One would think by now that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg lacks principles. Since early 2017 he has been caught lying about such basic matters as whether Facebook users have control over the data they generate and has repeatedly failed to confront the damage his company has done to people, democracy and social fabrics around the world.
Yet Zuckerberg has two core principles from which he has never wavered. They are the founding tenets of Facebook. First, the more people use Facebook for more reasons for more time of the day the better those people will be. As I documented in my book, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, Zuckerberg truly believes that Facebook benefits humanity and we should use it more, not less. What’s good for Facebook is good for the world and vice-versa.
Second, Zuckerberg deeply believes that the records of our interests, opinions, desires, and interactions with others should be shared as widely as possible so that companies like Facebook can make our lives better for us – even without our knowledge or permission. Privacy, Zuckerberg believes, renders us inauthentic. After all, Facebook knows what’s best for us.
These two principles – that Facebook is benevolent and that privacy is quaint and inefficient – drive everything Facebook does. They go a long way to explain why Facebook continued to give precious user data to a set of “trusted” partners years after the company claimed it had ended such a program, as the New York Times revealed in a blockbuster investigative story on Wednesday.
Facebook had long claimed that in 2015 it shut down a policy that allowed application developers and other advertising and technology firms to draw user data out of Facebook. That policy had been active since about 2009 and had generated a sanction from the US Federal Trade Commission in 2011. In an agreement it signed with the commission, Facebook pledged not to share user data outside the company without explicit permission from users. The practice continued, however, and ultimately resulted in such high-profile scandals as the release of 87 million profiles to the political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, in 2015.
The Times revealed that those that could have received data from Facebook as late as 2017 include such powerful global firms as the Russian search engine (and Kremlin partner) Yandex, Chinese phone maker (under sanctions for producing insecure devices that enable state surveillance) Huawei, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Sony (which suffered a major security breach in 2014), and the New York Times itself.
At first glance, the motivation for Facebook to share such valuable data seems unclear. Why should it allow another powerful technology firm like Amazon or Microsoft access to the one thing that makes Facebook rich and distinctive?
One answer is that Facebook officials understand that interdependence strengthens the company. If Facebook is not the sole company culpable for such seedy and abusive practices then regulators and litigators are less likely to target Facebook alone. In addition, if it becomes clear – as it has – that multiple industries depend on exploiting the personal data of millions or even billions of people, the concentrated political power of organized, wealthy companies outweighs the distributed power of disorganized citizens. These most recent revelations show that while Facebook might be the most egregious abrogator of our trust, there are no innocents. Major companies like Sony and Huawei are known to be insecure. Facebook itself has shown its systems to be insecure, subject both to massive data breaches and to political hijacking.
In addition, Facebook officials believe that if users see more targeted or carefully selected advertisements for Amazon products on their Facebook News Feeds, they will spend more time within Facebook and get a stronger sense that it benefits their consumer urges. The same is true of Netflix or Spotify. If we would stay on Facebook for a fuller and richer set of cultural experiences, our dependence on Facebook would grow.
Zuckerberg yearns for Facebook to become the operating system of our lives, making decisions for us, guiding us, and enlightening us through more efficient consumption. This is a manner of unfreedom masked as maximum freedom.
“Every single time that you share something on Facebook or one of our services, right there is a control in line where you control who you want to share with,” Zuckerberg told the US Congress earlier this year. This is a lie.
We never controlled, nor could we know, what Yandex knew of our Facebook activity and what – of anything – it offered the Russian government or its various proxies that have engaged in worldwide propaganda attacks using social media.
Because of a vast global power of both Facebook and its trusted partners, we are unlikely to see effective regulation on any continent. Because the only viable competitors for our attention, Instagram and WhatsApp, are owned by Facebook, we are unlikely to see market forces influence Facebook. And because many of the 2.3 billion users around the world are deeply dependent on Facebook to manage their relations and learn about the world, we are unlikely to see any significant user exodus from Facebook.
So while the most recent revelations of the depths of Facebook’s depravity shock the conscience, the deeper story is that Facebook’s position is more secure than we had feared. And Zuckerberg need not abandon his core principles as his algorithms continue to manipulate how billions of people make choices every day.
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Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018)