This post, I’m going to touch on something that is separate from yet related to all the political bullshit.
We know by now that part of the Russian intelligence campaign to assist in Donald Trump’s election was to foist propaganda through various means, including social media. Some of these contacts were through fake accounts or “bots.” But in some cases the agents were private sector businesses that styled themselves as social engineers. One that was frequently mentioned during the 2016 campaign was Cambridge Analytica, a company with a more than peripheral association with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Well, on March 20, Britain’s Channel 4 played an undercover tape of Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix in lunch discussions with a potential client, selling various services including the use of front companies and private data obtained via Facebook to turn elections or achieve other political results. Prior to this expose, former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie went to the press to state that the entire company was based on “ill-gotten” Facebook data. The Daily Beast said “Facebook was reportedly informed of this alleged breach two years ago but did not go public to announce that a political consultancy linked to Bannon and the Mercers had access to details from 50 million Facebook accounts.”
This has rather rapidly led to a crisis of reputation for Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg did a media tour that failed to quiet his critics.
Bannon himself complained, “When Zuckerberg goes on TV yesterday, and Zuckerberg gives the New York Times an interview, and the opposition-party media plays patty-cake with him, and doesn’t ask him one tough question, his entire business model is made upon taking that data for free and monetizing it”. Facebook’s actions in coordinating with Cambridge Analytica are now being investigated in Great Britain, while in America there are calls for Zuckerberg to testify to Congress. But hey, there’s a silver lining.
According to the New York Times and a bunch of other media, there is now apparently a big wave of people who have publicly announced they are quitting Facebook, including of course, Cher.
Of course it’s a sign of the hypocrisy and virtue signaling implied here that in order to blast one’s opinion as expediently as possible to all corners, these people are making their announcements on Twitter.
Going on Twitter to announce that you’re quitting Facebook is like telling all your friends at the crackhouse that you’re going to stop drinking. “Hey! Good for you, Tom!”
I’ve gone over the problem with Twitter at length. And one of the things I said in regard to social media generally was “I believe that if you are going to have a social media presence, you should know the right tool for the right job. I don’t need a blog to share cute animal videos to friends. For that I have Facebook. I don’t post to this blog every day or even every week because I don’t always have time to elaborate on my ideas, whereas I can usually find the time to post something on Facebook. But I decided to create my own blog not only to post essay-length pieces but because I could control the content to a greater degree than something I posted or liked on Facebook.” In this regard, I consider Facebook to be a medium between the prior modes of text communication and Twitter, which is specialized for impulse posting and unconsidered opinion. You can use Facebook to make extended statements in one post. It doesn’t work that well with the format, but it is more feasible than on a Twitter format which is against extended thought by design.
But just as it seemed to be news to Jack Dorsey that Twitter had become a cesspool of antisocial behavior, Mark Zuckerberg acts like he wasn’t even able to entertain the concept that his platform was valued largely as a means of researching people’s desires in order to manipulate them – as in, beyond commercial advertising purposes.
The irony being that one of the issues with Facebook – the mechanic of “self” selecting material according to your already established preferences – means that one’s reality bubble is reinforced and there’s not much contact with political posts that clash with one’s biases. But if you’re one of those self-enclosed partisans, or if you somehow manage to never get into politics at all, it’s still fairly easy to see that as a free platform, Facebook relies on ads, “data mining” and various methods for content providers to separate you from your money. The most innocuous of these are technically free games that require you to pay money for the game equipment to complete various levels of play. And then of course there are the real clickbait scams like “Enter Your Credit Card Number to See What Star Wars Character You Are” and “Remember Rameses II? You’ll Never Guess What He Looks Like Now!”
Vox has apparently decided to write a bunch of articles against Facebook (similar to how they periodically write a bunch of articles against guns). The most trenchant of these is Matthew Yglesias’ piece, “The Case Against Facebook.” Yglesias mentions not only the confirmation-bias engine, but he also asserts that the use of Facebook as a news platform is “(d)estroying journalism’s business model”. (Even though much of my awareness of Vox stems from their Facebook links.) Although he does concede, “Facebook critics in the press are often accused of special pleading, of hatred of a company whose growing share of the digital advertising pie is a threat to our business model. This is, on some level, correct.”
Whereas Ross Douthat (centrist conservative at the New York Times) said this week: “But the liberal establishment’s fixation on Facebook’s 2016 sins — first the transmission of fake news and now the exploitation of its data by the Trump campaign or its appendages — still feels like a classic example of blaming something new because it’s new when it’s the old thing that mattered more. Or of blaming something new because you thought that “new” meant “good,” that the use of social-media data by campaigns would always help tech-savvy liberals and not their troglodytic rivals — and the shock of discovering otherwise obscures the more important role that older forms of media played in making the Trump era a reality. ”
Douthat goes on to the general point that for all the attention paid to the impact of social media and Donald Trump’s Twitter account, his real advantage was in old-school media giving him the equivalent of 2 billion dollars in free advertising through interviews, pro-Trump pundits and coverage of his rallies on basic cable “news” channels. But I already knew that.
In other words, while Yglesias and other critics are correct in asserting that Facebook’s mode of business undermines proper journalism in favor of consumerist imperatives like sensationalism and confrontation, this is hardly a problem unique to Facebook, or even to social media. Or as Douthat says in his column: “And as cynical as I believe the lords of Silicon Valley to be, the more important cynicism in 2016 belonged to those television execs who were fine with enabling the wild Trumpian takeover of the G.O.P., because after all Republicans deserved it and Hillary was sure to beat him in the end. Except that she didn’t beat him, in part because he also exploited the polarization that cable news, in particular, is designed to feed … The depth and breadth of Trump skepticism among right-wing pundits was a pretty solid indicator of his unfitness for high office. But especially once he won the nomination this skepticism was often filtered out of cable coverage, because the important thing was to maintain the partisan shouting-match model. This in turn encouraged a sense that this was just a typical right-versus-left election, in which you should vote for Trump if you usually voted for Republicans … and in the end that’s what most G.O.P. voters did. ”
Not that there isn’t reason to be concerned about the influence of tech companies (and the deceptive nature of Facebook businesses) as issues in themselves, but much of this hysteria over social media is mainstream liberals casting about for yet another excuse for why Queen Hillary lost. For example, the idea that a Russian propaganda effort was needed to brand Hillary Clinton as untrustworthy. Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity had been doing that for maybe 20 years, and do we blame the Russians for that? Which doesn’t even touch on an analysis of whether Clinton actually IS untrustworthy, and why the longer she was in a position of real influence on policy, the more distrusted she was by the Left as the quintessential neoliberal.
Twitter is that much more a habitat for snarky, savvy social justice types, and it got taken even harder by the alt-right, but then Twitter is that much more disposed to emotional venting. So the Left can’t be too surprised by now that the Right keeps using their own culture against them. But then, if they weren’t always surprised by that, they wouldn’t be the Left.
From what I’ve seen of the pundit consensus in the last day or so, the opinion seems to be that Facebook being what it is, you shouldn’t be surprised that it’s exposing your data to unscrupulous people. And in fact, this was already the known business model. So if people are going to tie Facebook’s real issues to the current political catastrophe, it’s yet another case of the established gatekeepers blaming that pesky free will for screwing their world up.
I can’t blame anybody if they do quit Facebook, but I think the hype is overblown. If people are encouraged to look at it more critically, that’s one thing. Again, each medium is for different things.
I think Facebook is good for what it is, and the social problem with it (and to a greater extent Twitter) is that people expect it to be other than what it is. To spread cute, quick messages to a mass number of people, I’ll use Facebook. For more in-depth thinking, I have this blog.
I did link my Facebook account to some job-finder services like LinkedIn, so I’m thinking of cutting those connections. Especially since those sites aren’t helping me find a job. But then, that might be because, if those guys have access to my Facebook, they might see all the times I’ve said “fuck.”
Which is the real dilemma for me here. If I can’t say “fuck” on Facebook, what is it good for?