May 2, 2024

You are here: Home / Archives for Facebook

Ganging Up On Facebook

October 26, 2021 By

The news media are ganging up on Facebook. Why?

There are two underlying reasons: (1) Because they now can, based on AI and database management software and cooperative news consortiums that can take advantage of this software to analyze millions of emails and documents. (2) Because Zuckerberg is on the autism spectrum and has no concept of empathy.

Several years ago news organizations around the world created the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to investigate a global tax avoidance scheme based on 11.5 million leaked documents (2.6 terabytes of data). A single news organization such as The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal would probably take at least a year to analyze this much data, even with sophisticated software. However, a global network of 280 journalists in over 100 media organizations spanning more than 100 countries, including the United States, Australia, France, Spain, Hungary, Serbia, Belgium, and Ireland was able to scope out the leaked data and publish investigative articles that were labeled the Panama Papers.

The Panama Papers, when they were published in 2016 by such newspapers in the U.S. as the Washington Post, not only created a sensation but also resulted in the prosecution of Jan Marsalek, who is still a person of interest to a number of European governments due to his revealed links with Russian intelligence and international financial fraudsters David and Josh Baazov. Also, Iceland’s Prime Minister resigned as a result of revelations about offshore accounts detailed in The Panama Papers.

This October the ICIJ struck again with the Pandora Papers. A leak of 11.9 million documents to the ICIJ exposed the secret offshore accounts of 35 world leaders, including current and former presidents, prime ministers, and heads of state as well as more than 100 billionaires, celebrities, and business leaders.

Also, this October, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who shared company documents, led a meticulous media rollout of Facebook internal emails that demonstrated that Facebook executives and, of course, Mark Zuckerberg, knew that their products (Facebook and Instagram) were toxic and harming people worldwide. Led by the Wall Street Journal in a series of articles titled The Facebook Files, Haugen’s whistleblowing certified what we knew all along — that Facebook is dishonest, hypocritical, dangerous, and, most of all, greedy.

Why, many people might ask, does Mark Zuckerberg, who is worth $116.2 billion dollars, put revenue growth above the well-being of Facebook’s over 3 billion users? Isn’t he rich enough?

He doesn’t seem to think so. He’s on the autism spectrum (what until the DSM Fifth Edition was published in 2013 was known as Asperger’s syndrome) and has no sense of empathy. He can’t read emotions in others or empathize with them.

One of the symptoms of those on the high-functioning autism spectrum is that they often have impaired social skills. They are sometimes unable to form friendships, especially with their peers, and may find it difficult to act in a socially appropriate manner. Many instead befriend animals, and they find it especially challenging to have conversations with people they don’t know (i.e. U.S. Senators).

In a recent Sway podcast titled “Is Mark Zuckerberg a Man Without Principles?”, host Kara Swisher interviewed her long-time mentor, Walt Mossberg, the former technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In the podcast Swisher asked Mossberg about Zuckerberg and Facebook:

“I think the company is fundamentally unethical.” And, drawing on his experience covering controversial leaders, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (as he calls them, “the old guard”), Mossberg says the Facebook C.E.O. is still an aberration: “In my encounters with Mark Zuckerberg, I’ve never been able to discover any principles.”

Mossberg talks about several interesting encounters with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. He indicates that even though he had disagreements with both entrepreneurs as they tried to get favorable coverage in his influential column on technology and that even though they were highly competitive, they both had a conscience, both had principles — a red line that they wouldn’t cross.

Mossberg says that he thinks of the Big Five tech companies( Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook), that Facebook is the most poorly managed. He tells a story about when Zuckerberg visited him in his Washington, DC office. Walt says he talked to Zuckerberg about privacy, but that it was like “ships passing in the night.” Mossberg kept talking about privacy and Zuckerberg had no idea what he was talking about.

Zuckerberg, as Facebook’s CEO and majority shareholder of FB’s voting stock, has complete control of the company, its policies, and its practices. Therefore, if he doesn’t want to change, if he wants the company to continue to be unprincipled and greedy, nothing can stop him short of massive government regulation, which is probably coming in some form or another.

However, what can be done until the government acts? Public opinion. Public opinion and approbation can damage the company’s reputation enough to, perhaps, get Zuckerberg’s attention, especially if FB’s stock continues its decline.

So, yes, the news media is ganging up on Facebook, and good for them. Keep it up.

Filed Under: Facebook, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

How To Solve the Facebook Problem

October 7, 2021 By

There seem to be more solutions to the Facebook Problem than Facebook has problems. I posted a simplistic solution last week, which was for everyone over 40 to cancel their Facebook and Instagram accounts. Silly and impractical.

Many columnists, such as media critic Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post, want the government to take action. Sullivan, in an October 6, column titled “Facebook is harming our society. Here’s how to reign it in,” writes:

A problem that threatens the underpinnings of our civil society calls for a radical solution: A new federal agency focused on the digital economy.

The idea comes from none other than a former Federal Communications Commission chairman, Tom Wheeler, who maintains that neither his agency nor the Federal Trade Commission are nimble or tech-savvy enough to protect consumers in this volatile and evolving industry.

“You need an agency that doesn’t say ‘here are the rigid rules,’ when the rules become obsolete almost immediately,” Wheeler, who headed the FCC from 2013 to 2017, told me Monday.

Too much of the digital world operates according to Mark Zuckerberg’s famous motto: “Move fast and break things.” That’s a perfect expression of what Wheeler called “consequence-free behavior.”

I am uncomfortable with a government solution because, even though I am generally in favor of government regulation to reign in greedy business behavior, regulating Facebook means, essentially, defining free speech, which I worry about the government doing.

Kara Swisher of the NY Times in her October 5, column titled “Brazen Is the Order of the Day at Facebook” interviewed Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former head of security at Facebook. Stamos had the following solution:

I think Zuckerberg is going to need to step down as C.E.O. if these problems are going to be solved. Having a company led by the founder has a lot of benefits, but one of the big problems is that it makes it close to impossible to significantly change the corporate culture. It’s not just Zuckerberg; the top ranks of Facebook are full of people who have been there for a dozen years. They were part of making key decisions and supporting key cultural touchstones that might have been appropriate when Facebook was a scrappy upstart but that must be abandoned as a global juggernaut. It is really hard for individuals to recognize when it is time to change their minds, and I think it would be better if the people setting the goals for the company were changed for this new era of the company, starting with Zuckerberg.

I like this solution. Facebook’s Board of Directors could fire Zuckerberg and Sandberg. There are nine members of the board:

  1. Zuckerberg
  2. Sandberg
  3. Peggy Alford – Formerly Pay Pal
  4. Marc Andreesen – Co-founder Netscape, investor
  5. Andrew Houston – CEO Dropbox
  6. Nany Killefer – Formerly McKinsey
  7. Robert Kimmitt – Lawyer
  8. Peter Theil – Formerly Pay Pal, FB investor
  9. Tracey Travis – Formerly CFO Estee Lauder

I don’t know the Facebook bylaws, but if a majority of the board can fire the CEO and COO, they should do so.

By the Board of Directors taking action to solve the problem, it would be a situation of a business policing itself and, thus, avoiding government regulation.

I’m also in favor of peaceful protests. I’d love to see a protest crowd appear outside Facebook’s headquarters with signs saying FIRE ZUCKERBERG AND SANDBERG. Such a protest might not have an immediate effect, but it might get the board thinking in the right direction.

Filed Under: Facebook Tagged With: , ,

The Facebook Problem

September 22, 2021 By

In media news, there has been a lot of discussion about the Wall Street Journal’s series of articles about Facebook’s duplicity, titled “The Facebook Files.” The in-depth series is worth a read because the normally business-friendly WSJ exposes Facebook’s dishonesty, harmfulness to society and greed.

The WSJ is doing what good journalism is supposed to do — hold the powerful accountable. The WSJ pointed out the problem, but what is the solution?

In a September 9, Media Curmudgeon post titled “The New New Journalism,” I wrote about solutions journalism as advocated and taught by the Solutions Journalism Network. Solutions journalism takes a positive approach and produces news articles that show how institutions and communities have solved problems. Good idea.

But what do you do about the Facebook problem? It’s a unique problem because Facebook is so huge (3 billion active users worldwide), so profitable (2020 revenue = $70.697 billion, income = $29, 146 billion), has so many businesses worldwide that depend on it (10 million advertisers) and has so many stockholders (over 80% of Facebook’s shares are owned by mutual funds, many of them various government retirement funds).

One solution, as advocated by Shira Ovide, a NY Times technology columnist, in her September 21, column titled “Shrink Facebook To Save the World” is for Facebook to get out of some countries:

But maybe we should all ask ourselves radical questions about the horrors of Facebook: Is a better Facebook a realistic option, or is the solution a smaller Facebook? And what if no one can or should operate a hugely influential, lightning-fast communication mechanism for billions of people in nearly every country?

There’s a deep irony in my suggestion that a less-global Facebook might be better. The power of people to use the network to express themselves, collaborate and challenge authority is more profound in places where institutions are weak or corrupt and where citizens haven’t had a voice. It’s also in those places where Facebook has done the most harm, and where the company and the world have paid the least attention.

And who is going to force Facebook, a private company, to downsize in Myanmar, or the Philippines or anywhere else? The U.S. government via regulations? The government sued Facebook in June, and a judge threw out the FTC and 48 state attorneys generals’ case saying that the FTC hadn’t proved any anti-trust violations.

Some critics of Facebook have suggested that government make Facebook a utility, a common carrier, and thus, completely regulated by the government, like AT&T was until 1984 when a government anti-trust case broke AT&T up into the seven baby bells.

So what good did that do? In 1984 no one, especially the government, could have predicted Steve Jobs inventing the iPhone and, therefore, AT&T is back bigger than ever, although not dominant.

During WW II when Britain was being bombed unmercifully by the Nazis, out of necessity the government nationalized the hospitals, and they are sill owned by the government today and are an integral part of the national health care system.

But imagine the outcry if the U.S. government nationalized Facebook. Socialism! It would be a political disaster, not to mention an economic disaster. Who cares if Mark Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel lose a billion dollars? But we do care if pension funds lose money.

So what’s to be done to reduce Facebook and Instagram’s power? Cancel your accounts.

Never go to Facebook or Instagram again — or Snapchat or Tik Tok. Deleting your accounts may be relatively easy if you’re my age (89), but getting people under 40 to kick their addiction to social media is hard. For people under 30, it’s virtually impossible.

It won’t work for parents to reduce screen time to, say, two or three hours a week because social media is more addictive than heroin. However, if everyone over 40 deletes their social media accounts, think how much time they would have to protest, protest against major advertisers who advertise in social media, protest against the Texas anti-abortion law, protest against the use of plastic, protest in favor of vaccinations and wearing masks.

Read Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism, delete your social media accounts and write that poetry, novel, screenplay or play you’ve always dreamed of writing.

I am.

Filed Under: Facebook, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

The Media Are Killing Us

July 21, 2021 By

The first allusion to media and death that I remember was Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death. Postman’s thesis was that:

TV is turning all public life (education, religion, politics, journalism) into entertainment; how the image is undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word; and how our bottomless appetite for TV will make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we’ll be overwhelmed by “information glut” until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we’ve lost as long as we’re being amused.

Postman’s idea was that TV was killing our culture. On Friday, July 16, when President Joe Biden was asked by an NBC reporter what his message was to social media platforms, particularly Facebook, Biden replied, “They’re killing people,” then added, “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.”

Even though Biden backed off a little a few days later after Facebook complained and laid out all the things they were doing to promote vaccination, the President was essentially right. In fact, he should have included Fox News in his condemnation.

In an article titled “Facebook, Fox, and what ‘killing people’ means in a pandemic” in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Jon Allsop wrote:

Biden’s intervention—along with rising cases and plummeting vaccination rates—have reignited urgent media conversations about vaccine hesitancy, whose fault it is, and to what extent. Facebook has been central to this conversation, with observers debating the proper balance between the good messaging it has instigated and the bad messaging it has allowed on its platform. Right-wing media outlets—and, given its huge reach, Fox News, in particular—have also been central, with some commentators arguing that they deserve a greater share of the blame for sowing mistrust of the vaccines and Biden’s efforts to distribute them. (“Who’s winning the war between Biden and Facebook?” a headline in Wired asked. “Fox News.”) On Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Murthy [Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general] whether Fox is also “killing people”; Murthy replied that the general cost of misinformation “can be measured in lives lost,” but declined to be more specific. Oliver Darcy, a CNN media reporter, called this a “dodge” that reflected poorly on the administration’s priorities: “misinformation on Fox is distributed intentionally, while Facebook is at least putting some effort to combatting it.” 

With the increase in COVID infections and deaths due to the Delta variant, there really is a pandemic among the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated are killing not only themselves but others as well. It seems they would rather die than admit they were wrong about believing in science and getting vaccinated.

Some entertainers on Fox News seem to be developing a little conscience and adjusting their moral compass slightly. Jon Allsop in CJR reports:

Many media observers have this week noticed an apparent shift in Fox’s coverage of COVID vaccines. On Monday, the network ran on-screen banners advertising official vaccine resources, and Sean Hannity urged his viewers to take the pandemic seriously; on Tuesday, Steve Doocy, of Fox & Friends, said that the vaccine “will save your life.” These efforts have met, in more liberal quarters, with relief, and even some praise. It’s not clear, however, that they really represent any sea change. Hannity and Doocy have both endorsed vaccines before; in February, the latter appeared, alongside several other Fox hosts, in a vaccine PSA. And, more pertinently, hosts who have consistently cast doubt on the vaccines have continued to do so: following Hannity on Monday, for instance, Laura Ingraham accused Democrats of trying to cancel “inconvenient opinions regarding their Covid response,” and brought on a guest who called the idea that there is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” a “lie.” Some of this week’s Fox-has-changed commentary reminded me of the post-election period, when supposed instances of hosts turning on Trump belied a more sordid reality. With vaccines, as with Trump’s election lies, low expectations can dilute our standards of accountability.

So, some entertainers on Fox News seem to be accountable, but not all of them. Facebook? No. Facebook is still defensive and will not take down vaccination disinformation. If some people would rather die than believe in science, Facebook would rather make more money than be accountable by removing vaccination lies that are killing people.

In 1985 Neil Postman was right: in the media, people are amusing themselves to death, and some of the media could care less. Money before morality.

Filed Under: Covid-19 Tagged With: , , ,

The Sound and Fury Surrounding Facebook

July 8, 2020 By

A week ago last Friday, I began writing a blog post about the pressure on Facebook from politicians, employees, advertisers and some users to change their algorithms to do a better job of limiting hate speech, racist language and violence-inducing posts.  I stopped writing because I said to myself, “Self, you’d better wait and see how the story develops and if more advertisers join the boycott and if the boycott forces Mark Zuckerberg to change his hands-off policy of not factchecking Trump or other politicians or censoring hate speech, racist language or violence-inducing posts.”

The New York Times, in both news and opinion, the Washington Post, and publications and online newsletters such as Media Post, Digital News, The Information, Stratechery and POLITICO among many others have reported on the Facebook censorship and boycott issues.  I have followed the controversy and tried to keep up in order to make sense of it.  And over the 4th of July weekend, I finally realized, to quote Macbeth, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

So, who’s the idiot?

Not Mark Zuckerberg, whose stock in Facebook on Tuesday, July 7, made him worth $85.4 billion, which put him #3 on the list of wealthiest Americans, behind Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, just ahead of Warren Buffet.

Zuckerberg has resisted changing Facebook’s no-censorship policy using a freedom-of-speech argument, and has said that Facebook does not want to be arbiters of the truth.  He has made some cosmetic changes after being pressured by #StopHateforProfit, a group formed by the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, Free Press and Common Sense.  The #StopHatyeForProfit group asked corporations to suspend their advertising on Facebook (and its Instagram subsidiary) for the month of July, and about 500 large national advertisers have announced they have pulled their advertising for July.

Zuckerberg’s response has been, “they’ll be back,” which is probably correct, although it was announced on Tuesday, June 7, that Zuckerberg and Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, would hold a virtual meeting with major advertisers to hear their concerns.

What is all this sound and fury about?

For the last half of this past spring semester, I taught my two graduate courses on Zoom.  All of my 38 students were isolated at home in America or India or Brazil or Russia.  In order to keep my students occupied and engaged in learning, when The New School semester ended, I offered a free, no-credit, six-week course, not associated with The New School, to my current and several former students. 

I had 21 students sign up for the course titled Competitive Strategies and Game Theory.  The required text was Brandenburger and Nalebuff’s classic book, Co-opetition.  Chapter 7: Tactics discusses the use of tactics in competitive strategy.  The authors write that the goal of tactics in the game of business is to change perceptions – perceptions of competitors, customers, suppliers and complementors.  The idea is that you don’t have to change your business model, change your overall business strategy or change your pricing, you just have to change perceptions.

In the Facebook boycott controversy, the #StopHateForProfit pressure group is trying to change the public’s perception of Facebook.  National advertisers such as Unilever, Coca-Cola, Verizon and Starbucks are pulling their adverting for July, and are trying to make themselves look good by making statements, according to The New York Times, such as, “Facebook has not done enough to address” hate speech and disinformation (Denny’s).  Or “Facebook’s failure to stop the spread of misinformation and hate speech on its platform” and saying that “this inaction fuels racism and violence and also has the potential to threaten our democracy and the integrity of our elections.” (Levi Strauss & Company).  Or “At Pfizer, our Equity Value is core to who we are as a company, and all forms of hate speech go against that value.” 

Zuckerberg’s reaction?

BBC News reported that Zuckerberg’s response to the boycott was, “My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.”  He added, “We’re not going to change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue.”  The comments were made to Facebook staff at a private meeting.  Zuckerberg’s tactic was to create the perception among employees and investors that Facebook is just fine, and not affected by the boycott, which is undoubtedly the case.

Investors must agree with Zuckerberg, because since he made that statement on July 1, Facebook’s stock has risen from $237.55 to $240.86 on July 7.

So, does the sound and fury of all of these dueling perception-fixing tactics really signify nothing?  And if so, who is the idiot?  It’s not Zuckerberg or Facebook.  The situation is a win-win for Facebook, #StopHateForProfit, large national advertisers and investors.  Facebook looks good to free-speech advocates and doesn’t take down hate speech or violence inducing posts.  #StopHateForProfit looks good because they can claim they led an advertising boycott movement.  Large national advertisers get to sound oh, so self-righteous and goodie two shoes in addition to saving money. Investors make money as the stock go up.  None of them are idiots; they are all winners.

So, who is the idiot?  I think it is the news media that dutifully report on all of the perception-distorting tactics without context and as though the sound and fury signified reality.  The news media rarely covers the biggest loser in these perception wars.

The biggest loser is decency.  Facebook users will continue to be engaged by dopamine-producing posts that contain lies, hate speech, racist slurs and that encourage violence, and national advertisers’ ads will appear next to this trash.  The advertisers can shout their highfaluting values, but they want to sell toilet paper and cell phone data plans to everyone, no matter their political leanings, so they will be back.

Hello hate speech.  Goodbye decency.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,