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.
