Why You Can't Fix Facebook (Only One Thing Can)
The New York Times published an interesting piece with some smart cookies offering advice on how to fix Facebook. Nothing wrong with that except little on the list makes business sense for Facebook to do.
From the obligatory calls for transparency to requiring ID verification, the list is an adorable bevvy of things that have been said before and Facebook haven't done because it would either hurt engagement or directly stop money flowing into the mouth of the beast. My favourite was from Ali Paiser who wants Facebook to open itself up to independent research; "Right now, Facebook is a black box: It’s very difficult, and in many cases impossible, for researchers to independently look at behavior on the platform. While opening private data to research creates risks, there’s a ton of explicitly public data on the platform that Facebook makes difficult to query at scale." Damn right Facebook is a black box, that's exactly how Facebook like it. If you had something that was literally printing money, would you let anyone know what the secret was? Not unless you are mad or forced to. The latter is humanity's best option so I hope Congress and the EU do more than grit their teeth and do something. We're only seeing a taste of what can happen if checks and balances aren't applied internally. Facebook needs to want to fix itself and not just to protect itself from the people that can hurt the company.
I can't attack others' thoughts without at least offering my own for the same treatment, so here's how I would start to fix the big blue misery machine. Native advertising is a personal bugbear of mine. The industry screwed the pooch on that one early but, essentially, as a publisher of content (and Facebook is that) you have a decision to make; how evil do you want to be? Do you want to make everything look the same or distinguish paid and unpaid? Facebook has yet to make any content stand out in this regard. Therefore I would like to see every piece of paid-for content look totally different visually from everything else (not another feed) whether that's political content or something from the greengrocer down the street. People have shown they're incredibly bad at discerning against true content and adverts so you need to help us be better if you really want to "bring us closer together". Equally, if you want to operate a pay-for-play platform then at least... [MORE]