Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
It has been more than a year since the seditious incursion into the American Congress. In the intervening period Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook (now Meta), and YouTube. Banning Trump was tacit acknowledgment by the three media giants that it was providing license to name calling, demeaning characterizations, misogynistic rants, taunts, incitement of violence, and lies.
In July, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang published An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. I read the book prior to the Christmas holiday; it certainly did not put me in a festive mood. The book is based on thousands of hours of interviews with 400 informants. In it, the authors argue that the company knowingly spread lies about the US election, promoted hate speech that led to violence, used algorithms to provoke emotional reactions, and prompted negative social comparisons among school-age boys and girls -especially girls. Although aware of what it was doing, Facebook, the corporate entity, did little or nothing to change for fear of diminishing its profits.
Frenkel and Kang’s claims were
reinforced by evidence of Facebook’s agency from documents provided to the Wall
Street Journal and the US Securities and Exchange Commission by
Frances Haugen. Initially an anonymous employee at Facebook, Haugen became a
whistleblower. She is quoted by CBSNews as
saying: “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. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own
interests, like making more money.” When she appeared before the US Senate,
Haugen said she was appearing because she believed “Facebook’s products harm
children.”
Facebook’s (now Meta) founder Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, have walked a snakelike path to obfuscate the company’s agency and have done relatively little to put the public good before private profit. They’ve paid fines for breaching privacy protections and other transgressions, but one gets the sense that the fines are simply the cost of doing business. In response to public outrage, they delayed the development of Instagram Kids, a service that would have groomed children under 13 for adult social media. The company’s rebranding from Facebook to Meta appears a shallow attempt to further deflect responsibility for its egregious disregard for people.
In mid November, a law firm in Washington State, formed the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC). SMVLC’s website says that it was established “to hold social media companies legally accountable for the harm they inflict on vulnerable users” by using the principles of product liability. The founder of SMVLC, Matthew Bergman, is quoted as saying, “We believe jury verdicts on behalf of victims of social media cyberbullying will not only furnish the compensation they need and deserve but also incentivize social media companies to design safer products to avoid having to pay court awards in the future.”
It is clear that there is a relationship between internet access and online aggression and that children and youth are harmed as a result, in part, of using Instagram. Facebook says it is looking for ways to “nudge” users to better content and to be more transparent. It is hard to see how Facebook will do that because it refuses to share internal research and has denied external researchers access to its data.
It is doubtful that a
technological solution to the negative impact of social media will improve the
situation. Education is a more promising but limited approach. Perhaps
litigation and financial penalties for successful litigants will have some
impact. But, given its track record – amply documented in An Ugly
Truth and in its own leaked documents – it is doubtful that real
change will occur without formal regulation.