree their product as it exists now sucks. The reason they have been so dominant is by misleading its users on what Facebook really exists for. They don’t exist to connect you meaningfully with the world and your friends no matter how much they tout that fact at their conferences and speeches. They exist to harvest every possible data point from you, package it, and sell it to the highest bidders.

Imagine what other social media, messaging, photo sharing, and other technology we could have if Facebook didn’t have their slimly hands over all these companies.

Facebook’s story brings up some tough questions that we increasingly face in the future. I strongly support capitalism and the means of capital/production being owned privately. However, what happens when a company is so scalable and powerful that it can influence elections, policy, human psychology and more?

I am concerned with the amount of power Facebook has, but there are other companies that concern me as well. Amazon Web services has a mind boggling market share of the cloud. Disney keeps buying up all the media companies, a different kind of worrying – its causing movies and TV to degrade in creative quality as they turn into formula’s to maximize ticket/subscription revenue. Twitter continues to bring out the absolute worst of people. Apple is making moves like hashing photos stored on our phones under the guise of protecting against child pornography. Since I am on the subject, our governments are also way too big.

Anyways, pretty good book.