Facebook Anniversary: 15 more years of disinformation, hate speech and violation of privacy among other things

A video created by the opinion page team at The New York Times this week wished the social media site “15 more years of disinformation, hate speech, data breach, violation of privacy and interfering with elections” among other things. The savage video lists the number of times Mark Zuckerberg, the 34-year old tech entrepreneur, had to say ‘sorry’ during this period.

Zuckerberg himself was feted for ‘bringing the world together’ by Facebook users. ‘Mark Sir’ was flooded with anniversary wishes. And his anniversary post received 16 thousand comments and was shared 10 thousand times within 20 hours.

But as the NYT video demonstrated, there is increasing criticism of the business model of Facebook, of unethical breaches of privacy and data, and more and more people have begun wondering whether Facebook has been good for humanity. Zuckerberg, of course, is clear that since Facebook largely replaced traditional media for content, traditional media and newspapers are hitting back at him.

In his anniversary post, Zuckerberg wrote, “…there is another force at play as well. As networks of people replace traditional hierarchies and reshape many institutions in our society -- from government to business to media to communities and more -- there is a tendency of some people to lament this change, to overly emphasize the negative, and in some cases to go so far as saying the shift to empowering people in the ways the internet and these networks do is mostly harmful to society and democracy.” The tacit acknowledgment that not all’s well with facebook did little, however, to appease critics who found the post insufferably arrogant and hypocritical.

American media asked well known writers, philosophers and so on to comment on if facebook has done any good to humanity. Most of them, while acknowledging the social media site’s reach and power, seemed doubtful. The criticism ranged from unregulated content to unbridled power to the absurdity of people boasting of having a thousand or more ‘facebook friends’.

Pew data from 2014 (the most recent available) found that the average Facebook user had 338 friends, and half of the users had more than 200.

Research has concluded that there seems to be a limit to the number of social connections a human brain can manage. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, estimates 150—known as “Dunbar’s number”—are the (approximate) number of casual friends a person can keep track of. The smallest circle, of five friends, consists of someone’s most intimate friendships. One can keep track of 15 close friends, and 50 pretty close friends. Expanding out from the 150 casual friends, this research suggests that the brain can handle 500 acquaintances, and 1,500 is the absolute limit—“the number of faces we can put names to,” Dunbar reflected.

Psychologist and behavioural scientist Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, recalled an interesting anecdote. He had argued in ‘Blink’ that intuitive conclusions based on little or insufficient information were often as good as the ones arrived at after careful studies of much more information. Speaking of Facebook, Gladwell recalled that in the 1930s in Britain, before the outbreak of the second world war, Lord Beaverbrook, media baron, wrote to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain seeking clarification of Britain’s policy towards Germany.

Media barons even then were primarily interested in making money. But they were also interested in the news, and understood their role in educating public opinion and upholding freedom. But he cannot imagine Mark Zuckerberg calling up the White House to seek clarification on a policy.

“Can you imagine him calling the president, looking for clarification of some crucial point of policy? I can’t. And that’s the problem. Platforms are only as socially useful as their owners want them to be,” he said. But the growing power of Facebook was also acknowledged with the admission that it has fundamentally changed the way people conduct their business. “Zuckerberg’s creation has, for better and for worse, forever changed how people connect, how businesses make money, how politicians seize power, and how information flows across communities and cultures. It’s where grannies share pictures of their grandkids and where state-sponsored trolls wage cyberwar against other countries. It’s how volunteers raise money for hurricane victims and how hate-mongers rally their followers to kill people,” noted tech journal Wired.

There are now more than 2.5 billion people around the world who use at least one of Facebook’s social networking or messaging services, with an estimated 4.2 billion people connected to the internet in 2018. Outside China, its reach is clearly stupendous.