Recent developments at Facebook Inc. confirm that it is a social menace. And that its utter dominance of social media worldwide is an unacceptable risk in our now-digital global economy.
The only effective remedy is to break up Facebook. The stricter regulation that many are now calling for with unprecedented urgency would be useful, but only as it is applied to a bigger number of smaller social-networking firms resulting from a Facebook breakup.
More on how to deal with Facebook later.
Facebook has shown that it cannot protect its users’ privacy. It cannot prevent disruptive service outages. It cannot protect its users from malevolent content.
It cannot protect our children from harm or drain its cesspool of online hate and COVID-19 disinformation, and seems disinclined to even try in any meaningful way.
On Oct. 4, Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, abruptly crashed. That left more than 3.5 billion people — roughly half of humanity — without an essential service.
The company was not a victim of a cybercrime or ransomware attack. The blackout — among the biggest failures in internet history — was traced to malfunctioning servers at a Facebook data-processing centre in Santa Clara, Calif.
That one isolated technical breakdown paralyzed a company that took in $86 billion (U.S.) in revenue last year. It even impeded the firm’s technicians from dealing with the crisis because their disabled security passes did not grant them entry to company buildings and control rooms.
Social media is no longer about sharing family vacation photos. It is how hundreds of millions of people organize their lives. It is how entrepreneurs from Delhi to London to Vancouver can do business.
That was hardly Facebook’s first system failure.
In April, it was revealed that a massive Facebook data breach violated the privacy of about 533 million users, including an estimated 3.5 million Canadians. Their personal information was spilled onto the global internet for all to see.
Worse, in the two years since that breach occurred, Facebook failed to disclose it — a lengthy period in which users didn’t know their personal information was compromised.
Between 2014 and 2016, Russian agents used the Facebook and Instagram platforms, and to a far lesser extent other social media services, to try to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The episode raised questions about why the company didn’t try harder to protect its platforms, users, and the U.S. election system.
Also last week, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, a data scientist, testified to the U.S. Senate that Facebook knowingly operates products and services that, in her words, “harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy.”
Haugen worked in Facebook’s civic integrity unit, charged with sanitizing Facebook’s many platforms.
But instead of integrity, Haugen has alleged that she saw Facebook keeping hateful content on its platforms to attract users, who drive the firm’s advertising revenues. She said Facebook does little about the role of Instagram, a photo-sharing site, in worsening the body-image mental-health problems of teenagers.
Facebook, Haugen said, is in a state of “moral bankruptcy.”
That might be an upgrade from U.S. President Joe Biden’s accusation in July that Facebook was “killing people” with its dissemination of pandemic disinformation.
Haugen, who worked at Facebook until May, says she also saw the “rampant” COVID-19 disinformation that Biden was talking about, along with a plethora of falsehoods in the 2020 U.S. presidential cycle.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to Haugen’s testimony by describing it as “deeply illogical.” Her assertion that Facebook puts profits ahead of its users’ safety is “just not true,” Zuckerberg said.
Much of Haugen’s testimony confirmed Facebook malfeasance already known or widely suspected. What makes her Facebook revelations the most explosive to date is that they are backed up by thousands of internal Facebook documents that Haugen has provided to lawmakers, regulators, and the news media.
As you would expect, there have been renewed calls in the U.S., Britain, and the European Union (EU) for substantive regulation of social media, one of the very few major industries yet to be strictly regulated.
The re-elected Trudeau government has promised legislation against online hate in its first 100 days. But it has chosen not to broaden its proposed new measures to encompass the wider range of social harms identified by Haugen.
Regulation alone is not the answer.
Many British and American lawmakers want to create new internet regulatory agencies. But both jurisdictions already have an alphabet soup of regulators with the competence to strictly oversee Facebook.
It was the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for instance, that in 2019 extracted a record $5-billion (U.S.) fine from Facebook for violating its users’ privacy. As noted, that didn’t keep Facebook cleansed of election disinformation in 2020.
Antitrust regulators in the EU have made the most determined effort of any jurisdiction to rein in big tech firms — notably the Google arm of Alphabet Inc. Yet Google still dominates global internet search as much as Facebook controls social networking.
Big Tobacco is seemingly everyone’s point of comparison with Facebook this week, because the tobacco firms covered up the harmful effects of their products, as Facebook is alleged to have done.
But it took about half a century to regulate Big Tobacco in a meaningful way after the first public-health warnings about tobacco use were sounded.
Suspicion should fall on new regs, which always contain loopholes, since Zuckerberg has been calling for them for years. His army of lobbyists is poised to help shape the proposed rules, a necessity since no one else understands social media’s algorithms. And with regs in place, Facebook can duck blame for its problems by citing regulatory failure.
The Facebook problem, in a nutshell, is a market-domineering firm which by its enormous size freezes out rivals and consumer choice.
As social-networking’s dominant provider, Facebook also puts users and the global economy at risk of total system failures like that of Oct. 4. And Facebook’s dominant status has enabled it for years to easily resist calls for genuine social responsibility.
A borderline global monopoly like Facebook in the banking, auto or grocery sectors would have been broken up years ago.
Breaking up Facebook would be less challenging than the successful 1984 breakup of Ma Bell into seven “Baby Bells.”
Facebook is conveniently segregated into its leading platforms. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger each have the strength to thrive as stand-alone companies.
Common sense argues for more competition and consumer choice. It argues for smaller firms unable to cause failures of nearly the entire social-media ecosystem, and that are easier to regulate.
It argues for a greater abundance of social-networking firms that compete on offering the most privacy protections, the safest platforms, and the least intrusive advertising, for a start.
Common sense argues for a breakup of Facebook.
