Siva Vaidhyanathan

Reposted from Inside Higher Ed with permission.

Facebook has been in the news a lot, lately. It’s getting flack for apparently violating a 2011 consent decree with the FTC by sharing data with device makers, including Chinese firms, one of which our intelligence agencies considers dangerous. After denying for years they’re in the content business, they’re funding original news programs to be created by news networks as their latest approach to fixing the problems of disinformation going show more viral on their platform. And now they’re partnering with community colleges to train students in “digital literacy” – or rather, in how to use social media in marketing campaigns. (It would be more honest to call this “digital marketing” but it’s an indicator that Facebook is practically synonymous with the internet in much of the world, just as being online has become synonymous with marketing.)

As it happens, I just finished reading Siva Vaidhyanathan’s new book, Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford UP). It wasn't supposed to be out this soon, but the brouhaha over Cambridge Analytica accelerated the publication date. It’s compelling and couldn’t be more timely. Vaidhyanathan, whose previous book was The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry), believes Mark Zuckerberg is entirely sincere when he says he wants to bring the world closer together, that he simply has no concept of history, sociology, or any of the things he might have learned in school had he been paying attention - or if he had less of a sense of naïve but godlike hubris. In a letter Zuckerberg wrote to shareholders, sharing creates a “more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the world” with absolutely no inkling of how people might use its unprecedented ability to micro-target messages for mischief. “If Zuckerberg were more committed to naked growth and less blinded by hubris,” Vaidhyanathan writes, “he might have thought differently about building out an ungovernable global system that is so easily hijacked. Facebook’s leaders, and Silicon Valley leaders in general, have invited this untenable condition by believing too firmly in their own omnipotence and benevolence” (p. 4). Facebook does indeed connect the world, but it works by encouraging “engagement” and that means the most emotionally charged messages will get the most traction.

After framing the problem in his introduction, Vaidhyanathan describes features (or bugs) of Facebook in chapters that focus on how the Facebook machine operates on us in terms of pleasure, surveillance, attention, protest, politics, and disinformation. The problem with Facebook isn’t going to be solved easily, because its fundamental design and its unprecedented reach work against thoughtful democratic deliberation. “If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook” (19).

For me the most fascinating parts of this book had to do with the ways Facebook has worked with political campaigns and the ways right wing movements deployed Facebook among other social networks to promote fringe agendas. To Facebook, political campaigns are just another marketing challenge: how to sell a candidate by capturing attention and tailoring messages to individuals. Who needs Cambridge Analytica when Facebook can do even more to target and persuade? Who needs a party platform when you can whisper different messages in voters’ ears, ones designed around their personal interests and tastes and inaudible to everyone else? The Clinton campaign had Facebook consultants but relied more on their own in-house strategists and traditional messaging channels. The Trump campaign used Facebook much more effectively. “By timbre, temperament, and sheer force of personality, Donald Trump is the ideal manifestation of Facebook culture . . . After a decade of deep and constant engagement with Facebook, Americans have been conditioned to experience the world Trump style. It’s almost as if Trump were designed for Facebook and Facebook were designed for him. Facebook helped make America ready for Trump” (p. 174).

So too did white supremacist groups that used more obscure channels to plan their assault on the public sphere, testing out various messages and memes before launching them on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. As those messages spread, mainstream media begin to report on them, and Facebook in turn amplified those stories. Instead of connecting us, Facebook, which values all content in units of “engagement” rather than importance or truth, rewards those who interact with one another the most, solidifying our insular affinity groups.

We’ve seen how polarized our politics have become, but what many Americans fail to grasp is how influential Facebook is abroad. The campaigns that elected Modi in India and Duterte in the Philippines were coached by Facebook employees. In Cambodia, the dictator Hun Sen uses Facebook “Free Basics” (a freemium model of internet access - free use of Facebook, a paid option for anything else) to solidify his rule and attack opponents. In Myanmar, a country which had virtually no institutions to disseminate information other than the rumor mill, the arrival of “Free Basics” fueled a genocidal attack on a minority group. “Facebook allows authoritarian leaders and nationalist movements to whip up sentiment and organize violence against enemies real and imagined. It’s like nothing before . . . Facebook does not favor hatred. But hatred favors Facebook" (195).

Vaidhyanathan does have some solutions in mind, but they are not the simple tweaks Facebook proposes. There’s no way at this point to reengineer a platform that rewards hasty, emotional, shallow engagement or moderates content to ensure two billion people behave themselves. We need to support institutions that generate knowledge and develop publicly-funded forums for discussion and deliberation. We need government interventions (hard to imagine at the moment, but not without historical precedent). We need to work across borders to make these steps multinational if not global. And we need to do it soon. The lamps are going out all over Europe again, and far beyond.

Vaidhyanathan points to some hopeful signs, but concludes “as anti-rational, authoritarian, nationalist movements gain strength, enabled by Facebook, the prospects for the necessary movements and deliberation get more remote every year. If we are going to take a global stand to resist the rising illiberal oligopoly and reform our information ecosystem, we must do it soon. It’s getting dark—quickly” (220).

Read it and weep - and then let's get to work. show less

A highly readable, obviously relevant, critical examination of the deleterious effects Facebook has had on our lives, social structures, polis, and culture. This is a scholarly book (which is a good thing), so, Vaidhyanathan draws connection to Neil Postman's work as well as other media and communication scholars. But as scholarly and informed as the book is, Vaidhyanathan does not mince words when exposing the Facebook effects. He also broadens the discussion under Postman's technopoly show more framework where social issues are depoliticized and treated as technical issues. Alas, there is no salvation by algorithm (which we should know by now since there is already substantial literature on this). So, yes, this is a pretty pessimistic account Facebook cannot be "reformed" and its founder still gets it wrong. In the end, Vaidhyanathan offers a few prescriptions that might have a better chance of happening outside the US, considering our current political climate, in part generated and amplified by Facebook.
With this book and others (I'm thinking Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil or Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci), we are definitely leaving the era of utopian pronouncements on information wanting to be free and disruptive innovation and entering a bleaker (but more realistic) era of social media scholarship.
Highly recommended. show less

Google knows us better than we know ourselves. True story: my husband was answering a question from my son about the Large Hadron Collider (the source of the hottest temperatures we know of in the universe!) and started typing into Google search on his iPhone. By the time he finished “large,” the first suggestion—the first--was “large hadron collider,” a search term he could not recall using before. That’s freaky. And cool.

Vaidhyanathan argues that we’ve been distracted by the show more coolness and the freakiness from asking fundamental questions about Google’s proper role in organizing the world’s information. He argues that Google filled a vacuum created by public failure, a failure of government orchestrated by private interests in order to get the power to do what they wanted, often worse than government would have done. The political dynamic is: starve government and appoint incompetents (e.g., Hurricane Katrina), then use that to prove that government should be cut further. Meanwhile, people who are wealthy and informed enough to do so encouraged to choose “responsible” corporate providers like The Body Shop even though that doesn’t help all the animals/people caught up in producing the average unit of shampoo etc. Consumption, he argues, is not a substitute for citizenship, and by punting to private actors like Google we’re making a huge mistake of governance even if Google is (currently) well-intentioned. Eric Schmidt of Google thus preaches the same deregulatory bunk that got us the banking crisis.

We trust Google because it seems magic and we think we’re good searchers, even though we have no idea what the Google secret sauce is and most of us aren’t really good at distinguishing paid from organic results. Vaidhyanathan acknowledges that Google’s done a lot of good things, but there are also costs. Google’s withdrawal from China increased the scope of the Chinese government’s control over information (though he also argues that Google’s presence wouldn’t have been transformative either; prefiguring The Net Delusion, which I’m in the middle of now).

It’s a disturbing and often persuasive argument. Vaidhyanathan’s few unforced errors (for some reason, he thinks it’s not easy to exclude particular search engines from indexing your site and that you will have to make an up/down decision on them all together; it’s true that many people may not know about robot exclusion headers, but every explanation of them I’ve ever seen made it clear that you can exclude or allow particular bots at will), don’t go to the core of his argument. Unsurprisingly, I’m in greatest disagreement with him over Google Books: he says that offering the settlement makes Google’s fair use argument harder because Google conceded that it couldn’t do what it wanted without copyright owners’ permission, but this is really wrong, both in general and in specific. In general, we want to encourage settlement negotiations and therefore don’t treat them as admissions of wrongdoing, and in specific, the now-rejected settlement went much farther than Google’s initial scanning, as to which the fair use argument remains the same. He also says that the corpus hasn’t proven its value to research, which is (a) pretty early to be making that call, and (b) inconsistent with what I’ve read even with the early results. That said, he makes a good case that a government-scanned library could be more secure and open than Google Books proposed to be.

More generally, Vaidhyanathan is weirdly willing to accept the idea that companies have no responsibility to anyone but their shareholders—not their employees, their customers, or their society—and I think that’s a failure of imagination and history just as much as the assumption that government can’t do big things is. The idea that shareholder profits are all that matter is historically specific and economically catastrophic; “don’t be evil” could and should really mean something for corporations as well as for governments. show less

It didn’t occur to me in the early 1980’s when I was in business school doing an MBA that an intellectual battle was brewing between the profit maximizers and those who believed corporations owed a social responsibility to its stakeholders.

The old orthodoxy, championed by Milton Friedman, said that corporations were their most helpful when they pursued profit to the exclusion of everything else.

The new orthodoxy, developed by Edward Freeman, said that corporations had a social show more responsibility to its stakeholders, a term I remember learning about that time in business school.

Funny, I don’t recall any actual debate on the subject in the business school itself. But of course business school is more like a technical college than an Athenian school on deep moral and ethical concerns. Or at least it was then.

It seems the social responsibility folks got a little carried away in the US, with some corporations taking sides on the abortion debate and refused to fund public healthcare that had any relation to medical abortion or family planning for that matter.

That is how they interpreted their social responsibility.

Today we have a new debate on the social responsibility of tech firms like facebook, Twitter, and YouTube toward free speech in the US and elsewhere. The European Union now has strict regulations on managing the privacy of data collected by these firms and stiff fines for non-compliance.

In “Antisocial Media” Siva Vaidhyanathan argues that argues that US regulators need to get on board quickly. Since this book was published three years ago the chorus has only grown louder.

And as with other areas when business gets involved in social responsibility — or social engineering as some call it — there will be plenty of controversy.

When Twitter banned Donald Trump from the airwaves for ostensibly fomenting rebellion, Conservatives complained that Twitter had breached Donald Trump’s freedom of speech, notwithstanding the fact that the First Amendment of the US Constitution does not include protecting lunatics on social media. It’s a wholly private affair.

(You can tell that times have changed when getting banned from social media is a fate worse than impeachment.)

In the US, one always has to take the Conservatives with a grain of salt. They want the long hand of government out of the marketplace until it affects their sacred cows: free speech, abortion, etc., etc.

Which leads to ask the question: what exactly do Conservatives believe in? No Federal Government? States rights/government but not Federal Government? Libertarian ideals a la Peter Thiel? A “thought police”?

Why would people so enamoured with dismembering government put so much money into manipulating it for their own ends? And why wouldn’t the profit maximizers simply cede obvious public services to government that they really don’t want to manage themselves?

The answer is pretty obvious: pouring money into the political system helps the profit maximizers protect their interests. For them it’s just business.

It’s no wonder that some on the left confuse “conservative” and “capitalist” with “hypocrites.”

Conservatism is in a muddle.

And for those us expecting business to show more social responsibility, be careful what you wish for. show less