Читать книгу Terms of Disservice - Dipayan Ghosh - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIntroduction
When Mark Zuckerberg took the stand before Congress to answer to the American people nearly a year and a half after Donald Trump was voted into the presidency, the public’s great hope was that he would reveal specifically what had enabled the foreign infiltration of the national political process during the course of the 2016 elections.
What we received was quite different: an infuriating amalgamation of already public facts and obvious suppositions alongside essentially meaningless corporate commitments—all of which produced more questions than answers about the internet tools and technologies available to those who wish to raid our freedoms by influencing the natural march of political discourse in America.
Many long months after that initial Zuckerberg hearing, we are scarcely any closer to understanding the truth about Facebook or the broader industry it lies at the center of, the industry I call the “consumer internet.” The cacophony of unfocused congressional inquiries, frustratingly misleading corporate gibberish, and public outcry that followed the Zuckerberg hearing and the many others before and since that time will have put any Silicon Valley executive at absolute ease: Washington, D.C., is apparently not ready to earnestly understand how the internet works and to regulate the companies operating over it to protect the American public from further harm. Instead, the companies leading the sector—Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Amazon—could very likely continue to operate with their existing business practices intact. It apparently matters little whether those practices imperil the public’s interest.
But imperil the public interest they quite clearly do: inherently and almost directly so. Google, Facebook, and Twitter have each admitted that their platforms were systematically infiltrated by Russian disinformation operators in the lead-up to the election. The Russians’ sole purpose was to subvert the American political process and inject a dose of chaos into our democratic discourse, thus unsettling the nation internally as well as our standing in the world and in the process feeding the personal and political hunger of the Russian prime minister.
By all accounts, Vladimir Putin was wildly successful in accomplishing this task. The result is an American president who failed to win the popular vote and quite possibly would have failed to win sufficient Electoral College votes, too, had he not received support from disinformation operators sitting behind computer terminals in the former Soviet Union—anonymous agents of the Kremlin who engaged in a coordinated communications campaign with a unified goal: to boost Trump’s presidential chances by igniting a fire under the reputation of Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
I did not have to take my eyes from the screens draping the walls of the Javits Center in Manhattan that election night of November 8 to feel the reactions of shock among my friends and colleagues standing around me. The disbelief in the air was palpable as Secretary Clinton succumbed in one swing state after another.
I stayed to the bitter end that night, in shock. John Podesta, the chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign, took the podium to share a few words shortly after two thirty in the morning; the handful of loyal supporters who had stuck it out through the night represented a sorry sight. I left shortly thereafter: I had meetings in the Washington office of Facebook, my employer at the time, starting at nine in the morning, and I would have to begin the solemn drive south right away to arrive on time.
The drive was long, and that night I was discouraged and disillusioned. But it gave me ample time to ponder what the world had just witnessed. I could not read any expert opinions or conduct my own analysis on the election results before the drive, but as I concentrated on the road the conclusion I came to was this: an insidious but coldly logical commercial regime underlies the internet that propelled Trump to victory—and without the silent internet economy that had enabled the coordinated spread of outright lies against his opponent, the nation would not have been wrenched from its tracks with such force.
Nonetheless, the Russian disinformation problem was only the canary in the coalmine signaling deep-rooted problems at the heart of the internet. The commercial regime behind consumer internet platforms—and the journey to comprehend it in its entirety—is the focus of this book. I aim to cut through the internet’s weeds and depict its inner economic logic, as well as the economic factors motivating the decisions made behind the veil of Silicon Valley. And I do so in hopes that we can finally correct the course of a modern media ecosystem that has wholly failed the American people—and the global citizenry—time and again.
We have seen enough. It is time to repair the mass economic exploitation of American consumers that has taken hold at the behest of the technology industry.
The Internet as the Engine of Globalization
If you were to visit Calcutta today, you would be struck by the city’s great divide. On one side are the rich colors of an established cultural identity. Wide, hopeful avenues like Chowringhee, Prince Anwar Shah, Rashbehari, and Central evoke a certain nostalgia for decades past. Sun-filled streets go sleepy by day but come alive by night, with the constant activity of tea stallers, coconut merchants, and shoe shiners on every corner. Romantic alleyways unite and diverge again in hapless disorder, lined with wall-to-wall flats covered with weathered paint of every stripe of the rainbow. The Victoria Memorial, the High Court, the Great Eastern Hotel, and the Eden Gardens cricket ground, remnants of a colonial India during which the city enjoyed an economic importance and accompanying panache that it has failed to regain over many long years, grace the city’s center with elegance but serve as a constant reminder of decades of subjugation at the hands of the British Empire. And a people that has yielded the likes of the first Indian Nobel Prize winner and the first Indian Oscar-winning director today looks mostly to India’s past accolades, excessively proud of the country’s intellectual heritage and paying little heed to its place in the world’s future.
In the other half of the city—literally so, from a geographic perspective—looms an imposing new sector that has cast away Calcutta’s past and embraced the connected global economy in all its glorious commercialism. The new dedicated technology district sprawls over the northeastern edges of the city, flowing outward and upward as the tide of commerce grows. It only expands, graced by companies such as IBM, Infosys, Wipro, and Tata, all of which are engaged as technology consultants to the most important American and other foreign corporations.1 The sector—known as Rajarhat—boasts towering campuses that take advantage of the enormous local pool of high-skilled young talent at a cost of technical labor that clients in the rest of the world find relatively low. It is especially well connected, with newly renovated highways connecting it to the downtown area and the nearby airport, and set for a major modernization itself. It is this industry more than any other that hundreds of millions of young people in India strive to be a part of because of its pay and prestige.
Calcutta—like many overflowing metropolises in the developing world—finds itself stretching its cultural fabric between two realities. The former is the soporific postcolonial world that places outsize importance on the city’s high cultural heritage and intellectual contribution to the classical world. It is founded on the inherent brainpower of the local intellectual collective, a stronghold for the creation and study of literature, religion, science, and economics. Images of its greatest son, the writer and musician Rabindranath Tagore, grace the walls of the wealthy and the downtrodden. Pictured next to him is Subhas Chandra Bose, the nation’s greatest martial leader during the era of independence, whose contributions have been palpable to every generation since the colonists departed. These two individuals represent a revolution of ideas and action that fueled the freedom movement for the subcontinental race a century ago.
But Calcutta’s new world pulls the heartstrings of the local population in the opposite direction. Since national independence, the city has witnessed decade after decade of regional economic failure owing in large part to the failures of local governance advanced by a succession of communist leaders in the state, which have reduced Calcutta from what was perhaps the country’s most prominent city to a relative trash heap when compared with India’s booming metropolises situated to the far west and south of Bengal. This was no coincidence; there was a fair amount of political trickery behind the city’s turn to communism. An influx of immigrants from present Bangladesh, an ethnically Bengali part of India before the partition, left the city overpopulated and its people disoriented. Leader after leader, armed with communist rhetoric, fought off would-be industrialists, citing the interests of the displaced poor for their decision to hold Calcutta back from engaging the global economy while the rest of the country accelerated forward—fast.
And so, in a world that became increasingly cutthroat and capitalist, and increasingly desperate, there was no place for the intellectual Bengali. Year after year, regional ministers fought off industrial activities, settling on hackneyed counterarguments: if the multinationals build near the tracks, where would the thousands living in the slums go? These arguments, fair enough, were not met with new policies that could uplift the poor. As time wore on, the question of industrial investment and entry became so rigidly politicized along party lines that nothing happened, and seemingly nothing could happen.
But then came the World Wide Web.
It was this—the advent of the internet—that finally managed to defeat the city’s resistance to commerce. The industry did not have to work through municipal bureaucracy. There was so much money to be made that it could work around the local government completely if need be. As the modern world digitized commerce with the spread of the internet and increased use of the web, the market began to recognize that India could serve as the ideal technical support hub: millions of young, talented computer scientists, low marginal labor costs, and an English education system meant that this was a place teeming with economic opportunity for the Western barons of global digitization. India—powered by theretofore economically stagnant population hubs like Calcutta—could grease the commercialization of the internet along with all the background support the barons could want. And indeed, the barons have made their hay while the sun has shined. Thus was born Rajarhat, representing Calcutta’s principal wave of industrialization since the debilitating world war and national breakup.
The city has profited immensely in the process, at least in the short term. If the technology hub did not exist, what would its young people do besides serve the local consumer market in more mundane ways or leave the city? The internet has revolutionized the way Calcutta thinks about industry. What was once an overpopulated consumer market has turned into a haven for business—even if less so than other major Indian cities, including Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Chennai—and this will drive the city’s future as more young talent is attracted to careers in the technology sector and beyond. The industrial investments made in developing Rajarhat have afforded an economic energy that the city has not been party to in ages. To the same extent that there has always been an implicit pride in the historic nature of the city’s many architectural establishments and intellectual accomplishments, there is a newfound bated anticipation over the economic possibilities Rajarhat promises to afford in perpetuity.
This new wave of activity has further impacted the region’s cultural identity and political economy. Where once politicians used to beat back the efforts of the industrialists under the false platform of advancing the interests of the poor, they now claim credit for the economic benefits Rajarhat has brought. Commoners of the city now proudly boast the expansion of the northeastern sprawl, too; this new economic activity has positively influenced the region’s outlook, bringing a fresh wind of activity.
The circumstance of Calcutta teaches us an important lesson: the internet—and, more basically, connectivity—will persistently find ways to break inefficient and ineffective institutions; it is in the internet’s nature to tear down artificially imposed barriers by reaping the benefits of its low transaction costs and minimized frictions, challenging aging methods, industries, governmental regimes, and political systems in the process. This is the power of networks that Joshua Cooper Ramo has elucidated.2 In Calcutta, the commercialization of Rajarhat was the result of an organic economic interest—a steady but powerful wave of investment that came on the heels of an industry recognizing that a real economic opportunity was close at hand. And the fact that these changes have brought with them long-desired reforms to governance is a welcome effect.
The story of Calcutta can be generalized to second- and third-world cities across the globe; the capacity for networked communication has enabled economic activity that amounts to more than just fortunes: for cities like Calcutta, it represents hope for future economic success in an ever-globalizing world.
The Dark Underbelly of the Internet: A New Vector for Public Harm
The internet has had outsize impact on the global economy and, because of its democratizing force on the spread of information, humanity’s aggregate cultural richness. Indeed, its contribution to economic growth seemingly will only continue to grow. On the subject of international trade, John Stuart Mill wrote that “it is hardly possible to overrate the value, for the improvement of human beings, of things which bring them into contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.… There is no nation which does not need to borrow from others.”3 As much could be said about sharing culture and information for the benefit of humanity; the internet has enabled us to communicate seamlessly for the first time in history. I have within my reach a wide selection of services I can use to transmit any data format at a speed and level of efficiency unthinkable just a few years ago. To say that this newfound capacity unlocks untold riches is an understatement.
But we must now assess the price of those riches. Recent years have seen a vast number of shocking incidents in the physical world enabled and facilitated by the rising use of digital platform services operated over the internet—incidents that extend far beyond the concerns around foreign influence in the course of American elections. In this section we discuss the emergence of these new harms.
Hateful and Violent Conduct
The atrocities against the Rohingya people of western Myanmar are front and center of these concerns. It was estimated in 2018 that Myanmar’s military and local Buddhists killed no fewer than 24,000 Rohingya people—a chilling number that the United Nations has unequivocally said constitutes genocide. In their review, UN investigators noted that many of the Myanmar officials implicated in the genocide charges had been using Facebook to disseminate hateful content to fuel the killings, rapes, and beatings of the Rohingya. What followed was a hard slap to the company: the UN noted that “although improved in recent months, Facebook’s response has been slow and ineffective. The extent to which Facebook posts and messages have led to real-world discrimination and violence must be independently and thoroughly examined.” Facebook responded quickly, noting the obvious: “The ethnic violence in Myanmar has been truly horrific. Earlier this month, we shared an update on the steps we’re taking to prevent the spread of hate and misinformation on Facebook. While we were too slow to act, we’re now making progress—with better technology to identify hate speech, improved reporting tools, and more people to review content.”4 With the delayed takedown of eighteen Facebook accounts and fifty-two Facebook pages, along with the presumable addition of some new staff who would monitor the company’s business in Myanmar and attempt to obviate another human rights disaster, the company seemingly felt it had washed the grime from its hands.
Populism and Radicalization
In another category, internet platforms have abetted the new prominence of populism, which has dramatically been on the rise not just in the United States and Europe but across the globe. The Rohingya genocide is one instance, but at another scale is what has happened in Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 under the banner of the right-wing Partido Social Liberal.5 Bolsonaro maintains views ranging from the highly reprehensible to the deeply unsettling, including that women should not receive the same salaries as men because they become pregnant and therefore diminish work productivity;6 that “the state is Christian, and any minority that is against this has to change”;7 and that “if your child starts to become like that, a little gay, you take a whip and you change their behavior.”8 While some of his most eye-popping positions have been explained away, what Bolsonaro stands for is clear. More recently, his radical views have gone a significant way in exacerbating Amazonian deforestation.9
But what is also becoming increasingly clear is that YouTube propelled him to the presidency. Brazil, a remarkably diverse nation with significant population segments that have ethnic roots in Africa, Europe, and precolonial South America, is addicted to YouTube. Technologically speaking, that is more a natural phenomenon than a negative aspect. Google’s industry-leading video platform has become the go-to service for any topic under the sun—sports, history, music, movies, and all else—including, unfortunately, radical political content. Many young Brazilians have spoken openly about how YouTube was centrally responsible for their radicalization—expressed eventually through the ballot box with votes for Bolsonaro. The science appears to back up their claims about the platform. Researchers in Brazil and at Harvard University analyzed 331,849 videos and more than 79 million comments on the platform and studied a multitude of content pathways over the platform, entering common search phrases on YouTube, selecting top recommendations from the search results, and ultimately seeing where those recommendations took them.10 The answer: straight down the rabbit hole of far-right conspiracy. After leading a user to any video in the realm of politics or entertainment, it was often the case that the user’s pathway would run into far-right channels, and furthermore, once a user watched one far-right video, the platform would often recommend more. Bolsonaro was one of those conspiracists, and many Brazilian youth have described how they grew addicted to watching his videos and those of his followers.11
Other regions of the world have experienced similar outcomes, with platforms such as YouTube predicting citizens’ political preferences—perhaps incorrectly—and aggressively pushing users into compelling but hateful trails of conspiracy and radicalization. Over the many days I have spent watching videos of alt-right activists—Jared Taylor, Mike Cernovich, Stefan Molyneux, and, most engrossing of all, Richard Spencer—I grew to understand the likely impact of watching hateful political communicators preach radical ideas.
Localized Misinformation to Incitement
India has witnessed the spread of violence, particularly against the country’s most marginalized communities. There is no better example of an internet platform service derailing from its intended operation than the use of WhatsApp to spread hateful lies and conspiracies against targeted individuals.12 At issue is the use of encrypted messaging to large groups that has been used by various propagators throughout India to associate certain targeted individuals with rumors of child abduction and organ harvesting. As the messages have circulated, various groups have been incited to commit violence against the identified targets, including a series of local lynchings.13 The practice of sharing encrypted messages—such that hateful conduct becomes difficult to detect by the platform service provider or even governments—has been taken up in national politics in India as well, with the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party reportedly initiating hundreds of thousands of WhatsApp groups targeted at ultra-local communities in India to automate the spread of propaganda throughout the nation.14 While some might contend that the WhatsApp service does not implicate public interests and is not aligned with the business model pursued by Facebook (which owns WhatsApp), there is a direct line that can be drawn from WhatsApp’s operations and Facebook’s profitmaking pursuits, as I will discuss in chapter 2.
The Diminishment of the Fourth Estate
The prevailing digital platforms—especially those operated by Facebook and Google—have unconditionally diminished the importance of the organizations and individuals that have traditionally reported the news. Journalism today is floundering in the United States and in many other localities around the world where social media applications have become popular.
Breaking down the meaning of and implications surrounding journalism’s demise is critical. Many news organizations have been put in financially precarious positions in recent years, especially local print newspapers large and small, including the Tampa Bay Tribune, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and others that once enjoyed circulations in the hundreds of thousands.15 This has given rise to “news deserts,” pockets of the country that lack access to a print publication and therefore a medium by which to get news.16 Further, it has meant that the industry of journalism has contracted; beyond the job consequences of the aforementioned shutdowns, many organizations that remain in service to their constituencies have nevertheless had to cut staff. As Jon Allsop has discussed, 2018 was an especially bad year for the aggregate job count in journalism.17 Meanwhile, the only traditional news organizations that remain healthy to at least some apparent extent—like the New York Times and Washington Post—walked into the digital age with tremendously powerful brand names that extend their reach well beyond their relative localities. The growing number of industry barons like Jeff Bezos, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Marc Benioff buying up famous news organizations that have traditionally functioned as self-sustaining businesses does not bode well either.
Of course, we could interpret the decline in the number of traditional news organizations as a simple effect of fluid American capitalism at work, an instance of Schumpeter’s “perennial gale” of creative destruction featuring a cycle of innovation and disruption.18 As society has evolved and more and more people have gravitated from traditional news media to social media and other digital platforms to read current news, traditional news media has inevitably struggled to attract adequate advertising from marketers to support the sustenance of the business, causing them to contract or even shut down. But such a mass contraction has consequences. As more newsrooms shutter and the people in those that remain wane in number, the practice of journalistic inquiry will increasingly suffer. Fewer trained journalists will be in the field acquiring and investigating the hard facts of the Russian disinformation operations or even the health of local businesses on Main Street. Meanwhile, we as consumers will source our information from digital platforms, which populate our feeds with news and social posts—a circumstance that comes with its own vast set of problems ranging from the economic to the political.
The connections to the actions of Silicon Valley internet firms are not only many but also difficult to discern. Clearly, though, there is a deep-rooted societal problem underlying the predictable transition of ad dollars from traditional news media to digital platforms. As traditional news organizations have declined in numbers and revenue, citizens have collectively relied on the internet for a greater share of news facts—but those facts have been riddled with lies, hatred, and conspiracy theories driven by those who have interests in disseminating such content. Meanwhile, the platform firms have generally been standoffish about the need to regulate content until their backs have been pushed to the wall. They have furthermore been forced into a dispute with the news industry and others over whether they should simply be considered indifferent internet platforms that are not liable for the veracity of the content they spread—a standard that is protected by the now-infamous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—or whether they should be considered media outlets like the traditional news industry is and as such be regulated by the federal government.
The fact that digital platforms divide society into population classes for ad targeting purposes and curate content on a personal basis for individual users should suggest the correct answer: their curation of social and news content, alongside their relative centrality in the modern information ecosystem, will necessitate media-like regulation. Such legislation is already on the table for consideration in Congress.19 Passage, however, is controversial and likely will be drawn out over many long years. In the meantime, we must wait and see if the latest voluntary measures that companies like Google and Facebook have taken will amount to any meaningful change. Both have established well-funded news initiatives that nominally support the interests of journalists (although these projects have been vilified by some experts).20
Terrorism
One of the most terrifying incidents in recent times, once again involving Facebook, took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. Brenton Tarrant, a young Australian man from New South Wales who has been described as a far-right white supremacist, opened fire on the Al Noor Mosque and later the Linwood Islamic Centre.21 Tarrant’s chilling use of Facebook Live to stream his approach to the mosque and what he did inside it incited a global controversy over the use of online video-streaming services, including Facebook Live, LiveLeak, and YouTube, all of which were used to disseminate the shooter’s video. YouTube product manager Neal Mohan noted that the “volumes at which that content was being copied and then re-uploaded to our platform was unprecedented in nature.”22 Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, after copies of the video showed up in her feed well after the fact and despite Facebook’s attempts at content takedowns, took the matter into her own hands, hosting talks with French President Emmanuel Macron to confront the ongoing social media crisis.23 Many attended, including British Prime Minister Theresa May, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, along with Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, Microsoft President Brad Smith, and Google Senior Vice President Kent Walker. One notable absentee: Mark Zuckerberg.24
Digital Commerce: The Thread Connecting It All
What is the thread that connects these terrible new circumstances? I would put that it is the economic logic—the business model—underlying the consumer internet itself.
Consider this possibility: the commercial nature of Silicon Valley, and more specifically the internet sector, is causing the sociopolitical problems that beset us today. The conjecture is not obvious; applying this lens to the Russian disinformation problem, to take one example of a public harm engendered by the internet, is not trivial. There are nefarious actors—people in the physical world—who push coordinated disinformation into American media markets to trigger harmful political effects. Presumably they, of course, are also to blame.
Industry executives such as Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, accordingly describe such disinformation propagators in clear and aggressive terms. She has noted that “there will always be bad actors, and I don’t want to minimize that, but we are going to do everything we can to find bad actors,” adding further, “we’re not looking at these tradeoffs like ‘oh, it’s going to hurt our business.… People’s trust is the most important thing.”25
Sandberg places the blame for the spread of disinformation on one entity—the set of “bad actors”—and none on her firm. What the company knows too well is that a silent machine sits behind 1 Hacker Way’s shining exterior and—like any other Silicon Valley behemoth—advances solely the long-run profitmaking interests of the company’s owners and investors over any other consideration. And there is an implicit alignment in the commercial goals of Facebook and the persuasive goals of the Russian disinformation operators. Both desire the user’s maximal engagement with the content at hand, and unless the appropriate rules and regulations are set for the platform, the company will promote whatever makes it the most money. The responsibility for the spread of disinformation must be shared by the entities that created it and by the entities that enabled its dissemination. We cannot ignore the economic alignment of their objectives.
If we, as common consumers, were to take our understanding of the disinformation problem exclusively from their statements, we would not suspect the industry itself as a primary culprit. But it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that this problem is a by-product of Silicon Valley’s pell-mell pursuit of mammoth profit margins by expanding domination across the territory of the digital landscape with reckless abandon—or, to rephrase Facebook’s old motto, by “moving fast and breaking things.”26 After all, we did not have this problem before the age of vast internet commercialization; we were not plagued by misinformation and foreign election interference in the ways that our political communication networks were infiltrated in 2016.
It is on us to dissect what internet executives have thus far said and take it for what it largely is: commercial propaganda. The reality is that the economic infrastructure that defines the internet is centrally responsible for the widespread damage that has been done to the American media ecosystem.
Of course, as Sandberg suggests, nefarious actors are working for the Kremlin and beyond and have it in for us and are eager to develop new methods for injecting opportunistic political messages into the American discourse. In fact, we may never be able to make them disappear completely; even if the U.S. government were to organize a clever set of sanctions that debilitated Russia’s intent and capacity to attack our political and information systems, other actors would quite likely spring up and aim to subvert the sovereign strength of the United States. We have already seen some evidence of information operations emerging from China.27 That this is happening should come as no surprise; such is the way of a multiethnic world replete with transnational economic competition and the resultant geopolitical uncertainty.
But what did not exist until recently was the current mode of internet commerce—led by the likes of Google, Twitter, and Facebook—that has promoted the reemergence of digital propaganda and other classes of harmful communications. It is the creation and facilitation of the novel influence market hosted by the consumer internet firms that is responsible more than any other single factor for the prevalence of this series of public harms.
We need to step away from the industry executives’ injections of engineered noise and distill a comprehensive policy regime—a new internet order—that can once and for all motivate a truly earnest conversation about what the United States and jurisdictions around the world should do to contain the capitalistic overreaches of the consumer internet industry.
Unveiling the Web of Secrecy behind Digital Commerce
To design the appropriate regulatory intervention to contain Silicon Valley’s public harms, we must start with a thorough analysis of the business model that is in play. At its heart, that business model is joltingly simple: it involves the creation of compelling internet-based apps and services that limit competition over the internet, as well as the uninhibited collection of fine-grained information on individual consumers to create a behavioral advertising profile on them, and the ongoing development and implementation of a set of algorithms, including artificial-intelligence systems, that automatically curate social content to engage consumers and target ads at them in a programmatic manner.
My contention is that given this business model, we need aggressive, reformative policy regimes that can better ensure individual privacy, increase consumer transparency, and promote market competition in the consumer internet sector. It is only when examined through the lens of the consumer internet’s business model that the purpose of the industry’s corporate decisionmaking comes to life, enabling the type of truth-busting skepticism necessary to keep this industry and its executives honest.
Why was the Cambridge Analytica incident—in which Facebook data pertaining to some 87 million users was compiled and illegally sold to the British political consulting firm that was contracted to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—a critical event from a technical perspective? Was it really just like the data breaches involving Capital One or Target or Sony or the hacking of Experian customers’ e-mail addresses and financial information? Resoundingly, no.
Experts have discussed at length the troubling capabilities that Cambridge Analytica advertised. It could, for instance, engage in psychographic analysis and categorize people along five psychological qualities—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—determined by their behaviors and activities as revealed through their Facebook engagement data, including “Likes.” This is not a unique capacity. IBM, for instance, has used its Watson artificial-intelligence platform to generate detailed classifications of psychographic traits and apply them to text.28 Nielsen has advertised similar capabilities. And, in fact, it has widely been suggested that Cambridge Analytica’s capabilities in driving psychographic inferences on users for client applications in the political context was limited, at best.29
But beyond any capacity Cambridge Analytica may have had in developing psychographic conclusions about a given user, I think the most critical aspect of the incident involved the potential breach of personal identifiers, possibly including what are known as Facebook User IDs—individually identifying pin numbers that would enable whoever has the Cambridge data to create vast (or narrow) target audiences for digital advertising campaigns on both Facebook and non-Facebook platforms and to coordinate highly effective disinformation campaigns. Most advertisers on Facebook have to go through the hoops of mapping known customers to their Facebook accounts, which is a process that does not always yield many matches to Facebook profiles. However, if the Cambridge Analytica breach included user IDs, the mapping would have been done for them. In other words, instead of reaching a matching yield of just 30 percent or 50 percent, the firm’s clients could reach 100 percent of the 87 million accounts whose data the firm had obtained. Given that the vast majority of the 87 million accounts were those of American voters, the firm essentially had access to a targeting-and-tracking regime via Facebook’s advertising platform that would have enabled a degree of illicit targeted political communications the likes of which we have never seen before.
While we might have some clues from independent researchers about what data may have been a part of the breach given analysis of data generated by Facebook’s old application programming interface (API),30 the company has provided very little in the way of public guidance to address the actual data exposed in the breach. I have yet to see an in-depth analysis of the Cambridge Analytica incident that highlights the dangers associated with the breach of personally identifying Facebook data that potentially included user IDs—despite the reality that this likely is the single-most critical facet of the Cambridge Analytica incident.
That Facebook consistently fails to address the implication that specific users could readily have been targeted on the company’s on- and off-platform advertising services using the identifying data obtained by Cambridge Analytica is highly discouraging. It composes precisely the sort of obscurantism that deserves great public scrutiny and thorough investigation. Consider, also, Facebook’s recent decision to enable texting across its three major internet-based text-messaging services—Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Each enjoys hundreds of millions of users, which for Messenger came about in large part because Facebook some years ago forced many existing users who had Facebook accounts to download Messenger if they wanted to text over Facebook with their Facebook friends. On its surface, Facebook’s decision to enable this cross-messaging might appear to be a boon to consumers—who would reject the efficiency and ease of maintaining contacts on a single service versus switching back and forth between apps to keep in touch with friends?
However, what I find most striking about this decision is the way it is presented to the public by the company—as a technical change that will offer great convenience to customers. Of course, this might be one of the factors that drove the company to make this change; there was every possibility that by integrating the three applications users would find their experience to be more convenient and would therefore communicate with each other to an even greater extent over the three services or save some time in their day by not having to switch between mobile applications and websites.
But if everyone who uses internet messaging is a user of any of the aforementioned three apps and therefore can message with anyone else who is also a user of one of the three networks, what could drive the scaled adoption of a new texting service that might someday compete with Facebook’s universe of texting networks? As such, this advent would also accomplish something starkly new: propel Facebook along its already-secure path to monopolization of the internet-based text-messaging sector. With this artificially imposed and potentially unfair market strategy, Facebook may at once shut out the possibility for any rival to compete with its apparent takeover of the messaging industry and stave off potential threats of antitrust regulation by claiming that de-integration of the apps would in the short term be hugely taxing to end consumers. It is predictable that the company would argue against the notion that it is monopolizing the industry. But I believe this strategic move to consolidate the market is significant and potentially warrants the application of robust competition rules to maintain the vibrancy of internet services and economic fluidity in the texting market.
These examples suggest a silent, commercially driven insidiousness at play behind the exteriors of the biggest Silicon Valley internet firms. To be sure, they are not alone among firms in the U.S. economy attempting systematic exploitation of American consumers.31 All firms attempt it—that is the nature of our economic design. But there can be no doubt that significant regulation of the internet industry is needed at the earliest possible political opportunity, or else we will risk the failure of democracy in favor of the fortunes of a few: the internet barons. There come times throughout history when technology implicates public interests, and in those times we must for a time encourage the law of the suppression of radical potential.32
The internet has been an incredible force for good. The impact that Facebook and Twitter have had on the people of Tunisia and Egypt nearly a decade ago, as the world watched their protests, is a remarkable combination of positive political upheaval and radical economic enablement. Imagine those who experienced the Arab Spring; for the first time in their lives, millions felt intellectually liberated from their governmental oppressors. The aggregate mental release sent shockwaves around the world—and particularly in the Arab world, where many continue to experience turmoil and oppression every day but now have a clear example of what freedom can bring as well as what can be done to achieve it. Social media platforms were instrumental in bringing these positive changes about, as the government’s power to suppress was shaken by the will of a populace. Wael Ghonim, a friend and perhaps the most important organizer of the movement in Egypt, remarked to CNN that “this revolution started online, … it started on Facebook,” adding that “if you want to liberate a government, give them the internet.” By enabling new forms of democratic process, the social media firms have also facilitated progress to counter some of the world’s long-standing injustices.
That said, the focus from here on is the direct and immediate harm that the internet has wrought around the world. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is the most recent, high-resolution illustration of these harms. Most healthcare professionals and media outlets were quick to attempt to resolve points of confusion about the virus, but that did not prevent the tidal waves of misinformation and disinformation that spread over internet platforms and adversely affected an unknown number of people. Some of the hoaxes that have been spread through Facebook ads (including ones created by Consumer Reports to test the platform’s ad review system through a bogus page for a made-up organization called the Self-Preservation Society) suggested that coronavirus is a scam and that social distancing was entirely unnecessary, when in fact this was the single tactic that made the greatest difference in preventing the spread of the virus.33 Others suggested, by showing doctored lab test documents, that former Vice President Joe Biden had contracted the coronavirus.34 Yet more hoaxes indicated that there would soon be food shortages in the United States.35 The list goes on, to the extent that news outlets like NPR found it useful to host numerous segments specifically identifying and screening such misleading information.36 (In the case of Consumer Reports’s investigation, Facebook’s system approved the ads, failing to identify any issues or potential harms. Of course, the organization pulled the ads before Facebook could publish them.)
The main culprit in the spread of misinformation about the virus has been social media, as has come to be the norm. The vast majority of the misinformation concerning the features and spread of the virus has occurred over platforms operated by dominant digital platforms. On a more novel note, however, much of this spread has occurred over messaging threads on WhatsApp, where fake rumors about steps that could be taken to protect oneself had been sent to large groups of people who were then encouraged to send them on to friends and loved ones. Facebook recognized this problem and in turn placed serious limits on the forwarding of such messages,37 a tactic it has enforced in other past situations as well.
But will these kinds of corporate policies—narrow in their conception and application to timely problems—truly be enough to protect a society and the underlying media ecosystem we have worked so hard to guard and cultivate? Or could there be a deeper-lying economic demon within the internet industry that must be extracted and eradicated to diminish these problems in the long run?
Our purpose is to address these very questions. In this book, we will traverse the dark underbelly of the internet—the practices and positions that its leading lights are less proud of touting and that I believe have directly germinated the social harms we now witness, in the context of coronavirus and far beyond. Ultimately, we will also examine possible paths forward to mitigate these harms through progressive policy.
I believe that only with such a redefinition of our social compact with corporate America—and starting in Silicon Valley—can we again realize a world in which the internet is once more a universal gift to humanity.
