Just what is Facebook’s problem?

On January 4, Mark Zuckerberg posted an article on his Facebook page saying his personal challenge for 2018 was “fixing Facebook’s important issues” such as “protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”

The entry prompted a range of reactions from big names in the field: from John Battelle saying “Facebook can’t be fixed”, to Roger McNamee’s proposals to “fix Facebook before it fixes us”; but the truth is that Facebook’s problems date back much further than 2017.

Facebook is an enormously profitable company with a market capitalization of more than $500 billion and whose share price continues to rise. It is also a tool that has been used to influence elections and attack democracy, to promote genocide (prompting calls for the company to face charges of war crimes), hate speech, harassment, ageism and other types of exclusion, none of which have been prevented by the measures taken by the company.

Facebook’s incredible growth to the point where it is now used by over two billion people around the world has been built on a fundamental mechanism: an algorithm that the world seems to accept as normal, but that in my opinion is unacceptable. When you create content on a Facebook page, that content has a certain natural scope: it is disseminated by other people sharing it. Thus, the social network is supposed to be a platform in an environment where information circulates freely and we each find things based on our interests, friends, pages we follow and what they contribute to our lives. In reality of course, what happens is that the algorithm kicks in, artificially restricting the spontaneous scope of contents in the hope that the creator of the content, in order to reach ever-larger numbers of people, will pay for Facebook to help, through advertising. The majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from forcing content creators to pay for Facebook to distribute their material. Facebook is like a drug dealer: it controls the market, and if suppliers want to reach users, they must pay a bigger and bigger cut.

This is the source of most of Facebook’s problems. It is simply unacceptable to build an empire that reaches and involves more than two billion people on such an algorithm, which can be more accurately described as a dirty trick than a business model, regardless of the money Facebook has made from it. By restricting content’s scope and forcing creators to pay for it to be distributed, Facebook knows perfectly well what it is doing: fraud, deception, a twisted system it can use as it sees fit. Facebook’s problem is that its success is based on an algorithm that allows it to control what we see and do not see, illegally bypassing filters and only attempting to impose controls in response to repeated crises. Facebook’s problem is what happens when human nature collides with an algorithm, which should be completely unacceptable, but which for some reason, the world has accepted as normal. Making money by manipulating people in this way is wrong. Facebook’s problem is one of mentality, and it has become clearer over the years. The problem now is that Facebook’s problems pretty much require the company starting all over again.

That said, let’s see what Zuckerberg is really going to do to fix Facebook’s problems. The first step, modifying the News Feed to reduce the reach of news and videos, while reinforcing the presence of content created by friends, is just a temporary solution: as the world’s largest means of communication, the site where most people get their news, Facebook is logically going to be targeted by states and organizations trying to manipulate electoral processes, by people spreading hate speech; by anybody trying to manipulate anything that can be manipulated. But solving problems by reducing one’s relevance is not a solution: it is a withdrawal. What people want is a social network where they can access news, see that content has been sifted by their friends’ interests, where they can comment on them, like in a bar.

Facebook now needs to push through deeper change. Mark Zuckerberg is a smart guy, and although he faces a difficult task, he knows he must carry it out. In the short term, it’s going to be a bumpy ride: media that have bought traffic flow will be hit hard and see readership fall. Will readers go back to their old newspapers to search for content, now that Facebook will not be placing it in front of their noses? At the same time, the outlook should be less distorted; because what Facebook has done was simply to distort the relevance and scope of things. Which is hardly the way to go about building something lasting.

(En espa?ol, aquí)