Last month’s New York Times’ exposé about Facebook’s failures around Russian interference in the 2016 election has been weighing heavily on my ongoing debate as to whether to continue posting The Hot Screen to the social network. I’ve never been comfortable using Facebook to get my writing out — I despise its privacy-invading mission of reducing its users to sets of data points that it can exploit and profit from — and have always viewed my arrangement as a matter of expedience.
To read about Facebook’s failure to act in a credible manner against attempts to influence a U.S. election, putting profit over patriotism and greed over public responsibility, is utterly nauseating and unsettling. The company is revealed to be a fraud — not in terms of its ability to make money, but in its portrayal of itself as a benign friend of millions of people who use it to connect and communicate. Facebook sought to discredit those it saw as enemies by unethical and underhanded means, and preferred that foreign spies dupe Americans to taking action that might harm its bottom line.
This is not the only time that management has failed to apply the level of ethical thought required by the powerful and unprecedented nature of this technology. Mark Zuckerberg may be a genius, but he’s proved himself a moral featherweight, unwilling or unable to grapple with the darker consequences of his invention. I can safely say that if I had created an application that was used to facilitate genocide, I would probably never sleep again, but that’s just me.
I sense that there are a lot of people with increasing second thoughts about being on Facebook, and I do wonder if we are soon to see a mass exodus from the platform. There are such amazing benefits to be able to connect with other people online, but I think we are at a point where we really need to think through the downsides and the ways that Facebook in particular has been hijacked by the enemies of a free and open society.
I have told myself that there is value in being a source of reliable information on a platform undermined by propaganda, instant gratification, and the cultivation of surface over depth. The phrase “Occupy Facebook” sometimes comes to mind, but I have to admit that I don’t really know what that would mean beyond sounding cool. At any rate, I would be sorry to lose any readers by signing off from this site, but at the same time, the miracle of the internet means that The Hot Screen would still be as accessible as always, a-hover in the ether, for those who care to bookmark the page. And there are obviously other ways for me to get the word out: I am thinking of a weekly or monthly newsletter, and maybe engaging in the world of Twitter.
Believe me, I feel somewhat silly and hesitant to share these thoughts. The Hot Screen is a speck of sand in the billions-strong world of Facebook, and my decision here is not going to make a dime’s worth of difference. Millions of people had already rendered judgment on Facebook long before that New York Times piece came out, and turned their backs on its insistently cheery, claustrophobic electronic clime.
Yet the only way big corporations will act as good public actors is if we force them to, at both and individual and collective level. Their foundations in the quest for profit and the temptations of greed will always be ground to distrust their motives and their actions; somewhat ironically, the higher their claims to benefit the public, the higher the scrutiny and skepticism that are called for. You can dismiss this attitude as anti-business or anti-capitalist all you want, but a more clear-eyed perspective see it as pro-democracy and pro-citizen, and based on a realistic view of human nature rather than an ingenuous ideology of the glories of the marketplace.