The U.S. Goes to War on Facebookistan

I am not on Facebook, but some of my best friends are on it. Even people I have never met are on it. It turns out that makes some people very unhappy.

I was asked yesterday on a Tufts panel that I participated in why lawmakers on Capitol Hill are so intent on pursuing antitrust action against Big Tech. I gave all the usual reasons, you know, the long list of complaints against Big Tech. But, I said, beyond all of those grand reasons, there is a much more elemental one: it makes for great political theater to have one of the most powerful and richest men in the world look uncomfortable in a suit he rarely wears and squirm on camera, while lawmakers sit behind gigantic elaborately carved desks and glare down at him. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is almost perfectly cast for that stage set.

And, now, the second part of the one-two punch that follows such hearings. The FTC and 48 states launched an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. I have been writing a lot on Facebook in recent years. I thought I would put some of these articles together -- from Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Salon, Forbes, Newsweek, PBS, Quartz, among others -- as it gives me - and, I hope, you, dear reader -- some perspective on the latest action against the company and on an extraordinary phenomenon: Facebook, the social media platform that gave rise to Facebookistan, the nation that brings the largest number of people on the planet under one umbrella.

Why Facebook’s new ‘privacy cop’ is doomed to fail

FAST COMPANY

Giving an outside assessor a role in monitoring Facebook’s privacy practices sounds like a great idea, but it’s unlikely to work miracles.

The Federal Trade Commission issued its largest-ever fine, of $5 billion, to Facebook for violating a 2011 privacy settlement in late July. But the amount is only about a month’s worth of the company’s revenue, suggesting that the fine, while seeming large, is, in fact, rather modest.

More significantly, Facebook is required to have an “outside assessor“—a sort of privacy cop—to monitor the company’s handling of user data, along with following a few other corporate procedural requirements. That assessor could address the fundamental problems with the way Facebook operates–but as a scholar of technology companies’ business practices, I’m worried that this potentially all-important role is set up for failure.

Read the rest here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90385267/why-facebooks-new-privacy-cop-is-doomed-to-fail

Facebook’s "pivot" is less about privacy and more about profits

SALON

I see Zuckerberg’s latest move as Strategy 101: a market-driven shift of focus.

Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s latest promise is that his social media conglomerate will become a “privacy-focused” one. By turns lauded and lambasted, this move does not quite address users’ primary problems with the company.

His move is the pragmatic shift of a CEO toward where the market is already headed. Ironically, Zuckerberg’s announcement provides more evidence for Facebook critics who say the company doesn’t understand even the concept of user privacy.

Read the rest of the article here: https://www.salon.com/2019/03/19/facebooks-pivot-is-less-about-privacy-and-more-about-profits_partner/

Facebook is not all bad at 15, but now it must be good

PBS

It is almost too easy to bash Facebook these days. Nearly a third of Americans feel the country’s most popular social media platform is bad for society. As the company approaches its 15th birthday, Americans rate its social benefit as better than Marlboro cigarettes, but worse than McDonald’s.

Yet as a scholar of digital technologies and their effects on society – and even though I am not on Facebook – I worry that public perception has become overly critical of Facebook. It’s true that the company has been behaving like many 15-year-old adolescents, acting irresponsibly and selfishly, and making endless promises to do better, at least until the next mess is uncovered.

However, as talk grows of fines and regulations, it’s worth remembering there is such a thing as overregulation, which would respond to the urgency and charged political climate of the current moment but hurt the public interest in the long run.

Read the rest here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/opinion-facebook-is-not-all-bad-at-15-but-now-it-must-be-good

These Are The Countries Most Vulnerable To Facebook Data Breaches

NEWSWEEK

The latest shoe has dropped on Facebook: Private data on 50 million users found its way to a shadowy research outfit, Global Science Research, and then on to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm launched by former White House adviser Steve Bannon.

Zuckerberg has come out with a mea culpa for this latest breach of digital trust. But his company's globally dispersed user base presents a challenge. Every month, over 2 billion users worldwide log in to Facebook.

How does Zuckerberg convert his apology into action, while respecting the vastly differing circumstances that his network—the ultimate social network—connects? It can be difficult for global platforms like Facebook to consistently rebuild trust, when attitudes toward privacy vary so widely across the world.

Consider some of the essential differences that Zuckerberg must brush up on. (After all, he did miss a few essential classes since he dropped out of Harvard prematurely.) Let's call it the beginning of a cheat sheet on "digital anthropology."

Read the rest here: https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-developing-countries-trust-data-opinion-862592

How Facebook can really fix itself

QUARTZ

Facebook has a world of problems. Beyond charges of Russian manipulation and promoting fake news, the company’s signature social media platform is under fire for being addictive, causing anxiety and depression, and even instigating human rights abuses.

To make matters even worse, Facebook has faced huge backlash in recent days after it was revealed that Trump campaign consultant Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of up to 50 million users without their permission.

Company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to win back users’ trust. But his company’s efforts so far have ignored the root causes of the problems they intend to fix, and even risk making matters worse. Specifically, they ignore the fact that personal interaction isn’t always meaningful or benign, leave out the needs of users in the developing world, and seem to compete with the company’s own business model.

Read the rest here: https://qz.com/1233610/heres-how-mark-zuckerberg-can-fix-facebook-after-the-cambridge-analytica-backlash/

Lessons from Facebook’s Fumble in India

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

On February 10, Silicon Valley legend and Facebook board member, Marc Andreessen sent out a tweet:

I now withdraw from all future discussions of Indian economics and politics, and leave them to people with more knowledge and experience!

How did Andreessen arrive at such a moment? His Twitter fumble was in fact part of an important week for Facebook, India, and the debate over internet access in emerging markets. It started on February 8 when news broke that India’s telecom regulator had decided against allowing Facebook’s Free Basics service arguing in part that it would make it hard for smaller providers to compete and that the service violated basic principles of “net neutrality,” which is the idea that all internet traffic should be treated the same. The Facebook service was designed to offer free access to a select set of websites to those without internet access – but Free Basics had been equated to colonialism by its many critics.

Andreessen’s part began when he sent out a very ill-advised (and now deleted) series of tweets, including one that read: “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?” Not surprisingly, a firestorm of criticism followed. Mark Zuckerberg himself called the message “deeply upsetting.”

Andreessen’s misguided actions are a lesson for Silicon Valley innovators preparing to win over the next billion users: more than just coding intelligence, you need “contextual” intelligence; the complex histories, economic disparities, politics, and socio-cultural mindsets in the developing world shape success just as much as the product does.

Read the rest here: https://hbr.org/2016/02/lessons-from-facebooks-fumble-in-india

Digital Fairness vs. Facebook’s Dream of World Domination

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

(with Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi)

As founder of the nation of “Facebookistan,” Mark Zuckerberg has his hands full with over a billion worldwide users. But as you may have heard, he has an even bigger dream — to hook up the 4.5 billion people around the world who lack internet access. The one-year-old Facebook-led initiative, called Internet.org, is designed to offer free access to a select set of websites like a “lite version” of Facebook, Wikipedia, and others, along with a limited number of content services on mobile phones. Facebook and the consumer make a deal: the consumer gets free access to a limited form of the internet and it’s a good bet that as more people get this access, Facebook itself will be one of the biggest beneficiaries.

It’s an arrangement that raises questions, especially from activists campaigning for net neutrality. Businesses like Facebook are filling an internet access gap in emerging markets that others, including the public sector, may simply never be able to address. Plus, the company has an interest in giving more people access; a Mobile Africa 2015 study of five of Africa’s major markets found that Facebook is, on average, the most popular phone activity, more popular than sending SMS or listening to the radio.

Read the rest here: https://hbr.org/2015/08/digital-fairness-vs-facebooks-dream-of-world-domination

How Mark Zuckerberg Can Resolve The Inclusive Innovator's Dilemma

FORBES

Sometimes, Doing Well While Doing Good Can Be Bad For You

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg is on a global mission to get people on the Internet, even if it is a pared-down version. He also is, seemingly, undeterred by failure.

"Today we're partnering with Airtel Africa to launch Internet.org Free Basics in Nigeria," he said in a March 10, 2016 post on Facebook. This is just a few weeks since Facebook announced the launch of the same service in Bangladesh (April 11) and El Salvador (April 29).

By launching in quick succession across three different continents, Zuckerberg persists in his drive to connect the 4.4 billion who have never been online, despite hitting a wall recently in India. The irony is that India was also a perfect test case for the holy grail of combining doing well with doing good: it is Facebook’s second largest market, and, with growth, poised to be the largest. Yet, the country cannot realize its full potential because 80 percent of its citizens have never been online. Facebook’s Free Basics initiative was innovative and appeared reasonable: in partnership with a local telecom provider, Facebook offered free access to a limited package of websites, with a process for site developers to apply to be included in the package. The key, of course, is that the package was limited - and included a “lite” version of Facebook and would have been an on-ramp for those who have never been on the site or on any other.

Read the rest here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bhaskarchakravorti/2016/05/12/how-mark-zuckerberg-can-resolve-the-inclusive-innovators-dilemma/?sh=554cd8131081

Digital dungeons & dragons

INDIAN EXPRESS

I often liken my research to that of a medieval mapmaker. My research teams and I are charting the “digital planet”. This is a landscape whose contours are being shaped by many actors — by the titans of Silicon Valley and their counterparts elsewhere, by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, by regulators desperately attempting to keep pace, by half the world’s population that now has access to the internet and by many in the remaining half dying to be let into the club. In its early stages, mapmaking is an imprecise art. One cannot definitively fill in all the land masses or bodies of water. Our medieval predecessors closed such gaps with dire warnings, such as “Here there be dragons” or resorted to images of serpents, elephants with gigantic teeth, and, of course, dragons.

My team and I are still tracing the outlines of the emerging digital landscape using a “Digital Evolution Index” that we created and a soon-to-be-released “Ease of Doing Digital Business” ranking of countries, among other measures. We find that on this emerging map, the dragons, serpents and elephants with dental issues are representations of what we fear the most, the loss of trust: We may be awash in data, but we still have no good ways to separate the tangible from the virtual, the human from the algorithm, the real from the fake.

When challenged to fix the problem of, say, fake news and pernicious rumours, perhaps the most palpable breakdown of trust, the hapless leadership of the digital platforms lacks the imagination to figure out solutions. In fact, they seem to be adding to the problems. Consider everybody’s whipping boy these days: Mark Zuckerberg. The latest story to break on this front is that, not only is Facebook and Facebook-owned WhatsApp among the largest transmitters of misinformation, Facebook — the company itself — may be the creator of misinformation. According to the New York Times, it paid an “opposition research” firm to spread misinformation about the billionaire George Soros. The reason: Soros’ foundation funded the Open Markets Institute, which, in turn, was critical of Facebook. This isn’t the first instance of concerns over Facebook fathering — not just furthering — falsehoods. A lawsuit, filed by an aromatherapy fashionwear company, alleges that Facebook’s numbers for the number of users that are targeted by advertisements were vastly inflated, to the extent that the reported number of target users reached in a particular demographic exceeded the total number of Facebook users belonging to that same demographic.

Read the rest here: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/digital-planet-fake-news-whatsapp-facebook-5475342/