(2018-09-10) Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy
Evan Osnos: Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? The most famous entrepreneur of his generation is facing a public reckoning with the power of Big Tech.
he keeps a Peloton stationary bike, a favorite accessory in the tech world, which live-streams a personal trainer to your home. Zuckerberg uses the machine, but he does not love cycling
prefer board games to television
Across the tech industry, the depth of Zuckerberg’s desire to win is often remarked upon
When I asked Zuckerberg about this reputation, he framed the dynamic differently. The survival of any social-media business rests on “network effects,”
“I care about succeeding. And, yes, sometimes you have to beat someone to something, in order to get to the next thing. But that’s not primarily the way that I think I roll.”
his discomfort with losing is undimmed
Scrabble
If Facebook were a country, it would have the largest population on earth. More than 2.2 billion people, about a third of humanity, log in at least once a month.
A couple of years ago, the company was still revelling in its power
The company’s troubles came to a head during the Presidential election of 2016 (Donald Trump)
at least a hundred Web sites were traced to Veles, Macedonia
Russian agents... Internet Research Agency
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
former Facebook executives, echoing a growing body of research, began to voice misgivings about the company’s role in exacerbating isolation, outrage, and addictive behaviors
Facebook is now under investigation by the F.B.I., the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as by authorities abroad, from London to Brussels to Sydney
to critics, Facebook is guilty of a willful blindness driven by greed, naïveté, and contempt for oversight.
I found Zuckerberg straining, not always coherently, to grasp problems for which he was plainly unprepared. These are not technical puzzles to be cracked in the middle of the night but some of the subtlest aspects of human affairs, including the nature of truth, the limits of free speech, and the origins of violence.
Executives offer fulsome praise.
In person, he is warmer and more direct than his public pronouncements, which resemble a politician’s bland pablum, would suggest.
The contrast between the public and the private Zuckerberg reminded me of Hillary Clinton
“I’m not the most polished person, and I will say something wrong, and you see the cost of that,” he said. “I don’t want to inflict that pain, or do something that’s going to not reflect well on the people around me.” In the most recent flap, a few weeks earlier, he had told Kara Swisher, the host of the “Recode Decode” podcast, that he permits Holocaust deniers on Facebook because he isn’t sure if they are “intentionally getting it wrong.”
difficult for him to get genuine, unexpurgated feedback
In 2017, he travelled to more than thirty states on a “listening tour”
But the exercise came off as stilted and tone-deaf.
Zuckerberg travelled with a professional photographer
A former Facebook executive who was involved in the tour told a friend, “No one wanted to tell Mark, and no one did tell Mark, that this really looks just dumb.”
“a teleological frame of feeling almost chosen,” a longtime friend told me. “I think Mark has always seen himself as a man of history
When Zuckerberg was a junior in high school, he transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy
I think Augustus is one of the most fascinating. Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus
What are the trade-offs in that?” Zuckerberg said, growing animated
The couple named their second daughter August.
In 2002, Zuckerberg went to Harvard University
During Zuckerberg’s sophomore year, in line for the bathroom at a party, he met Priscilla Chan, who was a freshman
After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto and never left.
The Internet was no longer so new that users were scarce, but still new enough that it was largely unregulated
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.”
Then, in 2007, growth plateaued at around fifty million users and wouldn’t budge.
Among other fixes, they discovered that, by offering the site in more languages, they could open huge markets.
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
The Growth Team was the coolest.
To gain greater reach, Facebook had made the fateful decision to become a “platform” for outside developers
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.
*according to Parakilas, an executive rejected the idea, telling him, “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?”
Parakilas told me, “It was very difficult to get the kind of resources that you needed to do a good job of insuring real compliance. Meanwhile, you looked at the Growth Team and they had engineers coming out of their ears. All the smartest minds are focussed on doing whatever they can possibly do to get those growth numbers up.”*
Facebook engineers became a new breed of behaviorists, tweaking levers of vanity and passion and susceptibility.
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
In 2012, Facebook data scientists used nearly seven hundred thousand people as guinea pigs, feeding them happy or sad posts to test whether emotion is contagious on social media. (They concluded that it is.)
As Facebook grew, Zuckerberg and his executives adopted a core belief: even if people criticized your decisions, they would eventually come around
in 2006, Facebook introduced the News Feed
Users revolted
people got used to the feed.
“A lot of the early experience for me was just having people really not believe that what we were going to do was going to work,” Zuckerberg told me
In 2006, Zuckerberg made his most unpopular decision at the fledgling company. Yahoo was offering a billion dollars to buy Facebook
“I think nearly all of his leadership team lost faith in him and in the business,” Cohler said. Zuckerberg told me that most of his leadership “left within eighteen months
On several occasions, Zuckerberg stumbled when it came to issues of privacy. In 2007, Facebook started giving advertisers a chance to buy into a program called Beacon
Despite the apology, Zuckerberg was convinced that he was ahead of his users, not at odds with them. In 2010, he said that privacy was no longer a “social norm.”
“Move fast and break things,”
“There’s always someone who wants to slow you down,” he said in a commencement address at Harvard last year. “In our society, we often don’t do big things because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing. The reality is, anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can’t keep us from starting.”
2010, with the release of the movie “The Social Network,”
Before the movie came out, Facebook executives debated how to respond. Zuckerberg settled on a stance of effortful good cheer, renting a movie theatre to screen it for the staff. Eight years later, Facebook executives still mention what they call, resentfully, “the movie.”
While the movie contributed to the fortress mentality on campus, Zuckerberg made a series of decisions that solidified his confidence in his instincts. In 2012, he paid a billion dollars for Instagram, the photo-sharing service, which at the time had only thirteen employees. Outside the industry, the startup appeared wildly overpriced, but it proved to be one of the best investments in the history of the Internet.
That spring, Facebook went public on the Nasdaq, at a valuation of a hundred and four billion dollars.
Zuckerberg was happy to make sharp turns to achieve his aims. In 2011, when users started moving from desktop computers to phones, Facebook swerved toward mobile technology
In early 2016, Zuckerberg directed employees to accelerate the release of Facebook Live, a video-streaming service,
A few months after the service launched, a Chicago man named Antonio Perkins was fatally shot on Facebook Live and the video was viewed hundreds of thousands of times
The incident might have served as a warning to slow down, but, instead, the next day, Andrew Bosworth sent around a remarkable internal memo justifying some of Facebook’s “ugly” physical and social effects as the trade-offs necessary for growth: “Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people
Zuckerberg issued a statement: “Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things. This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly.
Zuckerberg was also experimenting with philanthropy. In 2010, shortly before the release of “The Social Network,” he made a high-profile gift. Appearing onstage at “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” along with Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, and Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, he announced a hundred-million-dollar donation to help Newark’s struggling public-school system.
Strategies that helped him in business turned out to hurt him in education reform. “I think in a lot of philanthropy and government-related work, if you try five things and a few of them fail, then the ones that fail are going to get a lot of the attention,” he said.
In 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan pledged to spend ninety-nine per cent of their Facebook fortune “to advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation.” They created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
In contrast to a traditional foundation, an L.L.C. can lobby and give money to politicians, without as strict a legal requirement to disclose activities
In 2016, Zuckerberg announced, onstage and in a Facebook post, his intention to “help cure all disease in our children’s lifetime.
As Facebook expanded, so did its blind spots. The company’s financial future relies partly on growth in developing countries, but the platform has been a powerful catalyst of violence in fragile parts of the globe
I asked Jes Kaliebe Petersen, the C.E.O. of Phandeeyar, a tech hub in Myanmar, if there had been any progress. “We haven’t seen any tangible change from Facebook,” he told me. “We don’t know how much content is being reported. We don’t know how many people at Facebook speak Burmese. The situation is getting worse and worse here.”
Over the years, Zuckerberg had come to see his ability to reject complaints as a virtue. But, by 2016, that stance had primed the company for a crisis
Tristan Harris, the design ethicist, said, “When you’re running anything like Facebook, you get criticized all the time, and you just stop paying attention to criticism if a lot of it is not well founded. You learn to treat it as naïve and uninformed.” He went on, “The problem is it also puts you out of touch with genuine criticism from people who actually understand the issues.”
The 2016 election was supposed to be good for Facebook.
Facebook offered to “embed” employees, for free, in Presidential campaign offices to help them use the platform effectively. Hillary Clinton’s campaign said no. Donald Trump’s said yes, and Facebook employees helped his campaign craft messages. Although Trump’s language was openly hostile to ethnic minorities, inside Facebook his behavior felt, to some executives, like just part of the distant cesspool of Washington.
During the campaign, Trump used Facebook to raise two hundred and eighty million dollars. Just days before the election, his team paid for a voter-suppression effort on the platform.
Zuckerberg was defensive. “The idea that fake news on Facebook—of which, you know, it’s a very small amount of the content—influenced the election in any way, I think, is a pretty crazy idea,” he said. To some at Facebook, Zuckerberg’s defensiveness was alarming
Facebook moved fitfully to acknowledge the role it had played in the election. In September of 2017, after Robert Mueller obtained a search warrant, Facebook agreed to give his office an inventory of ads linked to Russia and the details of who had paid for them. In October, Facebook disclosed that Russian operatives had published about eighty thousand posts, reaching a hundred and twenty-six million Americans.
In March, after the Cambridge Analytica news broke, Zuckerberg and Facebook were paralyzed
When he encounters a theory that doesn’t accord with his own, he finds a seam of disagreement—a fact, a methodology, a premise—and hammers at it. It’s an effective technique for winning arguments, but one that makes it difficult to introduce new information. Over time, some former colleagues say, his deputies have begun to filter out bad news from presentations before it reaches him.
Zuckerberg and Sandberg have attributed their mistakes to excessive optimism, a blindness to the darker applications of their service. But that explanation ignores their fixation on growth, and their unwillingness to heed warnings.
James P. Steyer, the founder and C.E.O. of Common Sense Media, an organization that promotes safety in technology and media for children, visited Facebook’s headquarters in the spring of 2018 to discuss his concerns about a product called Messenger Kids, which allows children under thirteen—the minimum age to use the primary Facebook app—to make video calls and send messages to contacts that a parent approves.
To some people in the company, the executives seemed concentrated not on solving the problems or on preventing the next ones but on containing the damage.
In March, Zuckerberg agreed to testify before Congress for the first time about Facebook’s handling of user data
In barely two years, the mood in Washington had shifted
Tim Wu, a Columbia law-school professor and the author of a forthcoming book inspired by Brandeis’s phrase, told me, “Today, no sector exemplifies more clearly the threat of bigness (BigWorld) to democracy than Big Tech.”
Shortly before Zuckerberg was due to testify, a team from the Washington law firm of WilmerHale flew to Menlo Park to run him through mock hearings and to coach him on the requisite gestures of humility. Even before the recent scandals, Bill Gates had advised Zuckerberg to be alert to the opinions of lawmakers, a lesson that Gates had learned in 1998, when Microsoft faced accusations of monopolistic behavior.
Nobody asked him to resign—or much of anything difficult. Despite scattered moments of pressure, the overwhelming impression left by the event was how poorly some senators grasped the issues.
When I asked Zuckerberg whether policymakers might try to break up Facebook (Anti-Trust), he replied, adamantly, that such a move would be a mistake.
But he argued that efforts to “curtail” the growth of Facebook or other Silicon Valley heavyweights would cede the field to China.
as a former F.T.C. commissioner told me, “in the United States you’re allowed to have a monopoly position, as long as you achieve it and maintain it without doing illegal things.”
Facebook is encountering tougher treatment in Europe
of the most formidable critics of Silicon Valley is the European Union’s top antitrust regulator, Margrethe Vestager.
if you grow to be dominant, you have a special responsibility not to misuse your dominant position
As the pressure on Facebook has intensified, the company has been moving to fix its vulnerabilities.
requirements to disclose the sources of funding for political ads, the company announced that users would now be able to look up who paid for a political ad, whom the ad targeted, and which other ads the funders had run.
Samidh Chakrabarti, the product manager in charge of Facebook’s “election integrity” work, told me that the revelations about Russia’s Internet Research Agency were deeply alarming. “This wasn’t the kind of product that any of us thought that we were working on,” he said.
As hard as it is to curb election propaganda, Zuckerberg’s most intractable problem may lie elsewhere—in the struggle over which opinions can appear on Facebook, which cannot, and who gets to decide.
Zuckerberg sought to avoid banning users, preferring to be a “platform for all ideas.” But he needed to prevent Facebook from becoming a swamp of hoaxes and abuse. His solution was to ban “hate speech” and impose lesser punishments for “misinformation,” a broad category that ranged from crude deceptions to simple mistakes. Facebook tried to develop rules about how the punishments would be applied, but each idiosyncratic scenario prompted more rules, and over time they became byzantine
For years, Facebook had provided a platform to the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Facebook was loath to ban Jones.
Then, in late July, Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of Noah Pozner, a child killed at Sandy Hook, published an open letter addressed “Dear Mr Zuckerberg,” in which they described “living in hiding” because of death threats from conspiracy theorists
Facebook relented, somewhat. On July 27th, it took down four of Jones’s videos and suspended him for a month. But public pressure did not let up. On August 5th, the dam broke after Apple Computer, saying that the company “does not tolerate hate speech,” stopped distributing five podcasts associated with Jones. Facebook shut down four of Jones’s pages for “repeatedly” violating rules against hate speech and bullying.
He told me that, after Jones was reduced, more complaints about him flooded in, alerting Facebook to older posts, and that the company was debating what to do when Apple announced its ban
I definitely care a lot. There’s a difference between letting emotions drive impulsive decisions and caring.” He went on, “Ultimately, I think the reason that we built this successful thing is because we just solve problem after problem after problem, and typically you don’t do that by making impulsive, emotional decisions.”
he decided long ago that no historical change is painless. Like Augustus, he is at peace with his trade-offs.
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