Can Mark Zuckerberg fix Facebook before it breaks democracy?

First, Deimos, thanks for posting this. I would likely have not read it otherwise.

I am only half way through this very long read, but I thought I should post this in at least 2 parts. Honestly, it’s hard to respond to something like this outside of a very long personal essay. So let’s call this part 1 of my response, and sorry that it’s still a wall of text. I took the time to do this because outside of climate change, this is the biggest issue of our time and it bugged me that the comment counter said: 0, while the vote counter said 10.

For many years, Zuckerberg ended Facebook meetings with the half-joking exhortation “Domination!” Although he eventually stopped doing this (in European legal systems, “dominance” refers to corporate monopoly), his discomfort with losing is undimmed.

This is the setup, win at all costs. It is no wonder that later a Roman emperor is mentioned as an idol.

Zuckerberg was spending much of his time conferring with heads of state and unveiling plans of fantastical ambition, such as building giant drones that would beam free Internet (including Facebook) into developing countries.

This article is excellent, but this part is extremely naive. As we have learned seen since that time, when FB introduces free data in developing markets, users start to think that FB is the internet as it is one of the few whitelisted (free) sites.

The Internet Research Agency, a firm in St. Petersburg working for the Kremlin, drew hundreds of thousands of users to Facebook groups optimized to stoke outrage, including Secured Borders, Blacktivist, and Defend the 2nd. They used Facebook to organize offline rallies, and bought Facebook ads intended to hurt Hillary Clinton’s standing among Democratic voters. (One read “Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.”) With fewer than a hundred operatives, the I.R.A. achieved an astonishing impact: Facebook estimates that the content reached as many as a hundred and fifty million users.

If accurate, this ratio is the best ROI that I have ever heard of. Less than 100 agents to influence over 100 million people. Imagine if that kind of asymmetric power was used to push good, like say dropping us off of fossil fuels.

At Facebook’s annual shareholder meeting, in May, executives struggled to keep order. An investor who interrupted the agenda to argue against Zuckerberg’s renomination as chairman was removed. Outside, an airplane flew a banner that read “YOU BROKE DEMOCRACY.” It was paid for by Freedom from Facebook, a coalition of progressive groups that have asked the F.T.C. to break up the company into smaller units.

I had never heard of this protest, and I think I pay decent attention. Giant corp’s control of the narrative is freaking scary. It reminds me of Sandberg’s ability to remove a negative narrative about her from a recent NYT piece.

And now everyone says, Is this a trick? And the question Mark Zuckerberg is dealing with is: Should my company be the arbiter of truth and decency for two billion people? Nobody in the history of technology has dealt with that.”

This is the unanswered question of our monopolized era, isn’t it? It’s almost as if anti-trust action had a purpose!

Zuckerberg told me, “You have all these good and bad and complex figures. I think Augustus is one of the most fascinating. Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace.” For non-classics majors: Augustus Caesar, born in 63 B.C., staked his claim to power at the age of eighteen and turned Rome from a republic into an empire by conquering Egypt, northern Spain, and large parts of central Europe. He also eliminated political opponents, banished his daughter for promiscuity, and was suspected of arranging the execution of his grandson.
“What are the trade-offs in that?” Zuckerberg said, growing animated. “On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today. Two hundred years feels unattainable.” On the other hand, he said, “that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things.” In 2012, Zuckerberg and Chan spent their honeymoon in Rome. He later said, “My wife was making fun of me, saying she thought there were three people on the honeymoon: me, her, and Augustus. All the photos were different sculptures of Augustus.” The couple named their second daughter August.

This is not a good sign in my book. That’s all I have to say on that.

When I asked Chan about how Zuckerberg had responded at home to the criticism of the past two years, she talked to me about Sitzfleisch, the German term for sitting and working for long periods of time. “He’d actually sit so long that he froze up his muscles and injured his hip,” she said.

Well holy shit, Zuck and I have something in common. My right hip hurts all the time from that.

His onetime speechwriter Katherine Losse, in her memoir, “The Boy Kings,” explained that the “engineering ideology of Facebook” was clear: “Scaling and growth are everything, individuals and their experiences are secondary to what is necessary to maximize the system.” Over time, Facebook devoted ever-greater focus to what is known in Silicon Valley as “growth hacking,” the constant pursuit of scale. Whenever the company talked about “connecting people,” that was, in effect, code for user growth.

Alex Schultz, a founding member of the Growth Team, said that he and his colleagues were fanatical in their pursuit of expansion. “You will fight for that inch, you will die for that inch,” he told me. Facebook left no opportunity untapped. In 2011, the company asked the Federal Election Commission for an exemption to rules requiring the source of funding for political ads to be disclosed. In filings, a Facebook lawyer argued that the agency “should not stand in the way of innovation.”

Well, this is the crux of the headline, isn’t it? Pure growth driven soulless-ness.

To gain greater reach, Facebook had made the fateful decision to become a “platform” for outside developers, much as Windows had been in the realm of desktop computers, a generation before. The company had opened its trove of data to programmers who wanted to build Facebook games, personality tests, and other apps. After a few months at Facebook, Parakilas was put in charge of a team responsible for making sure that outsiders were not misusing the data, and he was unnerved by what he found. Some games were siphoning off users’ messages and photographs. In one case, he said, a developer was harvesting user information, including that of children, to create unauthorized profiles on its own Web site. Facebook had given away data before it had a system to check for abuse. Parakilas suggested that there be an audit to uncover the scale of the problem. But, according to Parakilas, an executive rejected the idea, telling him, “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?”

Holy shit, as an outsider, this is really what it seemed like... I never understood the business case for opening the platform for all of this abuse and data harvesting. I never understood why a competing platform could not just make an FB game and harvest the graph. Couldn’t Zinga have done that?

New hires learned that a crucial measure of the company’s performance was how many people had logged in to Facebook on six of the previous seven days, a measurement known as L6/7. “You could say it’s how many people love this service so much they use it six out of seven days,” Parakilas, who left the company in 2012, said. “But, if your job is to get that number up, at some point you run out of good, purely positive ways. You start thinking about ‘Well, what are the dark patterns that I can use to get people to log back in?’ ”

YouTube seems to have crossed this Rubicon long ago.

Researchers found that, during the 2010 midterm elections, Facebook was able to prod users to vote simply by feeding them pictures of friends who had already voted, and by giving them the option to click on an “I Voted” button. The technique boosted turnout by three hundred and forty thousand people—more than four times the number of votes separating Trump and Clinton in key states in the 2016 race. It became a running joke among employees that Facebook could tilt an election just by choosing where to deploy its “I Voted” button.

Imho, the GOP visit to FB, prior to the 2016 election, prevented this from happening.. “Mark, have you heard of The Sherman Act?” I would give a lot to know what was exchanged in that meeting. I believe that when one becomes a monopoly, you become the government’s bitch, or else, antitrust enforcement.

Okay, I just finished this monster (listened to it thanks to the excellent recording).

I'm left with one major question. Why does distribution of targeted information seem to favor malicious intentions? In particular it seems that the Facebook model favors disinformation. Mark says that the vast majority of news shared on Facebook is not "fake news". A few hundred Russians influenced a hundred million Americans. It's obvious that the platform lends itself to amplification of these ideas.

Is this something about humanity that we need to accept? That the ability to broadcast to the world is dangerous. That people like to hate and fear. Perhaps the only thing that prevented this from happening before was ignorance.

I really appreciate how this essay is able to lay out the whole situation and give us a perspective on his POV. I think seeing his struggles with this and his many mistakes really illustrates the core of the problem to me - the people creating social media networks are software engineers, not social engineers. The design and moderation of a social network platform that becomes so ubiquitous has a large hand in shaping how people interact with one another. Similar to how the medium of handwritten letters, email, text messages and instant messaging all shape how people communicate and change how they interact, social media platforms warp communication through their design.

Putting the power to shape how we communicate with one another (and by extension of that in some sense also how we think) in the hands of a cooperation whose main goal will always be to garner more profit is more dangerous than people give it credit for. That said, reading a retelling of this ongoing saga with Zuckerberg’s account of his own struggles reminds me that it isn’t exactly the fault of the company either - we gave them this power and now they have to struggle with how they choose to use it. Now it’s up to them to decide, will they change their platform to provide a basis for meaningful, truthful communication?

I'm not sure I even agree with the premise of the title. If Facebook is powerful enough to "break democracy" maybe it wasn't that strong to begin with