Facebook and The Lost Art Of Critical Thinking

When something is free, you’re the product.

Never has that commentary about social media been more true – or more terrifying – than this past week.

50 million Facebook users are waking up to the reality that, by merely participating in an innocuous “Personality Test”, they were inadvertently providing their data – and the data of their friends and families – to an organization innocently called Cambridge Analytica.

Let that sink in…

FIFTY

MILLION

USERS 

To add insult to injury it would appear that all that data was then manipulated to help drive advertising and news (fake news?) into the Donald Trump election campaign.

And let’s not rehash the ongoing investigation into Russian meddling and manipulation of social media.

This is a situation that, even in the worst nightmares of George Orwell and William Gibson, none of us could have have imagined we’d be contending with.

Except, sadly, this situation was inevitable.

Inevitable that an organization that derives over 98% of its revenue from advertising would be motivated to utilize all the free data it was collecting.

Inevitable that a publicly-traded organization with one of the largest IPOs in history would be financially motivated to wring every last cent out of the only asset they have – your data – to keep Wall Street happy.

Inevitable that an organization whose CEO has repeatedly dodged US Senate hearings to discuss how his “platform” works would act like this. Remember this is a CEO who came forward only when a Canadian whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica made these privacy accusations public.

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have spent the last few years evangelizing the good intent of Facebook and their selfless goal of connecting the world. That “selflessness” is hard to reconcile with the CEO interviewed on CNN this week. The contrite – and agonizingly well-scripted – apologies are hard to reconcile with a CEO who has hired armies of behavioural scientists to create a “sticky” (read highly addictive) product. And with a CEO who has created divisions of his company to explicitly aid politicians around the world with their campaigns.

Beyond the “I’m really sorry” and “We’re trying hard to fix it” I didn’t hear anything approximating “That was wrong” and “We’ve shut the division down” – in the current climate, I’m concerned when a CEO seems more intent on apologies than actions.

There did seem times this week when I was one of only a handful concerned that Facebook has supposedly been aware of this “breach of contract” by Cambridge Analytica for two years. Two years! But are only reluctantly coming forward now? Perhaps they were hoping this news item would be lost in the deluge of information their channel pummels us with daily.

As someone who signed off and deleted Facebook 2 years ago, I’m certainly relieved my data hasn’t been compromised but that’s scant comfort. There are many people I know who are still actively engaged on it. 

Earlier this year, WIRED published a spectacular article on the issues within Facebook and how Mark Zuckerberg was attempting to address them. It is a scathing blow-by-blow of the last 2 years inside Facebook and it highlights a litany of internal struggles, poor judgement and an organization struggling to reconcile its "techno-optimism". In light of current events, this article is a must-read.

My personal decision to leave Facebook was because I got a very early taste of the derisive and divisive filter bubbles that the platform created. I've seen innocent debates quickly turned into vile personal attacks (behind the safety of a keyboard of course) and the confirmation bias became just too poisonous for me to stay.

Most concerning to me is the derision and division we’re all witnessing daily seems to have spread from social media into the very fabric of our society. That should concern us all.

Let me be completely unambiguous.

I fear we’ve become a society so wrapped up in the insatiable convenience of instantaneous access to absolutely everything that we’ve lost our ability to think critically.

The Halloween candy – and I use that metaphor deliberately – of sugary, addictive treats floating on top of our mobile phones is just too delicious for us to try curb. Let alone #deleteFacebook as the CEO of WhatsApp – a Facebook acquisition ironically – recommends.

Here’s what we’re not thinking critically about.

The news we consume – what’s the source? What’s their agenda? What level of facts – real, hard, verifiable facts – substantiate this story? If this Facebook story doesn’t make you question every single “news” story that floats past you, I’d be concerned. Heaven forbid, if you still use social media as a news source, please please shake your head. The need to critically evaluate the news we consume has never been more important. 

How politicians are using social media – I’ve been a very outspoken critic of how politicians have weaponized social media and how that must end. Canada is in the midst of a deeply troubling economic time where planning for our future in real terms has been usurped by politicians more concerned by Instagram selfies. Where the serious business of running our country – at a Provincial and Federal level – is driven by platitudinous social-media-ready commentary rather than full open debate. That must end. Social media, as we’ve seen from BREXIT to Trump to Myanmar, is just too volatile a tool to be given to politicians who seek fame and fortune. 

Since this news broke in Canada, the Government – who has a past relationship with the data analyst at the centre of the Facebook scandal – has also been very reluctant to take a position on this issue. What’s been ominously absent from the discussion in Parliament is what our politicians – from all parties – are prepared to do about it. How are they all going to change their behaviour and their own use of social media moving forward? As highly contentious and personality-driven Provincial Elections heat up in my home province of Ontario, I will be very surprised if any politician is prepared to step away from social media and its ability to get their message out.

The businesses we covet – As a seasoned entrepreneur, I know the agony, sweat, angst and euphoria of building something from scratch. And I have the deepest respect for those who follow into entrepreneurial passions. But I despair when I look at the organizations we covet, the CEO’s we idolize and wafer-thin business models we hold up as Unicorns. We’ve created a worrying trend where we tell our next generation of Canadian entrepreneurs that innovation means UBERing everything.

If sustainable Canadian innovation is going to truly happen, we need to hold our entrepreneurs to more exacting standards and higher levels of diligence.

That means less selfies with Sidewalk Labs and holding our private and public sector leaders accountable for mentoring and guiding our next generation of entrepreneurs. That mentorship will be effective if we can reverse the current steep trend against critical thinking.

Our Canadian data and what our Plan is for that – Numerous astute Canadians have been talking at length about data as a national security issue. 2 weeks ago that might have sounded alarmist but I believe (thankfully) that this conversation couldn’t be better timed. We have a significant Smart City initiative under discussion in Toronto – which is spectacular – yet we seem to have high levels of opacity around all the deep, rich data that’s going to be generated by this project. And that’s only one example. Several months ago Toronto threw itself enthusiastically into the race to be Amazon’s second HQ. That furor has died down but what seemed to be missing from that dialogue is “what are the data implications and guardrails we’re going to need if that happens?” These are big meaty challenges but they’re not going to be met by superficial debates. And they definitely aren’t going to be solved by inexperienced politically-motivated actors either. We should be particularly concerned by the current brain drain of our brightest and best into Silicon Valley. Retaining those beautiful minds should be a national priority.

Our own accountability – This might be the hardest part to swallow. I have some accountability in all of this as do YOU. Each and every one of us makes deliberate choices on all of these things. Our actions are ours alone and no-one coerced us into downloading Facebook. That’s on us. For all the legitimate – and long overdue – scrutiny that we’re all presently doing, we really need look no further than the mirror and ask “what accountability am I going to take for this?” Perhaps, even more critical, is to ask “So now, what am I going to do differently?”

 We have an amazing ability to build constructs and ideas like free will, democracy, autonomy, self-actualization and self-determination. In each of those, lies an inherent responsibility to take accountability for our actions. 

That accountability is something that, with the utmost respect, I feel requires the most critical thinking from each of us.

As egregious as this Facebook story is, perhaps the story we should all be focusing on is the apparent loss of critical thinking.

As a friend said recently, never has the cost of free cat videos been so high.

This is a meaty topic my friends but I do very much want to hear your thoughts and comments on this one.

This story is just going to keep growing…