For a company bent on making the world more open, Facebook has long
been secretive about the details of how it runs its social network —
particularly how things go wrong and what it does about them.
Yet on Tuesday, Facebook rushed forward to alert Congress and the
public that it had recently detected a small but “sophisticated” case of
possible Russian election manipulation. Has the social network finally
acknowledged the need to keep the world informed about the big problems
it’s grappling with, rather than doing so only when dragged kicking and
screaming to the podium?
While the unprompted revelation does signal a new, albeit tightly
controlled openness for the company, there is still plenty that Facebook
isn’t saying. Many experts remain unconvinced that this is a true
culture change and not mere window dressing.
“This is all calculated very carefully,” said Timothy Carone, a
business professor at the University of Notre Dame. He and other
analysts noted that Facebook announced its discovery of 32 accounts and
pages intended to stir up U.S. political discord just a week after the
company’s stock dropped almost 20 percent — its
worst plunge since going public.
But Facebook’s proactive disclosure, including a conference call for
reporters with chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, struck a
markedly different tone from the company’s ham-handed approach to a
string of scandals and setbacks over the past two years. That has
included:
— CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous dismissal of the idea that fake news
on Facebook could have influenced the 2016 election as “a pretty crazy
idea”;
— The company’s foot-dragging as evidence mounted of a 2016 Russian
election-interference effort conducted on Facebook and other
social-media sites;
— Zuckerberg, again, declining for nearly a week to publicly address
the privacy furor over a Trump campaign consultant, Cambridge Analytica,
that scavenged data from tens of millions of Facebook users for its own
election-influence efforts.
A chastened Facebook has since taken steps toward transparency, many
of them easy to overlook. In April, it published for the first time the
detailed guidelines
its moderators use to police unacceptable material. It has provided
additional, if partial, explanations of how it collects user data and
what it does with it. And it has forced disclosure of the funding and
audience targeting of political advertisements, which it now also
archives for public scrutiny.
All of that is in keeping with the image of Facebook that Zuckerberg
relentlessly promotes. In his telling, the giant, data-and-ad-driven
social network is a force for good in the world that must now
reluctantly do battle with “bad actors,” such as Russian agents, who
threaten Facebook’s noble mission of “connecting the world.”
Solving such problems, in Facebook’s view, is mostly a matter of more
investment, more hard work, more hires, and better technology —
particularly artificial intelligence.
And Facebook’s newfound passion for openness only goes so far. Of the
32 apparently fake accounts and pages it found, it only released eight
to researchers. In a conference call this week, executives declined to
characterize the accounts, even in terms of whether they leaned right or
left. Facebook left it to researchers at the nonprofit Atlantic
Council, a think tank that is helping the company on election
interference, to draw those conclusions.
Facebook said its timing was motivated by an upcoming protest event
in Washington that was promoted by a suspicious page connected to a
Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency. Several people
connected to the IRA have been indicted by the U.S. special counsel for
attempting to interfere in the 2016 election.
Despite Zuckerberg’s repeated mantra — delivered to relentless effect
in some 10 hours of testimony before Congress in April — that the
company now really gets it, some who know the company best have their
doubts.
David Kirkpatrick, the author a Facebook history, argues that neither
Zuckerberg nor Sandberg have ever shown themselves to be “deeply
alarmed in public.” As a result, he suggests, Facebook seems more
concerned with managing its image than with solving the actual problem
at hand.
Such issues run deep for the company. Some of its biggest critics,
including former employees such as Sandy Parakilas and early Facebook
investor Roger McNamee, say the company needs to revamp its business
model from the ground up to see any meaningful change.
 |
FILE - In this April 11, 2018 file photo, Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a House Energy and Commerce
hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, about the use of Facebook data to
target American voters in the 2016 election and data privacy. For a
company bent on making the world more open, Facebook has long been
secretive and reluctant to talk about security issues. Yet on Tuesday,
July 31 it rushed forward to alert Congress and the media that it had
recently detected a small but telling case of election manipulation.
While this signals a new openness for the company, there is plenty that
Facebook still isn’t saying, and experts wonder whether it’s mere window
dressing or a true culture shift. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
|
These critics would like to see Facebook rely less on tracking its
users in order to sell targeted advertising, and to cut back on
addicting features such as endless notifications that keep drawing
people back in. Parakilas, for example, has advocated for a
subscription-based model, letting users pay to user Facebook instead of
having their data harvested.
Merely hiring more moderators, or hanging hopes on the evolution of
artificial intelligence, isn’t going to cut it, in their view. There
have also been widespread calls for Facebook to acknowledge that it is,
in a sense, a media company, responsible for what happens on its
platforms — a characterization the social network has long fought.
For all that, Facebook is well ahead of Silicon Valley rivals such as
Google and Twitter when it comes to openness — even if only because
it’s attracted the lion’s share of criticism, said Paul Levinson, a
media studies professor at Fordham University.
But Facebook “can’t win at this game,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a
University of Virginia professor of media studies whose 2018 book
“Antisocial Media” critiques Facebook’s effect on democracy and society.
Because it’s so huge — 2.2 billion global users and counting — and so
difficult to police, he said, “it will always be vulnerable to hijacking
and will never completely clean up its content.”
Worse, he says, there is no real solution. “It is hopeless,” he said. “The problem with Facebook is Facebook.”
