“Our moral responsibility is not to stop the future, but to shape it…to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition.”
― Alvin Toffler

Social media is a defining phenomenon of our times that powerfully connects people using media, and it has achieved a remarkable mixed record of both wonderful and awful results. Digital media dominates how people communicate — news, entertainment, commerce, government, science, and person-to-person — so it’s essential to get it right. Powerful systems are working at global scale, are almost very reliable, but for the hard part that involves trust and fairness we seem to be stymied. This piece sets out my high level take on the problem and some new thinking about how to best move forward.

For tactical purposes I want to focus on Facebook (recently renamed Meta, but I’ll use the familiar moniker, as with Alphabet a.k.a. Google) here, because it’s the poster child for social media woes and to contain the discussion to some degree. This is not to say that other social media don’t have problems, nor is it to suggest that Facebook doesn’t serve some of its users perfectly well in some scenarios. Full disclosure: I don’t use Facebook myself, for reasons that will become clear, but I am a software professional and do have a technical understanding of what social media does and how it is built and operated.

Even if you think that Facebook is an unalloyed good for the world, it’s inarguable that they certainly have a tight lock on social media for much of the online world across the globe. Given that reality, I would suggest that it’s problematic to have all that power concentrated in one company, especially one that’s essentially controlled by one individual.

Just as technology enabled the rise of these platforms, I believe that it can also hold the key to breaking the hold they wield over us all. The core issues that social media struggle with — safety, privacy, self determination, competition, profits over people — all in large degree result from the top-down cloud architecture that dominates the web today, and these challenges become much more tractable in a bottom-up grass roots digital world, so that’s the long-term vision that believe will be key to making real progress. Given the many ways Facebook uses its resources and market power to protect its position, combined with the fact that most users don’t seem to care very much about any of this discussion and hence are unwilling to make much of an effort for change, it will probably take a combination of technology and regulatory action to repair damage done and get us on a better road into the future.

What’s the matter with Facebook?

The problems associated with social media are legend: Wikipedia has a compendium of accusations about Facebook that runs 21 sections (as of December 2021): censorship, privacy, psychological/sociological effects (with ten diverse subsections!), tax avoidance, treatment of workers, anti-competitive practices, stealing competitive product concepts, numerous content moderation failings, technical failings, bad faith dealings, litigation issues, terms of use controversy, interop and data portability problems, Better Business Bureau review issues, poor security, environmental impacts, a host of advertising problems, fake accounts, poor user interface, undermining net neutrality, and treatment of potential competitors. While there are at least two sides to the debate over these various accusations, it’s remarkable that virtually every aspect of the business — and one with a service used by well over a billion people — is so embattled.

Further complicating matters, Facebook services now span the globe and so it must operate under a diverse set of jurisdictions and across many cultures and languages. Many of these problems are interrelated in complex ways, so possible solutions in one area often threaten to potentially reverse progress elsewhere. That said, the company famously has an attitude of not minding to break eggs to make omelettes as exemplified by the motto, “Move fast and break things.” As a result, solving even one of the myriad of problems is extremely difficult, much less tackling them all together. In approaching this topic I want to assume that the people at Facebook mean well, that they have a tiger by the tail, and are also under considerable pressure to keep the service running continuously while producing profits for shareholders, but without evil intentions to cause harm.

Over the past several days I’ve been thinking about all of this after reading Zucked by Roger McNamee. The deeper I research, the harder all these problems appear … yet I want to suggest that we can go down the rat hole and there is light at the other end.

Let me offer a different take on all of this that I think boils the problem down into a more tractable challenge. The modern cloud architecture that Facebook services, like much of the web today, are built on bakes in centralization and top-down control, and many of these problems naturally arise out of that paradigm.

Specifically, all your Facebook data (not only all your content, but your social graph connections, your usage patterns and access details, tracked activity across the web, and combined datasets from various partners and data merchants) is all in one nest — the Facebook datacenters. To access any of this, you must login to Facebook because everything is within their walled garden. And Facebook incessantly pushes you to use their apps to access this data (because they can harvest a lot more valuable data from you that way). As a result, people’s data is increasingly being hoarded into one massive trove, all interconnected by the social graph, under the control of one company, only accessible on their terms within their system using their apps.

I think this needs to change, to become a healthier and more diverse ecosystem instead of a monopoly in so many markets creating so much trouble.

3 Steps

“If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.”
― Alvin Toffler

Nobody knows what a more humane and equitable social media of the future looks like, but the evidence is crystal clear that we have a long way to go. If you believe that Facebook is unfairly criticized and uniquely poised to steward all this technology in service to the greater good of society and its citizens, I’d very much like to hear the case for that supposition. Yet even then, is it wise to put all those eggs in one basket and drive innovation subject to the whims of one person?

I don’t know the answer, but I will propose a three step process to get us on the right track: transparency, competitive interoperation, and flipping from top-down to grass roots organization.

Transparency: Facebook is so opaque that there is no way to discern how to best fix it from the outside looking in. The one person with controlling interest who could conceivably force real change is clearly incapable of seeing the problems with his precious creation, much less working to find solutions and effect real change. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his fortune and legacy depends upon his not understanding it.” Given the breadth and depth of Facebook services and how much personal information they possess about so many citizens, the public deserves a detailed accounting for how it operates. I won’t attempt to outline what this entails, but it includes details of data collection, analysis, use, sharing, and how this data is leveraged to produce advertising revenue. In addition, internal corporate policy, corporate governance, user studies and feedback, and other strategic business and product details should be disclosed because the company is of a size and scale that they need to operate on the basis of merit, not by concealing internal communications.

Competitive interop: Facebook needs to share their unique position to enable competing offerings of their service that do a better job at security, content moderation, content discovery, and much more. There are significant technical challenges to do this securely, and enabling the necessary research to make that possible is one important reason for the transparency stage of this strategy.

Grass roots: Overturning the top-down control structures that rigidly lock in users and control every aspect of modern social media is absolutely crucial to finding a better path forward. People need to be empowered to transform their social media experience the way they want it to be, and the way we accomplish this is by opening up new choices through competition that will spur innovation.

It is going to take a lot of work to effect significant change. Despite any number of spectacular failings, Facebook users seem content enough with the status quo to stick with the service (calls to boycott going back many years have yet to produce any major change in the company’s behavior). There may be a subversive technical maneuver to crack the walled garden and give users more agency, but the deck is heavily stacked against any such intervention.

Antitrust law in the US never anticipated the internet, nor that a monopoly could leverage its position with a free service to extract personal data to its financial advantage, adversely impact the psychological health of its users, or any of the other many problems this digital leviathan is responsible for. Yet some kind of governmental intervention seems necessary to rebalance the power relationship between Facebook and its members.

Choice and the Rubin vase

New legislation could mandate significant transparency in the digital economy, not just for Facebook but across the major players on the internet (and including the smaller and less well known brokers of personal information and other corners of the modern data economy). With a behind-the-scenes view into the actions and decisions that shape social media and technical details of its operations we will have a unique opportunity to design new and better architectures to enable broad interoperability without sacrificing security or features. Interoperability, in turn, will fuel new innovation to empower users and provide real alternatives for a better deal.

In the end, it boils down to trust. With the deluge of problems already mentioned, many of us don’t trust Facebook, and their repeated apologies ring hollow when months and years later nothing really changes. In the wake of recent whistleblower disclosures resulting in terrible PR, Facebook made yet another tone deaf move renaming the company (a common move to shed a bad reputation) and declared their metaverse strategy that aims to encompass more aspects of life for more people just when many believe they are too big and have too much power already.

It must be acknowledged that at the same time all of these woes are coming out, every day millions of people happily use Facebook and its acquired properties and surely get much good value from it. Perhaps this is emblematic of the challenges of modern life: large corporations are immensely powerful and always cause a complex mishmash of both great benefits and terrible harm upon the world. We can choose to see one aspect or the other, but like the Rubin vase, it’s difficult and confusing to hold both ideas in mind at once; yet that’s just what we need to do in order to best decide what to do about it.

No entity acts purely for good and without any harmful unintended consequences or side effects, yet for all their faults neither is Facebook, Twitter, and the rest wholly without any redeeming value whatsoever. The world is full of superpositions of both good and bad, and these are often entangled, making our task especially difficult when we seek to effect change. At what point do we declare that enough is enough and make decisive change? When do we risk throwing out the baby with the bath water? History suggests that these impasses will continue to challenge us, and that it takes a paradigm shift in order to break out of a legacy mindset in order to find higher ground. So long as users are disempowered and bereft of choice, no such progress is possible, which is why that is where I believe we need to begin.