What’s on your mind?
Fourteen years later, we wake up from a dream. As disappointing as it is, we strive to deal with the awoken reality, and leave the almost too-good-to-be-truth aspirations for the psyche. As software engineering makes its journey to granting wishes and solving problems, we come to halt its recklessness. It’s time to talk: grab a chair, it will take some time.
Just like there’s no free lunch, data is being collected as we use social media. And no matter how much people know about the extent of this data usage, the word “advertisement” seems to buzz when the matter is the Web 2.0 business model. We have come to understand a few years ago that money could be made with platforms that were free for the users but could still derive dividends to the shareholders, which is nothing to be reprimanded. However, it is now that we realize how fragile this model is when it comes to privacy, ethics, and what we may want in a second level that flies over content consumption. And for that, Mark Zuckerberg visited Washington this week.
Undeniably valuable, the hearings spun off an impression that Zuckerberg has few resources to abate the running issues, that people are illiterate about the inner-workings of technology, and that there’s a contradiction to the essence of the business model of these platforms in general.
While the past few years were a fuss about AI and Machine Learning tools and what they promised to do for us, we have been realizing we don’t understand it at all. Transitioning from stating that every single software had some sort of machine learning optimization (a lot of money was lost here), we stepped back to believe that not only is there a gap of progress to be made, but also that there’s a black magic component to this technology; we don’t quite control what’s inside it (often referred to as data-in, data-out), specially when it’s applied in scale. Since then, we matured enough to see that recommendation systems suffer from the same evils by suggesting wrongful content as far as unfitting to our profile, and more tragically, making blunt assumptions about our desire to see and consume extreme or fake content, which had legs in and of itself for a while. To the defense of software engineers, since then, a lot of thought has been employed to better understand these algorithms as well as to devise ways to better educate them. Nevertheless, the uncertainty is not quite tamed, and the non-trivial problem of admitting machine’s weaknesses in the affair of highly complex judgement remains. For the time being.
Perhaps even more pressing, what gained mass circulation over the past days were shots of bemused Congresspeople trying to understand technology. More on that later, but for now, to the extent that people are represented by the Congress, it’s fair to assume that most people would be in the same state if asked to explain how the technology they use work. And that follows specially for contemporaries, who profess mastery of technology, and justify it by being born with it, nevertheless lacking fundamental grasp of its engineering and implications. Congress, however, was one level up past that naivety, and did attempt to formalize and clarify our knowledge of how Facebook makes its money, even though they weren’t awarded virality for that.
If from one side Congress was, as said “grilling” Mark, it seemed the latter was doing a better job as a politician, who consistently escaped the hard questions in a mocking way and refused to clarify how Facebook really works. Zuckerberg got away with, to not use the well-known morale given by Marvel’s character, but go the opposite, theatricality and deception — promising that everything will be fixed with so-called “tools”- read AI and Machine Learning. Meanwhile, Facebook comes out untouched, is given a fresh-start, and is awarded a successful wrap-up to the data fiasco by means of apologies from the CEO. And so here we stand still, while the company catches up its fast movement to keep breaking things. Tomorrow, we will run faster, and there might be a redesigned feed, and no data will be collected, and it may solve all of our problems. Likely not. The reasons tie to the size of Facebook’s user base and its business model.
The platform saw itself in the past years lost in its essential values, struggling to make a choice between prioritizing the relevant over the viral, the news over the rumors, and the friends over the influencers, all of that in favor of building a more meaningful feed. On one way, by choosing the first, it loses its user base, the influencer economy, and most of the ad model. On the other, if it chooses the second, it starts to respond for the ethics of fake news, influencer marketing, privacy, and virality. Trying to guess the best way and implementing both of the two different policies to govern the social feed, Facebook also made both of the users of these groups disappointed, and on top of that, didn’t recognize it is too heavy to make such fast turns. Moreover, whether the influencers, the assiduous users, the internet geeks, the Macedonian fake news farms, or the presidential candidates were affected, it exposed sub-economies built off of this software in the real world, and the crossroad at which the company is currently at, missing a clear strategy going forward. While attempts to settle the feed’s rowdy behavior are worthwhile, they are doomed to failure; eliminating the personal factor is counterintuitive to the way it makes money and to how Web 2.0 was originally conceived — that was shifting the focus from the product to the data, and monetizing over the latter. As the platform promises to connect people while keeping their data safe, it establishes a contradiction that sits between encouraging us to share more of ourselves publicly and making efforts to protect our intimacy. Perhaps Zuckerberg hinted at this while in Washington when asked if Facebook was willing to change its business model in the interest of privacy, to which he replied with the same deception: “I’m not sure what that means.”
And so if it’s likely not to change, then what? Should we leave? Well, in attempt, you may be a lucky one if you conclude it doesn’t make a difference, but even if you do delete your account, it is still unclear if you can just ask for the check, stand up and leave with your data, as far as their being kept in the servers, collected elsewhere, contained in third-parties’ databases, or inferred in some way through the data of your friends that stay. To sum it up, it’s either all of us moving ,in a Project Diaspora similar endeavor, or it’s not even worth trying. Finding this first attempt unfeasible, or even still seeing value in the platform, you’re left to evaluate its actual price and to negotiate if possible.
Towards doing so, Congress took the first step, but still people refuse to acknowledge its necessity; this time, though, it wasn’t the algorithms’s fault, but, again, a lot of what went viral from the hearings were short clips mocking Capitol Hill’s misunderstanding of technology and Mark giving hacky answers in response. More interestingly, people used this very same platform to tune out the relevancy of its weaknesses and ethical implications. Instead, they chose to replicate ignorance and carelessness in starting a conversation about a proper business and cultural framework for the future, leaving the tough questions for someone else to answer. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what both Zuckerberg and the users want Facebook to be used for, and in that case, a proper solution to this problem will wait another fourteen years, at least, or until we wrongly or not profess mastery of AI and its ability to judge ethical matters and build businesses for ourselves. Whichever comes first.
Rather irrelevant, though, is how contradictory Mark Zuckerberg may sound, but whether we see ourselves as consumers, and thus learn how much Facebook costs in order to decide whether to put it back on the shelf or take it home. The scenario doesn’t point that way, and it becomes harder every day to opt-out of data collection, privacy breaches, and social media dependence. As the goal of connecting the world is pursued, and the social graph grows in edges and nodes, the cost of leaving it scales, and so does the price we pay for it, even though not to our knowledge.
The events that led to this week opened up a place for revisiting the type of relationship we want to have with these platforms, and we should educate ourselves to ask the right questions, not the “can Facebook read my conversations?” ones, or whatever is on your mind out of curiosity. Older generations have taught us: the worst son is not the wicked, but the one who doesn’t know how to ask. You ask my relationship status with social media, I’ll answer: it’s complicated.
Daniel Fonseca Yarochewsky, Spring ‘18
Revised by Maddy Bennett
