Facebook turns 15 this week. And it's still shirking its responsibilities
Photographer: Marlene Awaad/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Facebook celebrated its 15th birthday this week and, as is the case with most teenagers, its parents are not exactly sure how to control what they brought into the world all those years ago.
Facebook has become a crucial platform for the spread of news – both real and fake. This is something Mark Zuckerberg clearly never foresaw when he founded the site in his college dorm room a decade-and-a-half ago. However much he tries to sidestep the issue, Facebook is now a publisher. It has been a for a while. That immense power comes with immense responsibilities.
Given that Facebook executives have systematically failed to grasp this over the last few years, it comes as no surprise that politicians have decided to get involved. In November last year, we saw the spectacle of Facebook Executive, Lord Richard Allen, being grilled by politicians from around the globe in parliament. Zuckerberg himself appeared in front of a committee of U.S. Congressmen. These hearings largely produced more heat than light, and seemed to have encouraged talk of social media regulation.
The prospect of politicians regulating social media makes me deeply uncomfortable. I think there are serious free speech implications. The risk of unforeseen, damaging consequences is a very real one. For example, Health Secretary Matt Hancock recently warned social media companies that if they did not do more to block suicide and self-harm and content on their platforms, that they could face serious fines, or even be banned. His comments came after the high profile and tragic death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who killed herself after viewing such content on Instagram and other social networks. It is hard to disagree with taking action after such a tragic case, but doing so comes with the risk that those in the most desperate need of help may be blocked from finding it online.
Rushed legislation in response to specific incidents tends to be bad legislation. The Dangerous Dogs Act was one thing. The Dangerous Social Media Act would be quite another.
The truth is that for too long politicians were somewhat supine to Silicon Valley. They worshipped unquestioningly at the altar of social media billionaires – couldn’t wait to have their pictures taken with them. Largely, of course, this was a good thing. Technology, innovation, entrepreneurship have brought huge benefits to billions of lives. But now the web connecting social media and the law has been spun, it is very difficult to remove the rotten threads.
That is why it comes down to the companies themselves to get their own houses in order. Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly called for the US to step up its privacy regulations and bring in legislation akin to the EU’s GDPR. This is not students marking their own homework. It is the only conceivable long-term solution.
But when it comes to Facebook, it is not clear they quite get it. Marking 15 years since he launched his site, Zuckerberg wrote of social media: “If the first part of this century was about wiring up these networks, the next phase will be about people using these networks to redefine every part of our society. This will require finding the right balance between the freedoms and responsibilities of a connected world.”
He said similar in his annual news year’s message. Facebook talks a good game, but it has done very little to live up to it. It still shows no real appreciation or understanding that it is the world’s biggest publisher. In fact, it seems to want to shirk that responsibility, shifting its algorithms repeatedly to give less prominence to news and more prominence to holiday snaps and wedding pictures. The company that has explored ways to bring the internet to the most unconnected part of the world has decided that dealing with the news is too difficult
Twitter is far from perfect, it has a huge problem with dealing with hate speech, but it does at least appear to understand, at a fundamental level, its place in the media industry. It has experienced journalists in senior roles dealing with curation.
Facebook fired its editorial team after facing accusations of political bias. Last June, it posted job listings that indicated fact checking was coming back in house. By and large, though, it is still apologising for the mess its caused and promising to learn rather than doing anything really meaningful. The company has also ploughed large sums of money into local news, which is welcome, but hardly undoes the damage it already did to that industry’s revenue model. These actions only scratch at the surface of the problem
Sir Nick Clegg, Facebook’s new PR Chief, promised last week that the company was launching a fake news ‘war room’. It’s a start. Facebook needs to hire experienced editors, build a newsroom atmosphere in part of the company, and fully grasp its role in the media and wider world. If it doesn’t, politicians will come after it with legislation, and that is unlikely to help anyone.
