Last Night I went to watch the Social Reckoning, which serves as a companion piece to the Social Network and if you’ve been living under a rock (or in peace), it’s about Facebook, or Meta, as it’s now known.
A quick recap of the film, it follows Frances Haugen a data scientist at then Facebook and Jeff Horwitz, an investigative reporter working with the Wall Street Journal.
Frances works in the Facebook ‘Civic Integrity team’ - essentially ensuring that Facebook remains a healthy and safe platform (spoiler it isn’t). Their job was to figure out how the platform could be manipulated, in order to figure out how it could be made safer. She see’s online that someone she knew, who used to be progressive and liberal, had been radicalised into the far right in a short period of time. Wondering why, she starts to dig into Facebook data and activity, realising that they’re the problem.
I should point out, please go and watch it as I’m not a trusted source (i’m very tired the film finished at midnight).
From their work, and Frances gathering some 20,000 internal documents, the Facebook Files were created - 17 stories covering various topics, but all of them highlighting Facebooks flaws and ill effects on it’s users and society.
For an example one story Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Many Teen Girls, Company Documents Show - Instagram and social media as a whole, still effects users mental health, whether that’s a byproduct of the network or just how society has become, is a whole other question.
But my main takeaway from the film was, not a lot has changed. Yes it became public knowledge and laws across the globe have been put into place against tech companies and social platforms. But overall, we still see issues surrounding social devision which is exacerbated by social platforms, we have politicians using their social accounts to break news, shout about who they hate and politicise everything.
We still go on using social platforms that cause harm, because they’re so ingrained in our lives. I know that growing up when facebook started and seeing it evolve into what it is today. I feel that we’ve all been able to see the affects of these platforms, but do we turn a blind eye because it keeps us connected, or so we can stay up to date the meme’s and our favourite brands.
What’s the cost? What’s the acceptable level of pain we’re willing to endure to stay connected?
The difficulty we have is that companies are incredibly private about how their systems work, a lot of it is propriety and I get that, but when the impact is so huge, surely it needs to be more open? Safety is something that comes once companies are big enough, growth by any means necessary is the first port of call.
Going forward we may not even have whistleblowers, now Meta and other big companies log everything an employee does, opening documents, screenshotting, typing, emails. The cost for employees maybe too high and risky. Even taking a photo of a document on the screen, the same way Frances did, is difficult. Documents can be water marked with your employee ID so they’ll know exactly where a leak came from. Breaking NDA’s and contracts could ruin your career, or bankrupt you.
The thing these platforms need are engagement, eyes on screens and scrolling, that’s their goal. Engagement is money for them and they will do whatever they can to retain that. Algorithms are purpose built for this, regardless of the cost to society or our mental health.
I see a lot of parallels with the Facebook Files and the social media platforms of today, if anything I feel that we see more polarising and extreme content from left to right, rage bait everywhere you go and arguments galore.
It’s crazy to think all of the negative patterns and ill effects that these platforms cause came to light, yet we still use their products and accept their impact on our lives.
With AI we’re just going to see more of this, especially thanks to the mass levels of slop and content flooding the internet. Couple that with bot farms ran by nation states, we’re on the way to not know what’s real and what’s not.
We give a lot of our lives and information over to big companies without ever really knowing what they’re doing with our data. That level of trust is unprecedented and I wonder what the impact will be in the future.
Anyway, rant over, i’m going to go and share this on Instagram 😉
