This appeared
last week and encouraged me to wonder where we are going with social media:
Facebook is 20. It still hasn’t grown up
Technology Editor
February 11, 2024 — 5.00am
Facebook
has turned 20.
The
social media company that began life in 2004 as a “hot or not” website from
19-year-old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, eventually growing into a $1
trillion behemoth, would now be old enough to legally, in Australia at least,
drink and smoke if it were a person.
Some
say Facebook is the new tobacco: an addictive substance that doles out regular
dopamine hits – in Facebook’s case in the form of “likes” and comments – with
severe negative health consequences, particularly for young people.
It’s
arguably worse and, like smoking, we likely won’t know the true impact for
decades.
The
story of Facebook’s first 20 years is one of initial promise and optimism being
replaced over its evolution by rampant privacy intrusions, misinformation and
an overall malaise that has long dogged the company, though not its share
price.
Facebook’s
decline – setting aside its eye-watering valuation – is symptomatic of the
ruination of everything we once loved about the internet.
It
has fallen victim to “enshittification”, a term coined by the writer and
futurist Cory Doctorow to describe the decay of online platforms. As Doctorow
put it: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to
make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those
business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Nearly
every online service you can think of – Twitter, Reddit, Google search and
Bandcamp – are now shadows of their former selves thanks to enshittification,
and Facebook is arguably the poster child.
Facebook
was once a far more friendly, fun and innocent place to spend time online. It
was a simpler platform, and it was good to its users. Its feed was filled with
inane status updates (everyone must know what I just had for dinner), tedious
photos of said dinner, and general life updates including new jobs and
successful marriage proposals.
Its
premise was simple: to be a place to connect with your friends and family
online. It could be a time suck, sure, but a time suck without the toxicity and
rampant misinformation that we have now.
But
gradually Facebook changed. What began as a tool for connection became a hub of
division and unforseen consequences. The feed became increasingly flooded with
advertising, fake news and abuse. When their parents joined, many users – in
particular those aged 18 to 30 – left the platform altogether, flocking instead
to cooler platforms like TikTok, or switching to group chats and texting.
While
Facebook’s first decade was largely successful, its second has seen it
deteriorate in the face of scandal after scandal. The company has failed at
every hurdle to accept responsibility for the content posted on its platform
and, even two decades in, has not proven it can be trusted to act in the best
interests of its users.
In
2012, the company conducted experiments on around 70,000 users without their
consent, removing certain words from their newsfeeds to test how it affected
their reactions to posts. It took two years for those experiments to be made
public.
Nearly
10 years later, in 2021, employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen testified
before US Congress that the company puts profits over safety. Haugen helped
release the so-called “Facebook Papers” which detailed the platform’s fading
popularity with teenagers and its inability to counter hate speech.
That
same year, Facebook blocked the pages of Australian charities, health
organisations and government services during a pandemic and raging bushfires,
all to protest a law that would force it to compensate local publishers for
news.
And,
in 2022, the company paid a whopping $1.1 billion to finally settle legal
action relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which hundreds of
millions of Facebook users had their personal data released en masse to third
parties without consent.
Facebook’s
algorithms, which remain shrouded in secrecy, have often fed our worst
tendencies, encouraging everything from home decor envy to political extremism
and violence, as has been seen in the US and Myanmar.
Earlier
this month, it became apparent just how unrecognisable Facebook is now from its
2004 self. In front of the US Senate Committee, Zuckerberg and other Silicon
Valley executives were forced to face parents holding photographs of their dead
children, who were victims of online sexual exploitation and cyberbullying.
Senators
were united across the aisle about the damage done by the likes of Facebook to
the health and wellbeing of children.
“They’re
responsible for many of the dangers our children face online,” the judiciary
committee’s chairman, Democrat Dick Durbin said. “Their design choices, their
failures to adequately invest in trust and safety, their constant pursuit of
engagement and profit over basic safety have all put our kids and grandkids at
risk.”
Republican
Senator Josh Hawley – who couldn’t be more different politically from Durbin –
also repeatedly criticised Zuckerberg.
“Your
product is killing people,” he told the executive.
More
here:
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/facebook-is-20-it-still-hasn-t-grown-up-20240206-p5f2q6.html
I think it is
fair to say most of the social media platforms have become unrecognisable over
the period since they opened for use and
that since then huge numbers of users have left – myself included – due to the
unappealing way the platforms seem to work and the dominance of all sorts of unwanted
advertising and other unwanted influences.
All the
platforms seem to have mostly lost the ‘social’ aspect of their operations and
many are now ‘no fun’ to use anymore, and have lost track of their core purpose.
To me the
question is what can come next and attract users while fostering more
interested and useful behaviour! I am sure the platform is out there already but
that not many have noticed so far! It will be interesting to see what emerges
over the next decade or so.
David.
