Have you seen the new TV commercial for the latest James Bond film?
“Who is he?” Bond asks about our latest megalomaniacal villain. I bet it’s Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s been a bad few weeks for Facebook (although some might flip that on its head and say ever since Facebook came online its been a bad few years for the world.) The Wall Street Journal published a major expose on the company. Its main findings:
1. Despite claiming its editorial standards apply to all users regardless of fame or fortune, Facebook exempts millions of high-profile users from those standards. Some of those users have used their privileged position to (among others things) harass others and incite violent behavior.
2. Despite knowing of Instagram’s negative effects on teenage girls, Facebook has routinely swept those dangers under the rug. It has also been researching ways to attract preteens to its apps despite requiring users to be at least 13 years old.
3. When Facebook adjusted its algorithm in 2018 to refocus Facebook on interactions between friends and family, it inadvertently made communication on the platform angrier. Facebook has yet to readjust its algorithm to account for this.
4. As Facebook spread into developing countries, company monitors noticed it was being used by some to facilitate human trafficking and incite ethnic violence. The company’s response has been minimal.
5. Even though Zuckerberg committed Facebook to heavily promoting COVID-19 vaccines, anti-vaxxers managed to disseminate falsehoods about the vaccines widely on the platform, negating Facebook’s efforts.
This past Sunday, Frances Haugen, the former product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team who supplied the Wall Street Journal with the internal Facebook documents the newspaper relied upon in its reporting, appeared on 60 Minutes. Said Haugen, “There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.” Haugen also revealed Facebook relaxed the restrictions on misinformation it had put in place prior to the 2020 election shortly after that election concluded, a move that enabled the lies behind the 1/6 riot to proliferate.
A friend of mine directed me to what I would say is a more damning article about Facebook published in the MIT Technology Review a few weeks ago. According to that article, Facebook knew as early as 2019 that many of the most popular Christian and Black American pages on its site were actually run by troll farms operating out of Eastern Europe. These troll farms, which would often copy viral content on Facebook and then amplify it through their own network, were targeting many of the same demographic groups the Russian disinformation specialists had targeted prior to the 2016 election. They also tended to contain a disproportionate amount of false information and politically divisive content. The troll farms were incentivized to distribute this kind of content as it drew high interest from Facebook users and thus increased their profits. Facebook was slow to crackdown on the troll farms because they engaged users of the site.
Taken together, these foreign-produced posts ended up in the news feeds of 140 million Americans not because Facebook users had necessarily “friended” the pages these posts originated from or because their friends had shared them on their own pages but because Facebook’s own algorithm was pushing those posts onto users. It could be said then that Facebook was complicit in distributing misinformation and foreign propaganda in the run-up to the 2020 election. A few stats from that article standout: First, if counted as a collective, the reach of those pages (140 million Americans) exceeded that of Walmart, the page with the single largest audience in the U.S. (100 million Americans). And second, ten of the top fifteen Black-American-oriented Facebook pages (including the top page) and nineteen(!) of the top twenty Christian-oriented Facebook pages (including the top sixteen) were operated by troll farms.
Like many great Bond villains, these reports suggest Zuckerberg is determined to enrich himself regardless the deleterious social side effects of his ambition. Yet Zuckerberg also appears at times helpless before the might of his own invention, which seems to have a tendency to resist its creator’s efforts to improve it. That can make him seem like less of a Dr. No and more like a Dr. Evil.
So what can we do about it? Umm…I’m still working on that.
In working through this problem, it helps to think about the sort of medium Facebook is. At its most basic level, Facebook is an online publishing platform. For the most part, it’s not the author of the material posted on its website; its users are. Some might claim then that Facebook is nothing more than an online bulletin board, a place for people to pin messages and photos they want to share with others. As a mere forum for communication, Facebook might argue it is just a “dumb board” and not responsible for the messages transmitted over its platform in the same way a phone company would claim it is not responsible for the messages users transmit through its wires and cellular networks. According to this view, Facebook is just infrastructure.
But Facebook isn’t just a dumb board. It’s smarter than that. It’s also designed as a network. Facebook only shares a user’s posts with people that user has friended. That user in turn can see the posts of their friends (and potentially others if that user searches for others and those other people’s accounts aren’t set to private.) So unlike the bulletin board in your local library which may be plastered with flyers that are almost entirely of no interest to you, Facebook instead shows its users the posts of those people its users have friended. Users would theoretically consider these posts more interesting than the posts of random strangers (even though your friends, as many Facebook users have learned, have a tendency to share some very uninteresting material. And yes, they think the same of you. At its worst, this feature of Facebook is tedious but harmlessly mundane.)
The point, though, is that if Facebook is a bulletin board, we have to think of it as a personally tailored bulletin board that enables us to see the messages of only those whom we have allowed to post on our bulletin board. That keeps a lot of messages off our bulletin board, but I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that. Some might argue a tailored medium like Facebook tends to narrow our perspectives when we should be trying to broaden them. I don’t disagree with that sentiment; in fact, it’s good to broaden your informational horizons. Part of the point of Facebook, though, is to enable people to stay in touch with people they know, not random strangers. A medium that connected people with randos they weren’t interested in wouldn’t go anywhere.
Additionally, we already have a tendency without Facebook to follow our interests and ignore the things that don’t interest us. There are, of course, some media you may follow whereby you get a good dose of things you’re not interested in along with all the things you are; people have said that about newspapers, network nightly news programs, and radio news stations like NPR. But it’s also worth noting that if you’re consuming any of those aforementioned news media, it also means at that time you’re not consuming other media (i.e., books, topical magazines, international media) with different stories and different perspectives that could be equally valuable for you to read, see, or hear. That’s not a knock on something like NPR—it’s a model news agency that tries hard to air a wide-range of stories—just that even NPR would admit that despite it’s best efforts, it’s not covering everything.
Still, the claim that Facebook has become an echo chamber rings true since its users don’t only use it to follow friends and family but also other pages connected to their interests and that mirror their own views. It makes sense that a Facebook user would enjoy Facebook more if they were able to tailor their news feed to reflect their own interests and beliefs while banishing the things they aren’t interested in, don’t like, or that make them angry (unless, of course, you’re someone who loves to argue or make other people angry, meaning you may enjoy trolling your ideological opposites.) But this is where Facebook becomes more than a personally tailored bulletin board. Since Facebook has collected information about its users’ interests, it can recommend pages its users might want to follow based on those interests. If Facebook gets really good at this, it can really enhance whatever pleasure its users derive from its platform. This is definitely not the behavior of a dumb board but rather an almost self-aware bulletin board that has a seemingly intuitive sense for presenting its users with posts they want to see but weren’t yet aware existed. And once a user shares that discovery with their likeminded friends, chances are someone else will like it or share it and that post may begin to go viral.
There is a pretty straightforward thing Facebook could do to fix this: Quit suggesting posts to users, or, if it wants to suggest posts, only recommend posts from vetted, high-quality sources rather than clickbait. The original option would at least get Facebook back to what it was originally, which was a personally tailored bulletin board whose news feeds only contained posts by those allowed to post there by each individual user. That would presumably cost Facebook some money since it would no longer be pushing interaction on its website beyond each user’s circle of friends, but I’m sure the company isn’t hurting for the cash. (And it’s not like it isn’t making money through advertisements.)
That might rein in some of the troll farms, but it wouldn’t keep all or even most inflammatory and misleading clickbait off the platform. It would still be easy for someone with a large following—for example, someone like Joe Rogan—to direct followers to a problematic page simply by sharing a fairly innocuous post from that page; after all, it isn’t much of a leap to go from a “My body, my freedom” meme to an extended rant against vaccines.
Consequently, some believe Facebook needs to exert greater editorial control over what gets posted on its website. These people argue Facebook needs to quit thinking of itself as a dumb bulletin board but as a publisher hosting 2.89 billion authors. As a publisher, Facebook can assert editorial control over what gets posted to its website, just as an editor or producer decides what does or does not get printed in a newspaper or makes it to air. And Facebook has exercised this authority in the past; it’s why our country’s 45th president was banned from the social network last January and had that ban extended to two years this past June, and why Facebook took steps to ban vaccine misinformation this past February.
Yet I’m uncomfortable with Facebook stepping in as a regulator of speech on its site. I’m not upset they banned Trump—if you use social media to incite a riot and initiate an autocoup, you ought to be kicked off social media—or that they enforce decency standards. (You want to know what a terrible job is? Facebook content moderator. If you want to know just how terrible, read this article, although note it comes with a content warning.) My concern is Facebook, under public pressure, would begin to forbid unpopular or even mildly confrontational or offensive speech. It’s not hard for me to imagine an alternate America not much different from the one we inhabit today in which a few recent events turned out differently and set our country on a different course than the one we’re on now, one in which the powers-that-be and their empowered supporters sought to censor the speech of “fake news” journalists, critical race theorists, Black Lives Matter activists like Colin Kaepernick, “radical Islamists” like Rep. Ilhan Omar, and socialist “demagogues” like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because they supposedly threatened the social order and disturbed the peace. In a slightly different timeline, Facebook might be responsive to such an appeal.
It makes sense for me, then, for Facebook to embrace a maximal notion of free speech and grant its users great freedom to post whatever they want to say on their personal pages. If Facebook is looking for guidance in this matter, all it has to do is say it is following established First Amendment jurisprudence. After all, if a group of anti-vaxxers, the Ku Klux Klan, an anti-government militia, or Donald Trump sought to hold a rally tomorrow in a public space somewhere in the United States, or if they published books, magazines, brochures, or websites containing their views, the First Amendment would protect their right to do so, as well as their right to utter false or vile sentiments. While I’m inclined to make an exception for hate speech, it makes sense for Facebook to regard itself as a sort of public space and follow that lead (although it still unnerves me to think about how easily Facebook makes it for a user who’s gone down one of these rabbit holes to avoid content that could challenge their beliefs. Maybe Facebook should come up with an algorithm to counter that.)
And if I’m being honest, while I think Facebook is completely justified in kicking Trump off its platform, it is a bit unsettling to me that the world’s largest social media platform and one of the most important media of our era can do that to a political figure. Again, Trump had it coming, and some would argue Facebook waited too long to kick Trump off, but I worry Facebook could go too far and preemptively ban people like Bernie Sanders who calls for a revolution because the system is rigged or Stacey Abrams who might credibly protest the results of an election because of apparent voter suppression. Those are voices the public sphere would miss. Politics has rough edges. As a public, we’re supposed to be able to handle that. When we demand a nicer brand of politics, it’s possible we end up suppressing the confrontational voices of those fighting injustice.
A lot of people argue the problem with Facebook is a matter of size. It’s not just that some of its users are said to have acquired too much power on the platform by building up massive followings at virtually no cost. It’s that Facebook itself is too big, pushes out or swallows up rivals, is unchecked by market competition, and lords over a critical medium in a way that does not serve the public’s interest. For this reason, some want to make Facebook the target of anti-trust litigation. It’s a path worth exploring, but I remain skeptical it will solve much. For starters, Facebook has a social media rival—Twitter—and it’s no better (or even worse) than Facebook. There’s also some evidence that when it comes to media companies, less competition results in a better product since companies that don’t have to worry about competitors can focus more on their public service mission than on profit margins. Social media may not follow that model, but if there were 3-5 social media sites out there, we could see a race to the bottom as each tries to maximize profits at the expense of higher ethical standards. I mean, a team of Trump allies have already tried starting a social media site of their own. It’s apparently not very good (and that was before it was hacked by jihadists) but in more capable hands it would almost certainly end up worse and more dangerous than Facebook.
People are justifiably worried that Facebook is having a corrosive effect on democracy and that Mark Zuckerberg is either putting personal profits ahead of society’s well-being or unable to cage the beast he’s unleashed upon the land (it’s probably a bit of both.) While those concerns are legitimate—and I’m not trying to redeem Zuckerberg here or parrot the ads Facebook is running on Spotify this week—I do think those concerns can overlook social media’s potential benefits . For instance, social media can be used to build and organize constructive social movements, such as the 2017 Women’s March, the #MeToo Movement, and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement. Despite those examples, though, perhaps it’s the nature of social media to cater to the most outlandish and incendiary voices on the platform, and that it will ultimately do more harm than good. I don’t know.
As a matter of perspective, it’s worth remembering that radio and television have also been decried for their negative effects on democracy. Maybe; television certainly turned politics into a spectacle, but it also brought the brutality of segregation into living rooms in such a way that Americans could no longer ignore it. Perhaps Facebook and social media are changes society needs to adjust to, just hopefully before it’s too late.
I wish I could make a stronger recommendation as to how to address the problems attendant to Facebook. I long for more imaginative solutions because it’s easy for me to imagine all the problems that might result from those proposed already. In the meantime, I can only recommend greater efforts to teach social media literacy to users (I know, that sounds lame, but the more you know) while encouraging Facebook to voluntarily take steps to improve the quality of its site. I would think this is something Facebook would want to do anyway, because it’s developing a reputation as a junk site. Maybe its content attracts a certain demographic, but its toxicity and mindlessness is turning off others. It could be that one day the market fixes this Facebook problem all on its own.
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Garbage Time: An MLB Postseason Preview
(Garbage Time theme song here)
I often wonder if the post-war Yankees—we’re talking about the final years of Joe DiMaggio’s career, most of Mickey Mantle’s, and practically the entirety of Yogi Berra’s time in pinstripes—would have won as many World Series (10 between 1946 and 1964) or even appeared in as many as they did (15 out of 19 contests) if they played today. I’m not interested in comparing talent or playing style, even though those Yankees were a great team. It’s just that before 1969, the World Series pit the best regular season team in the American League against the best regular season team in the National League. The leagues were not divided into divisions, so there were no league championship series, let alone divisional series or wild card games. Exactly two (2) teams in all of Major League Baseball qualified for the postseason (out of 16 in 1946 and 20 by 1964) and those were the two teams that won their respective leagues. Today, 10 out of 30 teams make it to the postseason.
So it is impressive the Yankees managed to win the American League 15 out of 19 times between 1946 and 1964. And of course, the Yankees didn’t have to deal with free agency in that time either, so it was fairly easy for the best team to run it back year after year after year. With that much talent, they were built to win the 154-162 game marathon that the regular season amounted to, and once they made it to the World Series, they only needed to find a way to win four more games, which they did two-thirds of the time (again, impressive, especially given the quality of the competition).
What they didn’t have to do was run the sort of postseason gantlet teams have to run today, where great clubs may find themselves facing teams with unremarkable records that aren’t as talented as they are but got hot as the regular season was coming to a close. Those legendary Yankees teams could win the marathon, but could they have defeated an upstart team like this year’s St. Louis Cardinals, who won 19 of their last 22 games, including a record-setting 17 in a row? When the Cardinals began that run back on September 11, their record was 71-69. Just four days earlier, the Cardinals were one game over .500 and about 5 games back of the Reds. Who are you taking in that match-up: Mickey Mantle and the Yankees, or (checks roster) Nolan Arenado and the red-hot Cardinals? What if instead of playing a 5- or 7-game series, the teams only got one game to decide who would advance? How confident are you the Yankees would win that one game, let alone beat their next three opponents to win the World Series?
That’s close to the situation the defending World Series champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers, find themselves in this postseason. They’re the closest a team this year comes to those classic New York Yankees teams. The Dodgers may not have a Mickey Mantle but they’ve got a Max Muncy (above left) and a Mookie Betts (above right) and a Trea Turner and a line-up that’s absolutely stacked beyond that and a rotation that can lose two former Cy Young Award winners and still trot out close to the best top three starters (Max Scherzer, Walker Buehler, and Julio Urias) in the postseason. They’re built to win the marathon, and they nearly did. It just so happens they share a division with MLB’s best team, so the Dodgers’ 106 wins (and remember, their wheels came off in late April/early May when they went 4-14) was one shy of the San Francisco Giants’ 107 wins, which forces the Dodgers into a winner-take-all match-up against baseball’s hottest team, the Cardinals.
I have mixed feelings about MLB’s postseason format. The Houston Astros’ manager Dusty Baker once said (I’m pretty sure it was Dusty Baker; don’t quote me on that) no matter what, every MLB team is going to win a third of its games and lose a third of its games; what matters is what a team does with the remaining third of its games. That tells you a lot about the nature of baseball. You can go out there one day and score 7 runs and lose, then come back the next day, only score once, and win. Some days, your batted balls are going to find holes or bloop in for hits; other days, you’re going to smash line drives right at infielders. The difference between home runs and pop-ups are a matter of millimeters. Any professional team can hold its own against any other team on any given day of the season; stretch those contests out over a 162 game schedule, however, and the best teams will inevitably rise to the top. If it all comes down to one game, though? Yeah, the baseball gods are going to have a lot to say about that outcome.
Good regular season teams are designed to survive the ups and downs of the regular season. Players can go into slumps or hit the IL and the team can still keep things afloat. A staff of good-but-not-great pitchers can hold their own against any opponent. Put that team in a 7-game series, though, against a team with two aces and some tough outs and suddenly slow-and-steady is going to struggle to win the race. In this regard, I think it’s unfortunate MLB doesn’t trim its postseason down to only the best four regular season teams, as I still think regular season success is the true measure of a team’s quality. But so long as I put the regular season in the rear-view mirror and treat the postseason as its own season with its own do-or-die format that forces ten teams to do whatever they can to win every game they can, I can get behind it. The postseason tournament feels more like a novelty to me now than when I was growing up, but that’s OK; it’s a different style of baseball, certainly more exciting, even if it’s not how I would decide an MLB champion.
It’s really hard this year to project the postseason. I like the Dodgers, but they seem a little tired this season, lacking some of the spark they had last year when they won it all. They’re certainly the most well-rounded team. They’ve got that game against the Cardinals, though, which might as well be a coin flip. L.A. is starting Max Scherzer tomorrow in that match-up, which should worry Dodgers fans, because Scherzer has a tendency to get overamped for his postseason starts. If he can make it through the first inning and L.A.’s bats can plate a couple runs early, the Dodgers will cruise.
As for the rest of the National League, San Francisco will give Los Angeles a decent run for its money. The Giants’ pitching isn’t intimidating, though, and its lineup reads like a checklist for a set of 2011 Topps cards (Evan Longoria’s still in the big leagues?) and that’s before you get to the kid named Yastrzemski (I spelled it right!) They have Kris Bryant, though, which is cool so long as you don’t still wish he was with the Cubs. The Giants did win 107 games but they don’t seem like the sort of team that is built for the postseason roller coaster. In the other match-up, it’s Atlanta vs. Milwaukee, which is fitting since Hank Aaron passed away this year. I don’t give Atlanta much of a chance; for most of the season they didn’t seem all that interested in winning the NL East even as the Mets and the Phillies were just trying to hand the division to them.
Milwaukee could pose a problem for any other NL team because they’ve got a solid top of the rotation in Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff, and Freddy Peralta along with a sturdy bullpen anchored by closer Josh Hader (although their lockdown set-up man celebrated their division championship by punching a wall with his pitching hand, so next man up, I guess. That’s the dumbest postseason injury since dirtbag Trevor Bauer took himself out of the 2016 World Series by slicing his hand on the blades of a drone.) I’m pretty sure though every player in Milwaukee’s starting lineup was available in my fantasy league’s free agent pool at the end of the season (check that; I had their catcher; nope, check that, I dropped him sometime in September because I concluded it was better to play without a catcher than let his non-production drag my average down) so their pitching is going to have to be absolutely lights out for them to get past San Fran or L.A. because their bats are not going to do the job for them.
As for the American League, I’ve got the Yankees over the Red Sox in the wild card nope the Red Sox just won what do I know. That lines up Boston against Tampa, who finished the season with 100 wins. The Rays made it to the World Series last year which seemed kind of fluky but maybe not. They’re a small market/low payroll team that has a knack for scouting and developing young talent and is religiously devoted to advanced analytics (maybe to a fault.) They’re the little team that could, but they don’t feel like a team of destiny. I’ve got them beating the Yankees I mean Red Sox but that’s as far as I’m taking them.
It seems to me people are maybe sleeping on the Astros-White Sox series. I like both teams. The Astros are kind of old school like the Giants but not ancient. They’re a good mix of young and veteran players OK look, no one’s rooting for the Astros because they cheated in that World Series four years ago and everyone wants them humiliated but regardless they’ve got a lot of postseason experience and a part of me kind of wants them to win because I’d like to see Dusty Baker get a World Series ring. Their pitching staff does not seem built for a deep postseason run, though. The White Sox are interesting, however, because next to the Dodgers, they’re the deepest team in the playoffs in my estimation. They just need to maximize their talent. Chicago has only been playing .500 ball in the second half of the season and they’re the division champion with the lowest winning percentage in the American League, but they’ve got a formidable line-up led by shortstop Tim Anderson and last year’s MVP Jose Abreu, two Cy Young candidates in Lance Lynn and Carlos Rodon, and not one but two closers in Liam Hendricks and Craig Kimbrel who can absolutely lock down games. They’re also managed by Tony La Russa, who at this point is a dinosaur but may still have a few tricks up his sleeve, which are good things to have when it comes to the postseason. Maybe Chicago has been on autopilot these past two months since they had no competition in the AL Central to worry about. If they get focused—and sure, why wouldn’t they—I’ve got them in the World Series.
So I’ll call it now, Dodgers vs. White Sox in the Fall Classic. An idiot wouldn’t even pick against the Dodgers but I am because the last time a team won back-to-back World Series was when Hall of Famer Derek Jeter’s New York Yankees strung together their threepeat in 1998, 1999, and 2000. The other reason I’m picking against the Dodgers is they could very well lose their game tomorrow, er, tonight and there’s no coming back from that. And if they do lose, look out for the Cardinals, ‘cause they’re coming in hot. That might be enough to make me pick St. Louis to win it all but a team like that will cool off by the end of October. White Sox in 7.
Thanks for reading.
Exit music: “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” by Bobby Bland (1974, Dreamer)