I’ve been trying to read all the reports on The Facebook Papers and I confess I’m now a little bit lost. I would imagine that I’m not the only one. There is just so much and it’s all flooding the zone to the point that it’s becoming white noise which is not a good thing.
Still, it’s a very big story and we have to try to understand the implications. Here are a few pieces that synthesize what we know:
Key Takeaways from the New York Times
Explainer: Just what are the Facebook Papers Anyway?
An aggregation of all the stories
“History will not judge us kindly” — The Atlantic
Amid the Capitol Riot, Facebook faced its own insurrection
Tech reporter Charlie Warzel’s newsletter has a great deal of information and analysis about what we’ve seen and what we will be seeing and he concludes with this:
The Facebook Papers are clearly important. They are internal documented proof of things that reporters and researchers have been ringing alarms about for years. It’s vital work. And the scale of the coordinated roll-out feels commensurate with the scale of the platform it is trying to hold accountable (It’s fascinating to imagine what the total number of Facebook Files/Facebook Papers pageviews is). That matters.
And yet I’m not sure what’s going to come of it. In a hopeful imagining, the revelations kick off genuine, creative, only semi-partisan regulatory conversations about the platform. Or perhaps they force mass resignations inside the company that lead to some kinds of reforms to retain talent. Perhaps something truly wild happens that creates legal trouble/liability for the company’s executive leadership. Who knows?!
The dismal imagining is that revelations from the Facebook Papers confirm a lot of what everyone from activists to journalists to lawmakers knew or suspected and lawmakers don’t react proportionally. Other grim potential outcomes are that there’s simply information overload from too many stories at once or that this cycle is eventually lost to the very algorithmically driven, fast-churn news cycles that Facebook helped create. I am curious and unsure, for example, about what happens to any regulatory Facebook momentum if the former president decides to launch a political campaign in earnest soonish.
If the regulatory reformers get their wish, there’s a whole host of thorny questions and contentious debates waiting in the ‘How Do You Fix Facebook’ category. There are all kinds of interesting ideas — I suggest you read Will Oremus on ideas for congress to regulate Facebook’s algorithms. I include myself in the camp of people who are quite worried that potential platform ‘fixes’ might jack up the internet in unforeseen ways. Just two weeks ago Democrats proposed a new Section 230 “reform” bill that Fight For The Future director, Evan Greer noted would “function more like a 230 repeal than reform, because it opens the floodgates for frivolous lawsuits claiming algorithmically amplified user content caused harm (a wildly broad category for an enormous amount of content).” This is merely one very small example to highlight that we’re in complicated and still treacherous territory even if/when there’s consensus to ‘fix Facebook.’
Of course you can’t really ‘fix Facebook’ — at least not in any tidy/quick way. You can certainly make it safer (though as years of reporting and Haugen’s ‘Papers’ show, that would require rather substantially making Facebook less like Facebook). And if this week’s reporting has shown anything, it’s that even people inside the company who were hired to study and provide guidance on ways to make the platform safer have found it nearly impossible to push for change at the necessary scale, thanks to executive leadership.
I was struck recently by a line in the opening post of Max Read’s new Substack. “To consider…Facebook only in terms of a value proposition — net good or net bad for humanity — is to miss that it shapes the world as much as the world shapes it.” This sounds simple but it’s actually a dizzying idea that’s almost impossible to unpack without living outside of our current history. Big Tech has largely succeeded in re-imagining and re-making parts of our culture, government (Republican politics is legitimately like 51 percent professional shitposting), and economy.
But Big Tech doesn’t just act on these institutions/forces, they are all horrendously interwoven, making each node in the tangled ecosystem…worse? More complicated? You can make Facebook or YouTube safer. But you can’t necessarily change the ways all this shit has changed us or the ways it will continue to distribute/re-distribute money, power, influence, culture, and information. You can probably find ways to ameliorate the inequalities some but ‘fix’ is an impoverished word when it comes to Facebook. Fix…what exactly? And how exactly? Can we even decide and agree on what to fix and how? You tell me. But before you do, here’s what the Republican leader in the House said yesterday in response to the Facebook Papers:
For those uninterested in reading the tweet above (I get it!) he’s basically ignoring the content and making up his own (false) takeaways to justify his politics. Classic!
I will just interject here that this makes a great deal of sense for Republicans. They can offer Zuckerberg and company an easy fix: enable conservatives and you’re good to go. In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that Facebook has already gotten that message, they just didn’t know that they would have to endure being beaten up by conservatives anyway. That’s the deal.. But it will, in all likelihood, prevent them from being regulated if they continue to ensure that right wing disinformation and extreme ideology continue to be widely disseminated on the platform.
Warzel continues:
I don’t know what comes next but I’m concerned. I’m concerned that Facebook is too big. I’m concerned that people might tuning out due to over-saturation. I’m concerned that the ‘fixes’ that could come from this momentum are going to be extremely treacherous, too. I’m also concerned that we’re late (not too late…just late). It strikes me as noteworthy that we’ve caught up to what Facebook hath wrought (2012-2020) and Mark Zuckerberg and executive leadership seem to regard that version of Facebook as almost an outdated node of the company. They’ve got a new digital realm to colonize: The Metaverse!
Also, Mr. Zuckerberg doesn’t seem, at present, to be budging (just say ‘fake news,’ Mark!):
But I’m also worried because it’s going to be hard to untangle Facebook and the rest of the platforms from, well, everything else, including the way these platforms have changed us — the way that the architecture and nature of these platforms act on us and how we, even reluctantly or unwittingly, absorb some of their characteristics. That reckoning will be particularly painful and I’m not sure we fully possess the language or countervailing institutions or historical hindsight to start that work in earnest right now.
Read the whole thing if you can.
Facebook is the internet within the internet. The global influence is overwhelming, and as Warzel points out earlier in his piece, the US actually has the “good ” version of it, to the extent one even exists. The malign influence it has on other countries is truly dangerous.
It’s a huge problem, beyond my ken to understand it. But it’s hard for me to see how it can continue as the behemoth it is nor can it be adequately regulated without a whole lot of unintended consequences. It simply has to be broken up and even willfully destroyed in some ways.