In 2018 the world woke up from what had been its idyll with social networks. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how Facebook was used for the purposes of political manipulation. And worst of all is that the beginning of that story had occurred in 2016, with the interference of the company that gave its name to the scandal and of Russia in the elections that Donald Trump won.
Before that, Facebook was the meeting place for many generations. Also the distribution platform that all the media bet on. A farmland riddled with mines that ended up becoming an echo chamber in which negative ideas resonate more.
Also, later we have learned of the continuous security flaws of the platform, to such an extent that anyone who had an account in 2019 you had a 50% chance of having suffered a data breach.
Many sticks on the wheels. And yet, although Facebook has fallen in retention of its users and seems to have become a social network that no longer captures the attention of young people 16 years after its creation, the profitability of Facebook (the company) is better than ever thanks to your Instagram and WhatsApp purchases.
A very ugly truth, but we are all still using Facebook
The book An Ugly Truth, from New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, reviews these five years of calamity for Facebook, with Zuckerberg testifying before the United States Congress, and yet they have not stopped their accounts. Maybe because deep down we care little as long as new services serve us that fulfill the function of connecting us. The best moral is that the data continues to have the value that people want to give it; because companies give you a much bigger one.
The book takes the starting point of the dismissal of 51 engineers and how Alex Stamos, Former Facebook Security Chief, brought the matter to Zuckerberg’s attention.
That dismissal of engineers came after it was detected in 2015 that they had used the data from the social network to follow women and contacts of their interest.
Mark Zuckerberg ordered a review of the system to restrict employee access to user data. It was a victory for Stamos, in which he convinced Zuckerberg that the fault lay with Facebook’s design, and not individual behavior.
Facebook’s current problems are not the product of a company that lost its way, but are part of its own design
Stamos would leave Facebook in 2018 after hitting his head against the wall several times. Problems stemming from Facebook’s business model (advertising based on getting the more data the better) would only increase in the following years, but as Stamos uncovered more serious problems, such as Russian interference in the US elections which ended up giving rise to Cambridge Analytica, ended up being more and more isolated.
Frenkel and Kang argue that Facebook’s current problems are not the product of a company that lost its way, but are part of its own design and Zuckerberg’s neglected privacy culture, supported by Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s COO.
Remember that Zuckerberg has changed his tone about privacy. In 2010, in a statement to The New York Times, claimed that “the age of privacy was over “, in reference to the rise of its platform and how its users shared their photos and life on it. A message that of course has changed in recent years when the lack of privacy has become its biggest problem.
When the company was still small, perhaps this lack of foresight and imagination could be excused. But since then, the decisions of Zuckerberg and Sandberg have shown that growth and revenue are above all else.
In a titled chapter of the book titled The company above the country, the authors relate how the leaders tried to hide Russian interference from everyone, including regulators.
The book also covers how Facebook has profiled itself more than once on the hate problems that occur on its platform. Specific, picks up the case of Myanmar in 2014 when activists had already started warning the company about the worrying levels of misinformation on the platform directed against the Rohingya. But Facebook also had a tepid response then.
And yet it keeps growing
The book goes over all these cases that, although with repercussions, it seems that they have not ended up weighing down the company too much, which seems to have always known how to get out unscathed or at least cushion the blow while continuing to fill its income.
Perhaps the transmutation of Facebook into FACEBOOK, The company that owns WhatsApp and Instagram has managed to make the ordinary user, after all, purely interested in what each application offers as a tool, to have forgotten what the conglomerate behind it has been doing.
However, the message the book leaves is clear. Facebook has a difficult solution as a corrector of its own internal dynamics. And, of course, if there is a positive change it doesn’t seem like it will be driven by your current managers.