Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with the aim of connecting everyone into a global community. As his mission statement puts it ‘To give people power to build community and bring the world closer together.’ However, Facebook also has the business philosophy of ‘Move Fast and break things’ referring to its strategy of putting growth first at all costs – better to grow fast and apologize later than move with care and slow down growth.
True to his vision, Facebook is probably the fastest growing company in the world. From a standing start in 2004, Facebook now has 2.9 billion subscribers, and revenues of 86 billion USD. To put this in context, this is almost 40% of the population of the world, and the cash generated is twice as much as the Gross Domestic Product of Uganda. Zuckerberg also controls 58% of the Facebook’s voting rights, meaning that this individual has more influence over people globally than any world leader, including the President of the United States.
In order to meet its goals of rapid growth, Facebook, like Google, adopted a strategy of data surveillance in which they collect the data on every user and use that data to manipulate behavior to increase the time they stay on Facebook. Every Facebook user has multiple data points which are gathered and crunched by artificial intelligence to give a very accurate user profile: his likes and dislikes, his habits, his sexual orientation, his location, his movements, etc. Facebook then matches the profile to newsfeeds, adverts, groups, and information. In other words the news presented to one person is subtly different from that presented to another person. If a person has been profiled as a dissatisfied, white, right wing American, he will be categorized along with white nationalists and fed inflammatory views, inevitably making him more extreme.
Facebook does this for purposes of targeted advertising, but also sells its data to third parties, as was seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which millions of Facebook profiles were made available to Cambridge Analytica. This enabled an organization working for a political party to determine which voters should be targeted according to their specific profile and vulnerabilities.
Facebook has provided a platform to anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, causing an exponential growth in their influence. There have always been small groups of people who held such views but the reach of Facebook has given them apparent credibility, resulting in people failing to be vaccinated and dying unnecessarily.
Facebook has caused opinions to become more polarized, resulting in a sharply divided world. Therefore instead of Mark Zuckerberg creating a warm fuzzy global community, Facebook has become a platform to promote hate, divisions, lies, and mistrust. The effect of hate speech was evidenced in Myanmar, where Facebook was the main platform used against the Rohingya Community. One would imagine that when Zuckerberg realized that he had created a Frankenstein Monster he would have taken steps to change direction, but no. In fact, Facebook has a whole team of behavioral psychologists dedicated to promoting addictive digital behavior, and behavioral psychology is one of the fastest growing disciplines in Silicon Valley. How can all this happen? The first reason is that we like Facebook: it is very convenient, and if people realize it is addictive they are enjoying the addiction – it is pleasurable to get all those likes.
The scary part for me is that algorithms and AI (artificial intelligence) are now playing a large part in manipulating the behavior of human beings, and we are allowing themselves to be manipulated.
There is a lively debate about AI – whether it will serve humanity, or simply take over humanity because artificial intelligence is multiple times faster than the human brain. Many people feel that AI is nowhere near the point of overtaking humans in terms of ‘artificial general intelligence’, but AI does not need to be stronger than human beings; it just needs to be stronger than our weaknesses and we will submit.
Facebook is the proof of that. It is at this point that we need the US government to step in and bring regulation to the digital market. Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have already proven that uncontrolled capitalism will not regulate itself – the instinct to make money, no matter the cost to society, is simply too strong. We need regulation to save ourselves from unfettered capitalism on digital platforms preying on the weakness and addiction of human beings. The users are already the fodder for the machine and many are being brainwashed and addicted, while still believing they are in control. Just try to convince an anti-vaxxer, who has gathered his opinions from social media, that he is wrong, and you will understand how people are being brainwashed.
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