Tag: Facebook

IT’S TIME TO CONTROL THE RUNAWAY TRAIN OF SOCIAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGY

Like something out of a bad science fiction movie, social media technology has evolved into a grotesque, out-of-control monster that threatens our way of life. The beast’s ferocity has expanded so quickly and mindlessly that nobody is able to tame it, including the now-billionaire geeks who created it. Think that’s a harsh overstatement? Then look at these facts:

• Facebook admitted that it unknowingly accepted payment in Rubles from Russia for disguised pro-Trump propaganda spread to at least 10 million U.S. users during the 2016 presidential campaign.

• Twitter is equipped to place anonymous racist ads, ordered online, targeting 14.5 million users identified by Internet usage as responding to the n-word; 26.3 million to the term “wetback” and 18.6 million to Nazi.

• Google offers an online advertising tool in which ads are sold and placed with targeted users on the basis of such concerns as: “black people ruin neighborhoods”, “evil Jew” and “Jewish control of banks”.

To make matters worse, the offending content, placed on these sites by unidentified customers, have none of the visual properties of an online advertisement. They looked like ordinary posts, all part of a user’s daily newsfeed. In the case of the Russian Facebook buy, news-like items linking Hillary Clinton to Black Likes Matter or American Muslims were placed, for a price, on the pages of users who had clicked “like” on similar racist content.

Now, if these vile, misleading blurbs had been handled the way media outlets used to do business, a salesperson would have executed a formal contract for the buy and the advertisers’ name would appear in the copy. But that’s so 1990s. These social media sites rake in their billions over the transom of their medium. It’s all done online. In fact, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, until recently, brushed off reports of clandestine Russian interference on his site as a “pretty crazy idea.” Then he hired 3,000 “content monitors”, and suddenly hundreds of Russian “ads” and fake accounts were found. Same thing happened at Twitter.

Executives from the big three platforms – Facebook, Twitter and Google – steadfastly insist that there was never an intention to allow this kind of nefarious, deceptive activity on their sites. Think about that for a minute. Their defense is that the technology is at fault, that a bad algorithm did it. If they are right, then shame on all of us for allowing artificial intelligence to run roughshod over our democracy, for letting the technology control us, rather than the other way around. It’s time to take that control back.

Based on population, Facebook is larger than any country in the world. Except for Asia, it’s bigger than any continent. And it continues to grow at 17% a year. Zuckerberg, as an idealistic young Harvard student in 2004, created it in his dorm room. He said it would bring the world together through a “free flow of information”. He got the information flow part right, but there is nothing free about it. Facebook is now the largest online advertising company in the world, worth almost half a trillion dollars. As British writer John Lanchester put it, “Facebook was built to extract data from users to sell to advertisers.”

And that was precisely the transaction that Russia was looking for. It gave the Kremlin access to Facebook accounts of racist and anti-Muslim Americans, a ripe audience for pro-Trump messages paid for in Rubbles, but without a hint that they came from a foreign power. CNN reported Thursday that Russia’s Facebook campaign buy on Trump’s behalf was orchestrated so surgically that it hit disproportionately on a large number of targets in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that helped push Trump over the top in electoral votes.

So there is now a legislative campaign for transparency in digital political ads. Sadly, even that embarrassingly modest proposal is facing strong resistance. And it doesn’t begin to fix the much broader problem. Facebook, Google and Twitter are not just multi-billion-dollar conglomerates. Together, they control the communication infrastructure for most of the free world. Yet, the people who run these companies are not publically held to a single standard of accountability. Barbers and horse trainers are more closely regulated than these gigantic informational monoliths.

This is a long-overdue transformational moment. Technology has enhanced and lengthened our lives in so many ways. But that is no excuse for humanity to abdicate control, to let technology run itself, free from controls that reflect the values that only humans can construct. Yet that is precisely what has happened with these social media companies. No sick, ruthless executive knowingly took Russia’s money to let them tamper with our elections. It just happened because the technology allowed it to. Unrelated to the election, there are tens of millions of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, routinely sending off links to equally fake news sites. Neither company planned for that result; it was just technology doing its thing, unrestricted by human thought.

Folks with a rudimentary knowledge of code writing can create Twitter and Facebook bots, fake accounts, complete with pictures and bio. For all sorts of nefarious purposes, “bot farms” have been created to fire off thousands of phony messages every day. It is estimated, for example, that 43% of President Trump’s 38.6 million Twitter followers are fake accounts. In a recent high point of absurdity, Trump retweeted a follower’s post that blasted “fake news”. Turns out it had been created by a fake account.

This can’t continue. These companies can’t be allowed to simply sit back and bank their billions while their algorithms wreak havoc on the things that really matter to us, like truth and our democratic process. Whether through legislation or regulatory control, these corporate executives have to be sent back to their laboratories. They need to be forced to retool their technological monstrosities so that they comport with our values, not destroy them.

AN IMPORTANT LESSON LURKING AMONG THE RUBBLE ON FACEBOOK

I found something pretty incredible on Facebook the other day. It was hidden in the clutter of proclamations, declarations and protestations that dot our daily dose of social media cognition. It was unaccompanied by bold headlines and offered no sharp-edged sarcastic graphics. In plain, quiet 12-point type, the words almost seem to whisper. This is what they said:

“Just a thought but today, once again, I was reminded to use caution (when) speaking with family, friends and relatives. Those words might be the last thing that you ever have a chance to say to them. If you truly care, be careful. Sometimes hurt feelings become anger. Choose wisely.”

The message was written by a guy I barely know, someone I went to high school with 50 years ago. I can’t precisely place him, although I have a vague recollection of the two of us shooting spitballs in study hall. Now I am marveling at the wisdom and well-timed relevancy of his advice.

We’ve all been locked into this bizarre, and seemingly endless, political passion play for the last 18 months. Who among us has never chosen unwisely, never treaded or trampled on the feelings of those who don’t share our world view? The instantaneousness of social media is not always compatible with audience analysis and wise choices. Much has been written about how the presidential campaign, and its ongoing aftermath, have strained and destroyed close personal relationships (here, here and here). The New York Times just released a compelling video involving three parent-adult child dyads grappling with the Trump-Anti Trump dichotomy and the toll it took on their relationships. We’ve all gotten so caught up in preaching the righteousness of our beliefs that we needlessly and unintentionally hurt those who see the world differently.

I was so taken with my classmate’s advice, that I went to his homepage to see what other pearls of wisdom David had to offer. I am using only his first name here out of respect for his privacy, since he didn’t sign up to share his comments with my 300,000 blog readers. (Readership estimates calculated by Sean Spicer and Associates.) David heaped praise on the Republican/conservative control of all three branches of government and was critical of former President Obama for “forcing his extreme far-left agenda on an unwilling country by executive orders, left wing judges, and obsequious bureaucrats.”

As a far-left true believer, I disagreed with the content of virtually all of David’s political writings. Yet, there was something refreshingly nostalgic in the tone of his messages. He stuck to the subject matter, to the issue at hand, and never threw daggers or venom-laced sarcasm at those who might hold contrary views. I found it utterly refreshing. It was a throwback to our high school days.

I was on the debate team then. We learned how to argue both sides of an issue, a process that instilled a tremendous respect for differences of opinion. I covered the Minnesota Legislature in the 1970s, back when politicians treated each other with respect and civility, fighting over ideas without assassinating each other’s character. All of that now seems as outdated as rotary telephones and Smith Corona typewriters. We seem to have lost the ability to disagree without being disagreeable.

I live in a 55-and-up community where we all smile and wave at each other. The friendliness, however, morphs into cut-throat vindictiveness as soon as the neighborhood list serve detects a whiff of political thought. This week’s “nana na nana” exchange was over who was more obnoxious, Madonna or Donald Trump? The monitor had to shut it down and remind us to avoid political discussions. Here we are, a bunch of geezers in the twilight of our lives, and we can’t carry on a political discussion without sounding like professional wrestlers.

Remember the old “Saturday Night Live” riff on Point/Counterpoint? Dan Akroyd always started his counter to Jane Curtin’s opening argument with, “Jane, you ignorant slut!” It was a funny exaggeration back then. Now it’s standard procedure. I finally went cold turkey on the nightly cable news talk shows because I couldn’t take the shouting, the interruptions and the caustic sarcasm. Then come those daily email solicitations from political groups, all using what Andrés Martinez, an Arizona State University professor, calls “dystopian depictions” of the opposition. Martinez astutely notes that people are more inclined to push a button and donate $20 if they think they are helping to fight evil incarnate, as opposed to a reasonable person with whom we disagree.

Polarization clearly wins for cable programming and internet fundraising. But it also seeps into our psyche where it does absolutely nothing for our humanity. One of David’s political posts defended Trump’s bankruptcy filings on the basis that they were nothing more than a successful business strategy. From the left, there are obviously a number of rational and legitimate retorts that could have been offered. Instead, an alleged liberal, posted this rebuttal: “So a success? Fuck no, and it takes a brainwashed piece of shit idiot to even pretend it’s so. Know what’s good though? You’re old, and will be dead soon. And the world will be better off.”

The angry, young author of that comment deserves to be hit with a speeding spitball. The truth is that the world will be better off when there are more people like David in it, people who stand up for their beliefs without denigrating those who believe something else.