Truth Is, There’s A Big Problem With Social Media

Michael Hedges October 11, 2021 Follow on Twitter

Brands have good weeks and bad weeks. Winning with a dazzling performance gives a sports brand a very good week. Losing through mistakes or slovenly play is very bad. Consumer brands have outstanding weeks by introducing a product or service at just the right moment. Being beaten to the punch, so to speak, is bad. The discovery of bugs - animal, vegetable or mineral - in the soup, figuratively, is very bad. The public relations industry has become quite effective at highlighting the good things and spinning the bad backwards, for both they are generously compensated.

The Facebook brand, well reported, had a very bad week. There has been bad news before for the social media company, which offers Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The company has endured it all, sometimes with grace and sometimes not. Such is the life of the combined brands that serve 3.5 billion “monthly active people,” according to analytics portal statistica (October 5) for Q2 2021. That’s up from 2.2 billion users just two years ago. This week Facebook received the dictator treatment.

Newly installed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa described Facebook as “biased against facts, it is biased against journalism,” in an interview with Reuters (October 9). “If you have no facts, you can’t have truths, you can’t have trust. If you don’t have any of these, you don’t have a democracy. Beyond that, if you don’t have facts, you don’t have a shared reality, so you can't solve the existential problems of climate, coronavirus.” In 2016 the Philippines news portal Rappler, which Ms Ressa co-founded and is chief executive, discovered and reported dictator Rodrigo Duterte supporters using Facebook to target opponents, including Ms Ressa and Rappler.

The week began with a whistleblower. Every news editor has a magnetic attraction to whistleblowers, individuals who come forward with startling revelations. Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen revealed her whistleblowing on the US TV network CBS news program 60 Minutes (October 3). She had blown the whistle on Facebook for a nine part series for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in September and also shared internal Facebook documents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). WSJ is published by Dow Jones, subsidiary of News Corporation, principally owned by the Murdoch family, never fans of Facebook or digital media generally.

With 60 Minutes she discussed Facebook’s Civic Integrity program meant to blunt election misinformation. The program was wound down immediately after the US elections in November 2020, which Ms Haugen said she believed contributed to the January 2021 attacks on the US Capital Building by militant extremists. "The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” she said on 60 Minutes. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.” It was an affirmation of commonly held beliefs of many observers. Indeed, the company’s market capitalization fell by US$6 billion as stock traders took notice the next morning.

To add insult to injury, that next morning (October 4) Facebook’s various products vanished from the digital space. Gone. Everywhere. Cloudflare, which monitors all events of that sort, concluded that Facebook’s engineers made changes to a gateway protocol that inadvertently made the domain names unrecognizable. The outage lasted more than six hours during which time Facebook lost millions of users to Twitter, Signal and Telegram as well as US$60 million in ad revenue, reported CNET (October 5).

Ms Haugen was back with more on Tuesday (October 5), testifying before a US Senate sub-committee. "During my time at Facebook, I came to realize a devastating truth: Almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside Facebook," she told the politicians, reported US public broadcaster NPR (October 5). "The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the US government, and from governments around the world.” The US Senators were aghast, though most have complained about the company along ideological lines for years.

Noted NPR’s Bobby Allyn: “Haugen stood against breaking up Facebook, a popular rallying cry in Washington. She said it would only worsen the platform's problems by turning the social network into a Frankenstein monster that would still causes harm around the world, while a separate Instagram would siphon most of the advertising.” By evening parliaments of the UK and France plus the European Commission had asked for a personal visit.

Certainly after hurried consultations with public relations staff, not to forget lawyers, Facebook executives began to push back. "It's disheartening to see that work taken out of context and used to construct a false narrative that we don't care,” wrote chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a blog post. “It's very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids.” Unsurprisingly, there was pushback directed at Ms Haugen. Those documents she exposed had been “stolen,” said Facebook vice president of global policy management Monika Bickert to NPR (October 5).

By Wednesday, pollsters weighed in, putting public opinion in the headlines. Morning Consult, provider of US “business intelligence”, surveyed 1,334 Facebook users on October 6 and found if faced with a decision on giving-up a social media platform, 30% would quit Facebook, 23% dumping Instagram. “If these trends continue, Facebook will soon be looking at a net negative favorability rating among US consumers. At that point, brands will need to rethink their advertising strategy on the platform.” An AP-NORC poll (October 8) indicated “more bad news for Facebook,” said University of Chicago professor Konstantin Sonin. “It makes clear that assaulting Facebook is popular by a large margin, even when (the US) Congress is split 50-50, and each side has its own reasons.” Then there was a second technical outage. Karma.

As the week progressed, if that’s the correct term, investors weighed in on the turmoil. Facebook share price had slid by more than 14%. “Despite investor and congressional pleading, the company has simply not done enough to address the damage it is inflicting on our society, on our teenagers, women, marginalised groups, democracy, and geo-political stability,” said Arjuna Capital managing partner Natasha Lamb to Financial News (October 7). “It’s a cycle of rinse and repeat. Facebook executives get dragged before Congress, acknowledge the problem, apologise while denying any real culpability – ‘Sorry, not sorry’ – and then fail to make any real change.”

That brings us up to last Friday and a devastating critique from a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Through the weekend, Facebook executives, particularly vice president of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, flooded the field with plans, promises and suggestions. Doing away with algorithms, he said on US network ABC (October 10), would lead to “more, not less” hate speech and misinformation. Instagram is a positive experience “for the overwhelming majority of teenagers,” he said to a CNN news program the same day. As climate activist Greta Thunberg said recently to world leaders on a different subject: “Blah, Blah, Blah.”

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