Big Facebook Is Sort Of Watching You

Jeff Horwitz’s provocative ‘Broken Code‘ provides damning evidence that Facebook has played an important role in many deleterious world events, political and otherwise. The question is whether the company has the capacity to deal with it.

Way back in those innocent days of 2016, Facebook had no interest in downplaying its oversized role in political culture. It was too busy proving its bona sides. During the runup to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook offered to embed in each of the campaigns of the two major candidates a Facebook liaison who would help prove the usefulness of the website to winning at the polls. Hillary Clinton’s campaign turned the company down. Thanks. We’ve got it under control.

Trump’s campaign accepted, which prompted a problem at Facebook. No one at the company, Democrat or Republican, wanted to be the person to help Trump. A man named James Barnes accepted the challenge, and he soon had to suffer the fate of being the one who showed the Trump campaign how to use Facebook to help win the election. As Trump’s 2016 digital strategist Brad Pascale said in Wired, “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing.” It’s fair to assume James Barnes wasn’t a happy man on the morning of November 9, 2016.

Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has been writing about Facebook for several years, chronicles what can be known about the subsequent soul-searching within the company on its role electing Trump.

Say what you want about Mark Zuckerberg’s company, it aspires to come down on the side of free speech. Let’s not pretend such a stance is valueless. In a perfect world, Facebook and other important internet portals would maintain as much neutrality as possible in what they choose to censor. People should have ample leeway to speak their minds and be creative, and we all need to be challenged by ideas that cut against our own. If the 2016 election proved anything, it’s that we have to be careful about what we choose to ignore or downplay, and Facebook, for all its warts, takes its role that conversation seriously. If they had their way, they’d have nothing under their umbrella that you could possibly label “Thought Police.”

That said, Facebook has suspended many people, including Trump, or things they’ve said on the site. So much for that perfect world! As Horwitz chronicles, Facebook has repeatedly broken its precious stance of neutrality. A post in 2016 falsely claimed that the Pope supported Trump, which led to more than 900,000 likes, reshares, and comments. In 2018 Facebook determined that 40 percent of those Facebook publishers with significantly-sized audiences relied entirely on content that they’d either stolen, aggregated, or altered only trivially. In 2015 the government of Myanmar  used Facebook to promote ethnic cleansing that killed at least 25,000 people. If all that is happening, it’s time to adjust your algorithm. Facebook decided it needs to be really careful about what it broadcasts. They’re making billions off of us. It seems the least we can expect from them is to not break the world.

That’s the task for the company, as unveiled by Horwitz in the book: strike some kind of appropriate balance between letting us say whatever we want on their platform versus the broadcasting of those sentiments to the point that people die. Can Facebook succeed at this task? Horwitz has his doubts, which expresses convincingly in the book. For example, the company uses AI technology to mitigate societal concerns in countries such as the U.S. and Germany, with some success, but outside of those countries, Facebook’s international efforts to quell death and violence have proven lacking.

Ethiopia’s etho-regional civil war has been a humanitarian concern since November 2020. Amongst the conflict, someone murdered the university lecturer Meareg Amare  outside his home in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, in 2021. This murder occurred one month after a Facebook post went viral listing Amare’s home address, calling for his attack. According to its own At Risk Country team head Tony Leach, Facebook was ill equipped to deal with the issue. Leach wrote, “Most of our integrity systems are less effective outside of the United States … Classifiers either don’t exist or perform less well … [and] we lack human support.” The problem of mitigating sensationalism on its platform is a work in progress, both in the U.S. and abroad, but its failures lead to real consequences. The users are the guinea pigs.

Broken Code offers a thorough account of Facebook grappling with the fact that the best-intentioned content on its site doesn’t necessarily rise to the top, and that its most robust growth comes when we’re furious. How much fury is too much? That’s for the company to decide, which might be the scariest thing of all.

(Doubleday, November 14, 2023)