Too
much power in a few hands is inherently dangerous. That goes for private as
well as public, or governmental, power. In the world of social media, the
companies that own and control the platforms are essentially governmental in
nature in that the executives promulgate rules and, ideally, see that they are
enforced. The downsides to too few platforms—each with an extraordinary amount
of power—involve a constricting of ideas, or content, on the internet, and
potentially unanswered violations of the rights of the social-networks’
respective users. The public policy repercussions, I submit, include applying
anti-trust law to social media companies such that none gets to become as
massively dominating as Facebook had been allowed to become.
In an open letter in March, 2018, Tim Berners-Lee, the
inventor of the World Wide Web, proposed a regulatory framework to balance the
interests of the social media companies and their users. In the wake of the
Facebook scandal then involving the psychological-political manipulation of up
to 50 million users by a third party, Cambridge Analytica, the obvious
inference was that privacy rights were in dire need of being shored up by regulators
as Facebook’s management had failed even to notify the users of the invasive use of their data. Yet a single-minded focus
on that problem risks missing a more subtle one.
Berners-Lee points in his letter to the “concentration of
power” in a few social media companies that “creates a new set of gatekeepers,
allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen
and shared.”[1] As
a result, the “Web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will
find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been
compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.”[2]
The bloggers who can make good use of Facebook’s algorithm get to see their
ideas (and blogs) popularized, whereas bloggers who eschew Facebook stand a
greater chance of being relegated to a marginal position on the internet.
I am a case in point. I could have made use of Facebook for
years to promote essays I have posted online, but I made a decision on
principle not to use Facebook because of how that company had treated my
attempts to create and use an account. On my first attempt, Facebook suspended my
account because I had sent some text with a link to one of my academic articles
to some scholars whom I actually knew.
No one at Facebook bothered to ask me if my posts were spam. I was deemed to
have sordid motives without much evidence to support the projection of
distrust. I deleted the account. A few years later, I tried again. That time,
Facebook demanded that I upload a clear
facial picture of myself so I could be identified. Facebook had verified my
phone number and email address, and thus my name, but strangely those were not
enough. I had not yet even used the account and thus could not have violated
any of the company’s use-policies, so the projection of distrust onto me was
unacceptable to me. So I deleted that account rather than supply a picture of
myself to be scanned. I was also concerned how the facial recognition software
would be used, especially when combined with other basic information I had
included in the profile. It turns out I had reason to be concerned, for even if
my personality had not been construed and
I had not been subject to political manipulation psychologically, the fact that Facebook failed to prevent the
invasive actions by a political firm in 2015 means that other harvesting of
data could have been going on without the users being informed. Even before
that scandal broke, I did not trust Facebook’s staff.
I suspect that the fact that I had written a booklet, Taking the Face off Facebook, had
something to do with Facebook making it difficult for me to create and use an
account. That the platform was at the time so huge means that keeping me off
made it much more difficult for me to popularize my essays at The Worden
Report. If so, Facebook was exploiting a conflict of interest by keeping off
ideas critical of Facebook’s management. Although I made considerable use of
LinkedIn and some use of Twitter, I felt as though I was swimming upstream in
steering clear of Facebook as a possible means of publicizing my site. Even
though business ethics was one of my areas of expertise, and thus of the essays
on my site, I felt a strange feeling in actually making a stand ethically
against my own use of Facebook even though I really could use the added
publicity for my site.
A faculty member at the University of Chicago business
school wrote me interestingly just after the Facebook scandal became public that
if only I would get on Twitter and Facebook and
attack the positions of other people, my essays would be picked up by the
major media and I would no longer be making things harder on myself than need
be. If only I “attack people.” Really? The University of Chicago must be quite
a place! Another ethical line in the sand that I would not cross. Years
earlier, I had stopped attending the Academy of Management “academic”
conferences because the “scholars” had made a “blood sport” out of tearing
apart scholars giving paper-presentations. I found that I could be helpful to
the presenters by instead suggesting fruitful directions rather than trashing
what had already been written. Any dead wood would eventually fall off from the
tree anyway, whereas a useful insight would be sited and thus popularized. I
had the same philosophy about my essays, sans
any “facilitator” like Facebook. I suspect that Facebook’s culture might
have been allowed to become akin to that of the Academy of Management. If so,
vindictiveness could be added as a reason why the range of ideas on the
internet has been narrowed, and why more attention was not devoted to enforcing
policies on the third-party uses of user data. With great power comes great
responsibility, so does the power remain when it has become clear that the
responsibility has been lacking?
In short, social media companies like Google and Facebook
had been allowed by the U.S. Government, and ultimately the American people, to
get too big—too much coverage and control of the internet. There should have
been another platform similar to Facebook’s that I could have used to reach
more readers. Heather West of Mozilla stated at the SXSW conference in 2018
that people were “realizing the power that technology has in our lives and
[were] asking technology companies to be more transparent and responsible.”[3]
I doubt that, and, besides, I submit that something more than asking was needed. Social media companies
like Facebook were clinging at the time to their mantra that they merely
provide platforms rather than the content (or even curating it). That is
similar to Goldman Sachs insisting in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008
that the bank merely puts markets together, rather than acts also as a
proprietary player in them. At the SXSW conference, Kara Swisher of Vox Media
and Christiane Amanpour of CNN mocked Twitter and Facebook for insisting, “We’re
a tech platform that facilitates media.”[4]
A conflict of interest is in even just that, for which media is to be facilitated
and which relegated as problematic? Clearly, fake political ads are
problematic, but are the social critics whose range includes critiquing social
media companies also problematic? Perhaps Facebook’s actual role is a blend of public and private—a private sector
government, one might say. If so, democratic accountability, and even that by
stockholders, is problematic and thus not to be relied on.
The answer is more government regulation of companies like
Facebook, essentially meaning that the public governance functions of Facebook
should be overseen at the very least by public policy rather than corporate
governance and pressure from users. But government regulation has its limits.
Regulators cannot be everywhere, and they cannot get at the problem of the
willowing of the blogs on the internet due to factors controlled by the social
media companies. For there to be a true democracy of ideas on the World Wide
Web, alternative platforms of substantial but not dominating scale must be viable without being snuffed out by a
bloated platform like Facebook’s. Breaking up that company could mean that
potential upstarts would get a chance to grow without being bought out and
shelved by the giant. Oligopoly is not good for competition, and whether or not
an industry is permitted to attain an oligarchic structure is a matter for
governments to decide, and ultimately electorates.
[1]
Rob Pegoraro, “SXSW Takes a Skeptical Look at Tech,” USA Today, March 13, 2018.
[2] Ibid.
[3]Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
