Mark Zuckerberg has been sharing a lot this month. First, he posted that his “personal challenge” for 2018 is to fix the glaring and obvious problems for which he’s taken so much heat. Last week, he announced that he had directed Facebook’s product teams to change their focus from “helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.” Zuckerberg promised users that they’d see less content from “businesses, brands and media” and more content from “your friends, family and groups.” On Friday, Zuckerberg shared another major change: Facebook would improve the news that does get shared by crowdsourcing what news sources were and weren’t trustworthy via user surveys.
The first change, a return to “meaningful interaction,” is one I can get behind. I’m all for anything that discourages fake news sites from monetizing on Facebook. I’ve long suspected that part of why these sites took hold in the first place was a lack of meaningful content available on our feeds. Less sponsored content and more pictures and videos from family and friends will greatly improve my Facebook experience. I suspect I’m not the only one.
I’m also hopeful this change will move digital advocacy away from broadcasting and back to organizing. Given how Facebook groups have become such a crucial part of #TheResistance I’m glad to hear they’ll be emphasized. I want to see more groups like Pantsuit Nation and the many local Indivisible groups that have formed in the last year. (Media outlets fear not, Vox has also been building Facebook groups in addition to their pages.) Digital ads and acquisition shouldn’t be the only tools digital organizers use. Increased engagement should involve actually engaging folks rather than simply broadcasting to them.
The second change, user surveys to determine what news people trust, is maddening. If you were going to design a system that could be easily gamed, this is how you’d do it. “Freeping” online polls and surveys is a longstanding tactic of the far right online, going back nearly 20 years. It’s in their online DNA and they have groups of activists at the ready who live for this activity. Facebook isn’t handing authority over to their broader community but to an engaged group of users with an agenda. Even if the freeping wasn’t inevitable, it’s pretty well established that there’s already no common ground when it comes to what news sources people with different political viewpoints trust.
The crux of the problem is that Facebook desperately wants to be seen a neutral platform while Facebook’s users want them to keep inaccurate information off of Facebook. In his New Year’s post, Zuckerberg emphasized he believes technology “can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people’s hands” while acknowledging that the reality might be the opposite. There’s a tension between his core beliefs and what Facebook users currently expect from the company. My sense is that’s a driving force behind attempting to pass the buck back to us.
Facebook will only go as far as their users pressure them, especially in the US where regulation from the government will be minimal. If we want Facebook to take responsibility, we have to continually hold them accountable when things go wrong or when proposed solutions don’t go far enough. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal challenge is to fix what’s broken. Ours is to keep pressing him in the right direction.
This piece was originally published as part of Melissa Ryan's Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter -- subscribe here.