Are You Connected?

Facebook's Wild Ride Through the Twenty-First Century

I have a confession to make, sort of. Last month I woke up to find that my Facebook account had been disabled during the night for posting images that violated its ‘community standards’. I had no idea what this message referred to, and Facebook didn’t explain. As far as I knew, I hadn’t posted any images at all the previous day, let alone anything offensive.

It wasn’t till later that morning that I discovered from a friend that some 300-odd images featuring naked children had fleetingly appeared on my timeline.

These images were only up for a few minutes, before Facebook’s software detected and removed them. Fine, but they also removed me, and their detection programs didn’t seem ask why someone who had been on the platform for more than twelve years would suddenly unleash a deluge of images of this kind.

I realised that I had been hacked. This was annoying, but it wasn’t the end of the world - I don’t depend on Facebook for a living. But it did mean the loss of friends who do matter, not to mention more than twelve years of photographs and memories that were not available anywhere else.

Also, I didn’t particularly want to leave Facebook with a reputation as a child pornographer, so I tried to get my account back. To say that Facebook’s customer helplines weren’t much help would be something of an understatement.

It was impossible even to find a chatbot, let alone a human. The lines of complaint and explanation kept taking me back to the same place where I’d started, without taking me any further or leaving me any way to actually inform Facebook that I had been hacked and was not actually sharing child pornography.

When I asked for help on Twitter, a plethora of bots offered to get my account back in exchange for money - something I had no intention of doing. I was ready to give up when a few days later - miracle! - my account was restored without explanation.

It was only then that I discovered that the hacker had entered my account through some pages that I rarely use, by removing me as an admin and replacing me with a sinister-looking avatar calling itself Agnieska Montreal - a ridiculous name that almost certainly doesn’t refer to anyone human or good.

Though I managed to get a co-administrator to remove this creature from one of my pages, it still remains in the others like some malignant digital stain that I can’t erase, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it.

I have no idea why anyone would take the trouble to do all this, though I have found that this kind of hack is very common, and that the perpetrators apparently use your details to work bitcoin scams while your account is disabled.

This was the first time I have ever been hacked, and I can’t say that I enjoyed it. But it brought home to me the strange contradictions at the heart of our tech-driven networked 21st century. On one hand our brains, nervous systems, and even our emotions are inextricably enmeshed with the new technologies to which we have given enormous and unprecedented powers.

At the same time many of us, and in fact probably most of us, have so little understanding of how these platforms actually work, that we are constantly vulnerable to those who misuse them, and also at the mercy of giant corporations that often seem to have no responsibility or accountability to the people who use their platforms for more benign purposes.

Facebook is one of the most powerful and influential of these new platforms. In July this year, Facebook users reached 2.934 billion people monthly - an astounding 36. 8 percent of the world’s population. In 2021 400 users signed up to Facebook every minute.

Not bad for a handful of Harvard students who created an algorithm based on college yearbooks in 2004 to weigh up the sexual attractiveness of girls they couldn’t get dates with. In its mission statement, Facebook - or Meta, as the company now calls itself - declares

Originally founded in 2004 as Facebook, Meta’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Our products empower more than 3 billion people around the world to share ideas, offer support and make a difference.

This goal of ‘sharing ideas’ is crucial to Mark Zuckerberg’s declared intention to ‘connect every person in the world’ and ‘get every human online.’ The assumption behind all these statements is that ‘sharing’ widens our knowledge and understanding of the world and each other, and that the more of us there are online, the more likely it is that these harmonious outcomes will materialise.

The experience of the last eighteen years suggests that these utopian aspirations have fallen a long way short, even if they cannot be written off entirely.

Today, as the world well knows, Facebook has become a primary conduit for misinformation and disinformation, in the 2016 US election campaign and the EU Referendum, or in electoral campaigns in India, Kenya, and the Philippines. It has been used as an instrument for inspiring and organizing ethnic hatred, for example against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. It has enabled popular movements to launch protests and even bring down governments, and organise armed insurrections.

It has made possible an array of very dysfunctional 21st century pathologies, from revenge porn, to online bullying and harassment, and digital blackmail. People have killed themselves and also killed others because of things that were said on Facebook. Without Facebook there might not have been a Trump presidency, or Brexit, but there might also not have been revolutions in the Middle East, Belarus and Ukraine.

This was not the way Facebook or the ‘tech utopians’ of the nineties expected things to play out, when they celebrated the advent of a networked world, based on ever-increasing connectedness. As Mark Leonard and others have pointed out, connectivity does not necessarily lead to social harmony, and may sometimes have the opposite effect.

Some critics of the 21st century digital world and the chaotic politics of the last ten years have attributed the erosion of democratic norms and the increasing mistrust of government to the creation of siloed digital communities on Facebook and other platforms.

To my mind these criticisms are overstated. Political communities have always been divided from each other. Most of us would rather spend our time in the company of people we are more or less politically in tune with, than engage in endless bitter confrontations with people we have little or nothing in common with. Long before the digital revolution, we read newspapers that reflected our interests and ideas. Facebook and social media may have exacerbated these divisions, but they didn’t create them.

It’s true that the siloed communities on social media make it easier to pump falsehoods, lies, and targeted messages to closed groups, and it also creates groups in which fakery and lies go uncontested.

This has provided opportunities for Russian troll factories, for organisations like Islamic State to recruit and spread propaganda, for the dissemination of Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracies. As digital technologies become more sophisticated, these tendencies are likely to take the form of MADCOMS - Machine-driven communications tools - which can mimic voices and even faces to the point when an entirely false reality can be created and disseminated through social media platforms like Facebook.

As the authors of ‘LikeWars’ have warned, the cyberwars of the future may well be fought by ‘highly-intelligent, inscrutable algorithms that will speak convincingly of things that never happened, producing “proof” that doesn’t really exist.’

Such sci-fi predictions can easily be cited to justify a technophobic retreat into an imagined past, based on the ‘authenticity’ of print media, television and face-to-face contact. But the pre-digital world was never as authentic or as free from manipulation as we might like to believe. Long before the advent of the personal computer, Neil Postman had already pointed out the corrosive impact of ‘infotainment’ on politics and education, and some of his predictions about media-as-entertainment and low attention spans have been magnified ten-fold in our era of scrolling, clickbait, and ‘like’ emojis.

The negative political and social consequences of social media can’t just be blamed on social media per se, and they sometimes seem more glaring because of the over-optimistic technophilia that preceded them.

It was - and is - a mistake to believe that the mere fact of being connected or networked can reduce or eliminate conflict, and bring people into a more harmonious relationship with each other. This may sometimes be true of trade, because equitable trading relationships can generate levels of mutuality and self-interest that negate the need for conflict, but there is no reason to think that more ‘information’ can have the same effect.

Technology is to some extent a reflection of society, as well as an instrument for changing society for better or worse, and Facebook is no exception. The company insists that it wants to make technology accessible to everyone, and celebrates its business model based on ads that enables it to deliver free services.

This business model is crucial to its desire to ‘help people connect’. To make money, FB needs more ads to reach more people, and this means it has a commercial interest in ‘connecting’ people regardless of whether they want to be connected. This is why FB curates your memories, tastes, likes and shares, and becomes a kind of digital guardian angel, constantly encouraging you to share and like, or reminding you that you haven’t commented for a while on such and such a group page, or introducing you to potential ‘friends’ because they happen to be friends of someone you’re friends with.

For the most part users accept these nudges and pressures, because why not? But what is striking about Facebook is its absence of corporate responsibility towards the people it encourages to connect, not to mention the wider political and social impact of these connections.

This has always been the case. At his 2018 testimony to Congress on Facebook’s relationship with data mining and Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg often looked like a rabbit in the headlights of the power at his fingertips, and baffled at the temerity of politicians in asking him any questions at all.

This was not because Zuckerberg had any particularly evil intentions, unless you conclude that the desire to make money is evil in itself. His dumbfounded surprise at the interrogations he was subjected to might well have contained a note of bemused arrogance, but Zuckerberg also came across, as he has on numerous occasions, as someone still astounded by the power at his fingertips, and unable to accept the negative outcomes it has produced.

This starry-eyed optimism is not unique to him. As Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, puts it

The world is so complex that we actually need better forms of analysis and better forums for deliberation than the ones we inherited from the 20th century. And instead of building those, we trusted Facebook and Google. Google said, “Hey we’re going to build the library in the future! Let’s defund the libraries of the present!” Facebook said, “We will build a public square that will liberate the world and spread democracy!” And everyone went, “Great!”

The very fact that these corporate leaders believe so deeply in their ability to improve our lives should have set off alarm bells. It’s not that they’re lying. It’s that they actually believe it.

This is the problem. Because the technological revolution that we have been living through for the last thirty years or so has transformed our lives, and in many ways for the better, but technology does not have some innate transcendent power to do what human beings are unwilling to do.

If these new technologies are to become as socially useful as their architects claim them to be, then ‘corporate leaders’ like Zuckerberg must be forced by governments to give up some of their power. They must be made to make more efforts to regulate content and create enough staff to do this rigorously. They must be held accountable for their content.

And the responsibility doesn’t only lie with them. We need greater civic education to promote greater awareness of the pluses and the minuses of the new technologies and platforms, in the same way that media studies was intended to do for an earlier era. We need to reaffirm the humanities, as a means to deepen and widen our understanding of what it means to be human. We need to provide the young with critical tools that they can bring to bear in their response to the new ‘connectedness.’

And if companies like Facebook are going to encourage people to use their platforms, and deepen their connectedness in exchange for advertising revenue, then it seems reasonable that they should not just walk away from the people who use their services, and do nothing to help even when someone like Agnieska Montreal takes them over and turns their account into a sewer.