Facebook, the social media
giant, has received a lot of bad press recently, mostly focused on how it may
or may not have affected the results of the last presidential election. This spotlight has pushed into the background
other concerns about it that are occasionally raised: its size and extent give
it monopoly power in selling its users to advertisers; it is the most extensive
surveillance organization the world has ever known (except perhaps
Google/Alphabet); it is likely that Facebook uses its knowledge of its users
for beneficial as well as malignant purposes; most importantly, is it
beneficial to society or not?
John Lanchester wrote an
essay addressing issues like these for the London
Review of Books: You Are the Product. The title comes
from the notion that if someone provides you with something for free, then you
can be assured that the product being sold is you. Lanchester begins by describing the size and
scope of Facebook.
“In the far distant days of
October 2012, when Facebook hit one billion users, 55 per cent of them were
using it every day. At two billion, 66 per cent are. Its user base is growing
at 18 per cent a year – which you’d have thought impossible for a business
already so enormous. Facebook’s biggest rival for logged-in users is YouTube,
owned by its deadly rival Alphabet (the company formerly known as Google), in
second place with 1.5 billion monthly users. Three of the next four biggest
apps, or services, or whatever one wants to call them, are WhatsApp, Messenger
and Instagram, with 1.2 billion, 1.2 billion, and 700 million users
respectively (the Chinese app WeChat is the other one, with 889 million). Those
three entities have something in common: they are all owned by Facebook. No
wonder the company is the fifth most valuable in the world, with a market
capitalisation of $445 billion.”
What makes Facebook and other social media platforms so
popular? Lanchester suggests that humans
have an innate wish to know what others are doing so that they may copy them
(mimetic desire). This notion is
attributed to René
Girard, a French philosopher.
“Girard’s big idea was something
he called ‘mimetic desire’. Human beings are born with a need for food and
shelter. Once these fundamental necessities of life have been acquired, we look
around us at what other people are doing, and wanting, and we copy them.”
Such a notion would certainly explain Facebook’s
popularity. However, Lanchester also
points out that numerous studies have concluded that use of Facebook tends to
generate unhappiness and depression.
“To sum up: there is a lot of
research showing that Facebook makes people feel like shit. So maybe, one day,
people will stop using it.”
If Facebook is satisfying some fundamental need, why would
it be making people unhappy? It could be
because Girard misinterpreted human nature.
Keith Payne, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina
provides another interpretation of human nature that suggests an explanation
for why using Facebook can lead to distress. His perspective is provided in his book The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die.
According to Payne, we are interested in other people not
because we want to copy them, but because we are concerned about our status and
are continually checking to see how we compare.
Copying may occur but it will be driven by a quest for status.
We evolved off of the chimpanzee line, a species that
forms rigid hierarchical structures to insure that the best specimens, both
male and female, have optimal prospects for mating and feeding. For chimpanzees, status was a critical aspect
of life. While humans have evolved their
own unique properties over time, the tendency for human groups to form a
hierarchy is still present. All human
assemblies tend to arrive at a leader or a leadership group and a bunch of
followers. While precise hierarchical
levels tend to exist mainly in military organizations, all members of the
assembly will be conscious of their status and concerned that they are treated
properly given their status.
Psychological studies tell us that this status checking is innate and
often takes place subconsciously.
According to Payne, obvious factors such as attained
wealth and academic achievement are not reliable markers for high status. What is most important is how we assess our
ranking among those who we recognize as peers.
If a person feels diminished in status relative to peers this sense of
inequality generates physical and mental stress and produces the same unhealthy
responses as produced by living in a state of material poverty.
“….inequality is not the same
thing as poverty, although it can feel an awful lot like it….Inequality makes
people feel poor and act poor, even when they’re not.
Payne compares levels of status to rungs on a ladder
“We have to take subjective
perceptions of status seriously, because they reveal so much about people’s
fates. If you place yourself on a lower
rung, then you are more likely in the coming years to suffer from depression,
anxiety, and chronic pain. The lower the
rung you select, the more probable it is that you will make bad decisions and
underperform at work. The lower the rung
you select, the more likely you are to believe in the supernatural and in
conspiracy theories. The lower the rung
you select, the more prone you are to weight issues, diabetes, and heart
problems. The lower the rung you select,
the fewer years you have left to live.”
“Let me be clear that I am not
simply asserting that, if you are poor, then all of these things are more
likely to happen to you. I am stating,
rather, that these things are more likely to happen to you if you feel
poor, regardless of your actual income.”
This rather startling conclusion provides a convincing
reason why social media platforms like Facebook are so compelling and also why
they also leave us feeling depressed. A
Facebook page is a stage on which a person can present themselves in the best
possible light and perhaps engage in a bit of embellishment. An observer will be constantly comparing
his/her unembellished life with that of friends as presented on the screen. Feelings of inequality seem inevitable.
Jean M. Twenge has examined the trends observed in
adolescents as they spend large amounts of time on social media and reports her
findings in an article in The Atlantic:
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? She is most concerned about the effects
generated because interpersonal interactions via social media have become a
substitute for face-to-face interactions.
“Social-networking sites like
Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens
emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who
visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less
frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements ‘A lot of times I
feel lonely,’ ‘I often feel left out of things,’ and ‘I often wish I had more good
friends.’ Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high
since.”
Social media boasts of connecting people, but it is also
a mechanism for demonstrating a person’s isolation from peers.
“For all their power to link
kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about
being left out. Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time
together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts
relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along
are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has
reached all-time highs across age groups. Like the increase in loneliness, the
upswing in feeling left out has been swift and significant.”
“This trend has been especially
steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out
in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social
media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and
lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.
Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she
anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes.”
One of social media’s most significant contributions to
society is to increase the suicide rate.
“Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among
today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to
2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as much. The rise in
suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for
both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in
2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys. The suicide rate is still
higher for boys, in part because they use more-lethal methods, but girls are
beginning to close the gap.”
“These more dire consequences for teenage girls could also be rooted in the
fact that they’re more likely to experience cyberbullying. Boys tend to bully
one another physically, while girls are more likely to do so by undermining a
victim’s social status or relationships. Social media give middle- and
high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they
favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.”
Twenge then
illustrates the extent to which social media provides those owning the platform
with personal information that they can use to increase their profits.
“A recently leaked Facebook
document indicated that the company had been touting to advertisers its ability
to determine teens’ emotional state based on their on-site behavior, and even
to pinpoint ‘moments when young people need a confidence boost.’ Facebook
acknowledged that the document was real, but denied that it offers ‘tools to
target people based on their emotional state’.”
Lanchester believes the surveillance aspect of Facebook’s
business model is poorly understood and could become a problem for the platform
if more users appreciated what was actually being done to them.
“The one time Facebook did poll
its users about the surveillance model was in 2011, when it proposed a change
to its terms and conditions – the change that underpins the current template
for its use of data. The result of the poll was clear: 90 per cent of the vote
was against the changes. Facebook went ahead and made them anyway, on the
grounds that so few people had voted. No surprise there, neither in the users’
distaste for surveillance nor in the company’s indifference to that distaste.”
Sue Halpern obtained access to some of the information
Facebook had gathered about her and provides some interesting insight into how
it works in a New York Review of Books
article: They Have, Right Now, Another You.
Halpern tells us that Facebook accumulates 98 data points
that it uses to characterize an individual.
These factors are intended to help advertisers decide whether or not it
is worth putting an ad in front of this person. Some of these are self reported by the
individual of interest, while most are extracted via other means. For example, if you provide Facebook with a
photo of yourself, its facial recognition software is good enough to pick you
out of other peoples’ photographs. It
can clearly mine information from posts by you and those who it associates with
you, but since they wish to make money by selling you to vendors, they need to
learn more than you are likely to be willing to share.
“Facebook also follows users
across the Internet, disregarding their ‘do not track’ settings as it stalks
them. It knows every time a user visits a website that has a Facebook ‘like’
button, for example, which most websites do.”
“The company also buys personal
information from some of the five thousand data brokers worldwide, who collect
information from store loyalty cards, warranties, pharmacy records, pay stubs,
and some of the ten million public data sets available for harvest. Municipalities
also sell data—voter registrations and motor vehicle information, for example,
and death notices, foreclosure declarations, and business registrations, to
name a few. In theory, all these data points are being collected by Facebook in
order to tailor ads to sell us stuff we want, but in fact they are being sold
by Facebook to advertisers for the simple reason that the company can make a
lot of money doing so.”
What Halpern learned about Facebook’s characterization
was that it was often misleading and in some cases incorrect. Some of the mistakes were so outrageous that
Halpern began to wonder if Facebook has purposely created a more marketable
persona for her in order to attract higher priced ads to the pages at which she
would be looking. This makes one wonder
just how far Facebook would go in order to make more money.
Many of us think that a social media company that
collects data on us in order sell ads presenting us with something we might be
interested in buying is a harmless nuisance.
However, there is a dark side to this practice. Cathy O’Neil provides a number of examples in
her book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.
O’Neil tells us we should be concerned because big data,
such as that accumulated by Facebook, can be used to pinpoint vulnerable people
and take advantage of their vulnerability.
It has been demonstrated that degrees from for-profit
colleges are of little value to students.
They are much more expensive than equivalent education from a community
college and less highly valued by employers—in fact, little better than a high
school education. These schools make
nearly all their money from government-guaranteed loans. Whether students succeed or fail has little
to do with their business plan.
Platforms like Facebook have all the information required to provide
vulnerable targets for these outfits.
“Vatterott College, a career-training institute, is a particularly
nasty example. A 2012 Senate committee
report on for-profit colleges described Vatterott’s recruiting manual, which
sounds diabolical. It directs recruiters
to target ‘Welfare Mom w/Kids. Pregnant
Ladies. Recent Divorce. Low Self-Esteem. Low Income Jobs. Experienced a Recent Death. Physically/Mentally Abused. Recent Incarceration. Drug Rehabilitation. Dead-End Jobs—No Future.’”
What might you think of a social media company that would
assist an organization in inducing people like these to take out large school
loans with little or no prospect of ever being able to repay them?
Lanchester has clear feelings about Facebook.
“I am scared of Facebook. The
company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me.”
In fact he was moved to consider how Facebook might stumble
and fall.
The first possibility is that its growth is likely to
slow dramatically. There are only so
many eligible people in the world. The
next billion users will be difficult to find.
This will keep it generating large profits but its stock price will
likely fall.
Other eventualities could force Facebook to change its
business model. Lanchester wonders if people
will begin to reject the platform once they fully realize the extent of
Facebook’s surveillance activities.
Users might also just grow tired of an activity that makes large numbers
of people depressed and unhappy. The
government might also step in by recognizing that Facebook’s size and influence
has made them too big to exist in its current form.
Perhaps the most likely occurrence is that the business
of selling places for ads on web pages may dry up. The model is burdened by rampant fraud. It is easy to create a webpage, place ads on
it, and then schedule a bot on another platform to come and click on those ads
as often as one wishes.
“The industry publication Ad Week estimates the annual cost
of click fraud at $7 billion, about a sixth of the entire market. One single
fraud site, Methbot, whose existence was exposed at the end of last year, uses
a network of hacked computers to generate between three and five million
dollars’ worth of fraudulent clicks every day. Estimates of fraudulent
traffic’s market share are variable, with some guesses coming in at around 50
per cent; some website owners say their own data indicates a fraudulent-click
rate of 90 per cent.”
Facebook is not responsible for that fraud, but it has
been caught using dubious methods in presenting its value to advertisers.
“….many of Facebook’s metrics
are tilted to catch the light at the angle which makes them look shiniest. A
video is counted as ‘viewed’ on Facebook if it runs for three seconds, even if
the user is scrolling past it in her news feed and even if the sound is off.
Many Facebook videos with hundreds of thousands of ‘views’, if counted by the
techniques that are used to count television audiences, would have no viewers
at all.”
The best eventuality for society and Facebook users would
be for this ad-driven model to fail and disappear. That presumably would force Facebook to adopt
a fee-for-service model to acquire its income.
Surveillance would no longer be necessary and users’ selected
preferences would control how the platform interacts with them.
If something like what is suggested above does not occur,
we face an unknown future that is greatly feared by Lanchester.
“Automation and artificial
intelligence are going to have a big impact in all kinds of worlds. These
technologies are new and real and they are coming soon. Facebook is deeply
interested in these trends. We don’t know where this is going, we don’t know
what the social costs and consequences will be, we don’t know what will be the
next area of life to be hollowed out, the next business model to be destroyed,
the next company to go the way of Polaroid or the next business to go the way
of journalism or the next set of tools and techniques to become available to
the people who used Facebook to manipulate the elections of 2016. We just don’t
know what’s next, but we know it’s likely to be consequential, and that a big
part will be played by the world’s biggest social network. On the evidence of
Facebook’s actions so far, it’s impossible to face this prospect without
unease.”
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