The false Meta-morphosis of Facebook
By Christophe Lachnitt
By adopting the name Meta, Facebook affirms its will not to change.
The past few weeks are probably unprecedented in corporate history: no less than 125 articles were devoted to Mark Zuckerberg's group by a consortium of more than fifteen media outlets, fueled by the documents transmitted by whistleblower Frances Haugen.
We learn in these investigations that:
Facebook only acted to counteract the sale of domestic and sex slaves on its platform once its business was endangered by a threat to ban its mobile app from the Apple App Store and that it has still not taken the necessary steps to completely eradicate human trafficking from its network;
instead of acting when warned about the role of their network in spreading misinformation before, during and after the last US presidential election, the Group's leaders lied about it;
they also remained inert in the face of the information they received about the recruitment of killers by drug cartels on their platform;
Facebook's own research shows the very negative effects of Instagram (and not all social networks) on the perception of their bodies by a third of teenage girls, resulting in anxiety attacks, depression and sometimes even suicidal temptations;
Facebook exempts more than five million VIPs and celebrities from the penalties it should apply to them, under its own rules, when they harass others online or call for violence. Brazilian soccer player Neymar was able to post nude photos of the woman who accused him of rape on Instagram with impunity, which were seen by 56 million people;
the artificial intelligence systems whose effectiveness in moderating content is praised by Mark Zuckerberg actually remove only 0.6% of content that violates the Group's rules on violence;
87% of Facebook's budget for fighting disinformation is dedicated to the United States, even though this country represents only 10% of the network's daily active users. Hateful and even terrorist content therefore proliferates in countries whose local languages and cultures are not mastered either by content moderators or by Facebook's algorithms;
the Group did little to prevent its service from being used to stir up hatred in a civil war-torn Ethiopia (in a tragic repetition of its misdeeds in Burma);
Facebook was complicit, in exchange for access to the local digital market, with the dictatorial Vietnamese government in its fight against its dissidents.
After reading these articles, you will probably feel nauseous. Unfortunately, they confirm what I demonstrated much more modestly in a part of my latest book, "Prêt-à-penser et post-vérité", dedicated to the threat of the digital revolution on democracy: the societal problems created by Facebook are not the result of chance, but of the absolute priority given by its leaders to profitability over any other consideration. These problems could be mitigated if Facebook devoted even a fraction of the determination and energy to moderating the content published on its services that it devotes to growing its advertising revenues.
Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg want to be accountable for their profits, but not for their responsibilities: they are acting like the bosses of car manufacturers who would sell cars without seatbelts to save money, ignoring the consequences for their customers, and who, even though they have been warned internally about the risks posed by their attitude, would not change anything so as not to risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. In reality, the debate about the responsibility of social networks for the repercussions of their actions is distorted because it (almost) always starts from the assumption that their business and monetization model is immutable, which is the biggest victory, in terms of crisis management, of Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues.
If the moderation of content posted on digital platforms is humanly and technically impossible within the framework of their current functioning, and if this lack of moderation threatens our life together, should we prioritize the survival of our Societies or the prosperity of the companies that jeopardize it? In this respect, it is beneficial that the revelations of the last few days finally allow the general public in the West to become aware that the evils generated by Facebook in countries other than their own are even more serious than those we suffer in the countries most covered by the major information media.
The question now is what impact these revelations will have. First of all, I fear that their number will create an addiction and, therefore, a form of indifference of the general public to the ethical and moral abuses of Facebook. Moreover, they do not change the fundamentals governing the hypothetical reform of the Group: voting rights within the Group's management and control structures are still monopolized by Mark Zuckerberg, its customers (advertisers) are still too dependent on it for lead generation (especially SMEs) and too numerous to join forces, its employees still have too great a financial interest in the status quo to resign en masse, its regulators are still too politically divided to intervene decisively in the short term (I propose in "Ready-to-think and post-truth" ten regulatory provisions for digital platforms) and its 3.6 billion monthly active users are still too addicted to its services to detach themselves from them in very large numbers.
Mark Zuckerberg has understood this, and dismissed all these revelations during the presentation of his (good) quarterly results at the beginning of the week, during which he claimed that he was the victim of a conspiracy of the press: "Good faith critics make us progress. But I think we're seeing a coordinated effort to selectively use leaks to paint a distorted picture of our company. And, a few days later, he announced the change of his group's name from Facebook to Meta.
Now, if he were troubled by the role of his platforms in creating or exacerbating human, political and societal dramas, Mark Zuckerberg would have made very different announcements:
make public his internal research on how his ad network works, the effects of his services on political debate around the world, the impact of his products on individuals (teens and adults), etc.;
provide researchers with access to its anonymized data so that they can conduct their own analyses on these topics;
commit to stop using lies as a reflex communication strategy for the Group;
invest much more in the moderation of content published on its networks;
take a first series of emergency measures to reduce the most serious and easily correctable misdeeds of its services;
initiate an in-depth work with experts and NGOs to consider more structural measures to mitigate the negative consequences of its platforms on society
launch an internal participatory project to evolve its values, organization and decision-making and operational processes.
Each of these decisions would call into question Facebook's model and, therefore, its ability to monetize, which produced a net income of $9.2 billion last quarter. In fact, the company is remarkably competent at optimizing its platform to generate advertising revenue and deliberately ineffective at regulating it. The problem with Facebook is not freedom of expression; it is not even the principle of social networking.
The problem is the quest for profit at any price without the slightest blink when this quest favors the perpetration of genocide, the realization of human trafficking, the perversion of democracy, the degradation of human relations (individual and collective) and the commission of violence of all kinds.
Rather than addressing the evils it stimulates, Facebook prefers to adopt a new name, whose choice is also revealing: one of the meanings of the term "meta" is self-reference, and it is true that, with this new name, Facebook is only interested in itself. Confucius was right when he noted that "naming is the most important thing in the world".
Beyond its meaning, Facebook's new name also reveals its priority: the construction of the Metaverse, this universe that brings together physical, augmented and virtual realities in the same digital space. Meta will invest about ten billion dollars this year in this project and intends to increase its expenses even more in the future to make it a reality. One can only be admiring of this financial and technological bet that probably only a founder-manager can impose on his company.
But we must also consider that the first mission of a company, before creating new territories of expansion, is to ensure the safety of its existing activity. However, Mark Zuckerberg, with the Metaverse as with his cryptocurrency Libra and his digital wallet Calibra before, seems to be engaged in a headlong rush that always leads him away from his responsibilities: he prefers to dream an ideal world rather than face the reality of the one he has built. When the Metaverse will also have revealed its depravities, it will again be too late to rectify them.
In the end, with this supposed "Meta-morphosis" that concerns neither its raison d'être nor its operational mode nor its culture, Facebook reveals its inability to listen and to change.
This article was originally published on Superception.
Follow us on LinkedIn