“One down, one to go.” With that pithy remark the actor Sacha Baron Cohen recently summed up the U.S. presidential election. To his tweet, which drew more than 135,000 likes and 18,000 retweets, he appended a photograph showing outgoing President Donald Trump shaking hands with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The tweet is thought-provoking because it provides a different framing for a political problem that is faced by many countries, including the United States, Britain, Germany and also Israel. Yet, even though Baron Cohen is far from being alone in espousing the view that Facebook is dangerous, many people appear to have difficulty relating to it. The reason: It suggests that the problems that plague many countries do not stem only from populist, extremist or lying politicians, but also, and perhaps mainly, from a media ecology that promotes populism, pushes extremism and enables dissemination of lies. From this point of view, Baron Cohen argues, if you have a problem with Donald Trump, you must also necessarily have a problem with Mark Zuckerberg.
Why do so many people find this framing difficult to accept? Why do they shrug it off and see it as a futile attempt to cast blame on a young entrepreneur who built up a magnificent company, thereby becoming a billionaire? Why is it so difficult for us to grasp that the technology we’re using is part of the problem we’re suffering from? The question becomes more acute in light of the fact that since Trump’s election in 2016, thousands of articles, studies, interviews and reports have been published worldwide that show how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even the Google search engine are radicalizing the views of their users and encouraging the dissemination of conspiracy theories and falsehoods.
Hundreds of scientific studies have presented data based on surveys, observation and interviews that affirm these claims. Committees across the planet have reached clear conclusions. Books have been written (including one by this writer) and films made on the subject.
Netflix’s 2020 documentary film "The Social Dilemma” is engendering broad public discussion, but it is only the latest such debate generated by movies and countless television reports. All of them, in one way or another, with words of one kind or another, have reached the identical conclusion: Facebook is not good for your mental health as individuals and is even worse for the health of your society.
If a host of reports, studies, articles, commissions of inquiry, books and films were produced about the dangers inherent in the use of a certain product – let’s say a medication or an automobile – the likely result would be a public outcry demanding the elimination of said product. But that’s not the case with Facebook. Why?
Above all, there seems to be a lack of agreement about the nature of the problem.
Over the past few years, Zuckerberg and his representatives have presented testimony to Congress a number of times and have been assailed from right and left alike. From the left, the complaint is that Facebook does not do enough to stop expressions of incitement. (A recent example: Trump’s crony Steve Bannon suggested that coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, but Facebook maintained that this comment was not serious enough for it to ban Bannon.) On the right, it’s alleged that Facebook censors right-wingers while it does nothing to prevent dissemination of extreme left-wing statements.
It’s worth pausing briefly to reflect on this state of affairs. Freedom of expression is not meant to be supervised or managed by a private company. Mark Zuckerberg is not an elected official; no one appointed him the free speech czar of America or the world. But in practice, the legislators are complaining to the real regulator of freedom of expression that he’s not doing his job. This is off the wall.
This dispute gives rise to the mistaken impression that if both rightists and leftists complain about Facebook, the argument must be a purely political one and therefore Facebook acted properly, all in all. Actually, the very opposite is the truth: Even though everyone speaks from their own personal position, they all point to the fact that Facebook does not do enough to quell extremist statements appearing under its auspices. If there’s something everyone agrees on, it’s that Facebook is a hothouse of extremism.
Furthermore, we need to remember that someone, besides the companies themselves, is profiting from the modus operandi of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media. The absence of regulation and the fact that these companies behave pretty much as they please, serve political interests. In Israel in recent years, Likud has scuttled bills aimed at applying the laws related to election propaganda to the social media. Why? The reason might be that with no one to take aggressive action against the spread of the bots that echo propagandistic messages – during election campaigns but the rest of the year, too – those who operate them reap a political profit.
A comprehensive examination conducted early this year by the Israeli investigative website The Seventh Eye showed that, despite repeated requests, Facebook permits hundreds of pages and groups in Israel to disseminate the ruling party’s campaign messages in a coordinated fashion. The Seventh Eye found that most of these pages carry no identification and some are classified falsely as news pages or news groups, in defiance of the rules of Facebook itself. By the way, the Kahol Lavan party is also behind similar pages and groups, but the Facebook ones that spread Likud’s messages leads to three times as many interactions.
In response to the Seventh Eye’s request for a response to its findings, Facebook explained that “misinformation [newspeak for “lying”] does not conflict with the rules of our community. And accordingly, we do not remove content of that kind from the platform.”
It’s worth taking a minute to let that sink in.
If the mode of operation of social media helps the government protect its interests, the government has no motivation to harm them or to push them to change.
Political interests and big money are always intertwined with the activities of corporations, but the social media case is different, because it’s not just about a battle over money but also, and principally, a battle over the perception of reality and the citizenry’s consciousness. If the mode of operation of these entities helps the government protect its interests, the government has no motivation to harm them or to push them to change. In this sense, Facebook, Twitter, Google and their ilk are political players on the political playing field and they possess immense political clout.
The code is the law
Many users probably also do not understand what experts such as law professor Lawrence Lessig and political theorist Langdon Winner argue: namely that technology and computer codes effectively constitute a type of legislative process. As citizens in democracies, our point of departure is that laws are concepts written by legislators, approved by parliament and then enforced by the police and the courts. What is often overlooked is that the design of a technological service is also an act of legislation.
When Instagram came into the world, for example, it became known as a service that enabled users to display photos in squares, contrary to other photo- and video-sharing options, which displayed them across the length and breadth of the screen, in the shape of a rectangle. Instagram’s design decision functioned like a law, and it forced users to obey. After all, even if you wanted to post a rectangular photo, it simply wouldn’t work; Instagram’s application code won’t allow it. The code is the law. In 2015, when the company announced that it would permit rectangular photos to be displayed as well, it effectively amended its own law, a development that in its turn affected the users.
Similarly with the Facebook algorithm designed to allow dissemination of hatred and incitement, because that serves the global conglomerate’s economic interests: It is operating like a legislator who declares, in essence, that “incitement is permitted and even desirable.” In this sense, you, me, all of us, are acting in a closed universe in which there is a meta-legislator (Zuckerberg), secondary legislators (his employees) and laws (the algorithms’ mode of operation). The rules of that universe also serve as enforcers of the law, whether automatically or when imposed by the people who work at the company, who sometimes kick the issue upstairs to none other than the meta-legislator himself, who makes the final decision.
Would you want to live in a society that has legislation stipulating that “incitement is permitted and even desirable”? Probably not, but in practice, a great number of us spend many hours in just such an environment – one that, according to research conducted by Facebook itself, recommended that users join extremist groups. In the period that was examined, 64 percent of the users who joined such groups did so thanks to the Facebook algorithm. Someone ought to give someone a raise.
The fact that we do not see Facebook as an entity with legislative capabilities plays into the tech giant’s hands. It presents itself as a “pipeline for transmission of information” and as a neutral platform that does not intervene in content – other than in cases in which that content conflicts with the rules of its community, which prohibit, for example, encouraging mass murder or terrorist activity. However, that is, to put it mildly, a distorted picture of reality, not to mention the fact that the decision to be neutral in the face of someone who, for example, uses the platform to call for the beheading of the U.S. coronavirus czar is not a neutral decision – it is one that says: “there’s no problem in someone calling for a beheading, and therefore we will allow the clip in which he says so.”
However, the important point that is often missed is that many companies in the West, including in the United States and Israel, place the individual at the center and perceive the collective as a burden. The neoliberal – not to say libertarian – ideology makes us look within ourselves and ask ourselves one question: “How does it affect me?” Even though our activity on Facebook can have a negative effect on our frame of mind, our mental health and our opinions – particularly among children – we believe that we are capable of coping with the consequences.
What about the implications for society? That’s a question that’s tough to answer, because “society” is a thing that’s out there, and who knows what goes on in it? For this reason, many people take the idea that “Facebook is ruining society” and translate it into the question, “Is Facebook ruining me?” Few reply in the affirmative.
In Israel, because powerful political forces are operating relentlessly to eradicate solidarity and turn citizens into atoms that are preoccupied with themselves and hate all the rest – we examine broad social issues through a personal prism, egoistical and narrow: “Does it hurt me? Does it affect me or my family? Will I lose something from it?”
Many people find it difficult to part with memories, friends, texts and pictures that they have accumulated over the years. The ultimate demand – “to erase the account” – horrifies users, who have invested time, thought and in some cases much work to create a digital asset called a “Facebook profile.” Now I’m supposed to erase it all for something vague like “society”? What will happen with offers to be friends? What if I miss a job offer? Will I now have to pass up the funny memes from that guy in my neighborhood?
Those who are fighting for the soul of Israeli democracy have marked out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the threat to the institutions of law and even to their personal freedoms – but still find it difficult to see Facebook or Twitter as eroding that democracy too. The United States is a problematic country from many aspects, but in recent years many bodies, nonprofit organizations and lawmakers have been calling for breaking up the big tech companies and restraining their unlimited power. Not only because they harm competition – those are economic reasons – but also because of the immense social damage they cause.
Indeed, on December 9, 2020, following a lengthy investigation, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in cooperation with a coalition of attorneys general of 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that it has engaged in a systematic strategy to eliminate threats to its monopoly.
It’s time Israelis also realized that, despite the advantages inherent in social media – and there are many – the damage they are inflicting on the country’s democracy is profound and cumulative. It may not be manifested in our bank accounts, but it will be expressed in our ability to live here, all of us together, without placing a knife at each other’s throat. Isn’t that a goal worth fighting for?
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