Facebook — and Zuckerberg — took a big financial hit this week. I’m pretty sure I know why
When you’re looking at a raging dumpster fire, you don’t need to necessarily dive into outré arguments over the precise constituent elements of the trash. Sometimes, you start with the obvious: apply water
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Your support makes all the difference.Meta, a.k.a Facebook, took a big hit today.
The dollar amount is staggering: over $220 billion in market value lost in late Wednesday trading, on announcement of a decline in profits in fourth-quarter earnings reports. Mark Zuckerberg is personally estimated to have lost between $24-$30 billion.
It’s a fitting start to 2022, given the way 2021 went for them.
In the last year alone, Facebook was revealed as a key platform for organizing the January 6th Insurrection, also revealed as a superspreader of Covid misinformation, and sued by Rohingya Muslims for the company’s role in amplifying hate speech that incited violence in Myanmar. On top of all that, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg helped the government of Turkey silence a government dissident. Sandberg’s response to an email about the government’s action to block posts from the People’s Protection Units: “I am fine with this.”
The world, it seems, is less fine with this. We’ve had boycotts before, we’ve had campaigns to delete Facebook and fire Zuckerberg (we the people brought a pink slip to his house in the Bay Area, but he declined to take the suggestion to step down). We’ve had disclosure after disclosure of damning disinterest in protecting users and vulnerable populations, and we’ve had promise after promise (after promise) to do better.
Now, we’re seeing the first glimmers of a reckoning. The bombshell “Facebook Files” reported through The Wall Street Journal broke through the cluttered media landscape, and since then the calls for regulation, investigation, and consequences have grown steadily louder. It’s about time.
The real-world harms of Meta’s prioritizing profits over people are vast, and urgent. Yet if you ask rights organizations and lawmakers exactly what a fix might look like, you’re bound to get a range of answers, from stronger data privacy protections to antitrust actions to bans on ad microtargeting to — yes — a change in leadership. The truth is, Meta is a nesting doll of failure and dysfunction.
At the base of the pyramid, you have surveillance capitalism, an extractive, privacy-demolishing system generating billions of dollars in wealth off of users’ every thought and action. At the next level up, you have the unique dynamics of Facebook, a near-monopoly power with reach unlike any communications platform ever built. And riding on top of all of this, you have the unique structure of the company, which gives vast discretion to one human being — Mark Zuckerberg — to make decisions that impact the entire planet.
But when you’re looking at a raging dumpster fire, you don’t need to necessarily dive into outré arguments over the precise constituent elements of the trash. Sometimes, you start with the obvious: apply water. As proof that some of these things aren’t as complicated as Meta and others make them out to be, look no further than the changes the company made to the algorithm in the lead-up to the 2020 election: for a few blissful weeks, people saw more actual news, and less hate-filled garbage. Until the company promptly switched back once the heat was off.
Over at the Facebook Users Union, we’ve been working on building a user-powered movement to push for a few common-sense changes at the company to get things moving in the right direction. That means labeling and downgrading posts and groups that promote hate, violence, or disinformation. We’re asking the company not to amplify those posts or recommend them to other Facebook users.
To prevent the viral spread of hate and misinformation, Facebook should slow things down a bit, by implementing circuit-breakers to temporarily slow or stop newly viral content while it’s fact-checked, like the mechanisms in use in the stock market. And it’s important apply the same standards to everyone — even people like Donald Trump — and refuse service to anyone who uses the platform to disrupt elections in the US and abroad.
Facebook has exposed its users to lies, hate and disinformation. It has violated users’ privacy rights and let the platform be used to violate human rights, threaten community safety and undermine democracy.
I am not fine with this. We, Facebook Users, are not fine with this. And now that the company has proven that it isn’t beyond reproach, there’s never been a better time to demand more.
Corey Hill is a co-founder of the Facebook Users Union