(The Big Disrupt) Facebook: The Impossible Job – Why the boycott of facebook won’t be the last

The last two years has been (rightly) unforgiving for Facebook and with the recent ad boycott over the Menlo Park based company decision to keep president Donald Trump’s controversial post on its platform which heavily implied the use of force against protesters. The misery just keeps piling on. 

However, don’t feel sorry for the $665 billion juggernaut as this has been coming for a company that’s no stranger to controversy particularly over its policies regarding content moderation, privacy and hate speech. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t breaking a sweat as he knows as well as we do that the boycott will blow over once July breezes by because while advertisers theoretically hold the power of the purse, Facebook offer to much in scale and targeting for advertiser to ignore and more importantly.  

However, there’s a sneaking suspicion that Facebook maybe providing cover for its customers who were planning to cut ad spend anyway in lieu of the pandemic but one customer that won’t be cutting down their spending is one Donald Trump as he seeks to earn a second term.  

In any case, a month without a portion of their customers spending money on ads on their platform won’t hurt Facebook financially with the loss of income will likely be a rounding error on Facebook financial statement the next time they report their earnings. However, in their defense, Facebook have the unenviable task of moderating the comments, postings, musings of 2 billion people so expect mistakes to be made.  

Despite Facebook’s sizeable investment in AI research, the tools Facebook use to clean up its platform aren’t ready for prime time and with the pandemic pressuring companies into working remotely, Facebook’s AI tools to moderate content on its platform is going to suffer a baptism of fire.  

But much of this is Facebook’s fault. Facebook, like it or not, has for some time been a prominent marketplace of ideas and has for years fought off the responsibility that comes with it which has seen the platform fail spectacularly at addressing issues such as fake news and propaganda that publishers and newspapers have handled better at least in comparison to their technologically sophisticated counterparts. 

Much of the trouble Facebook finds itself in is because while it sees itself as a tech company simply serving personalized content to its users, its own users and wider public sees Facebook as what it increasingly is, a large but crowded marketplace where social progress or degradation is taking place in real time.  

However, its attempts to avoid acknowledging just how much power it has isn’t the real problem. For us, it’s easy argument that of all the members of FAANG, Facebook is the worst run of the bunch.  While the company is financially sound, recruits the best people, nurtures new talent and are more or less strong operationally, they’re extremely vulnerable in an area that can render these areas useless, morale.      

No matter how strong a company is at managing its finances, recruiting and developing talent, developing new products and features, acquiring and retaining customers or warding off competitors, if the company has low morale, every advantage in these areas will suffer and eventually wither away over time. 

Nothing kills a company faster than unhappy employees and Facebook over the last two years has waved to goodbye a number of key executives in amidst of damaging scandals, none more embarrassing than the Cambridge Analytica debacle. 

Even in Facebook’s own internal survey, employees were honest enough to report their discontent with approval for the direction of the company falling 19 points in a year. While other members in FAANG aren’t exactly hubs of worker bliss (they’re not), the difference between them and Facebook (with maybe the exception of Google) is that much of the discontent in their companies is among employees that are replaceable. 

There are a number of reasons why morale is ebbing at the company from the aforementioned scandals but the possibly the most striking is the leadership offered by founder, CEO and Chairman Zuckerberg. Founders are revered Silicon Valley but Zuckerberg’s entrenched power makes him and ultimately the company vulnerable to attacks that directly affects morale as the company looks less like a company chasing the noble goal to connect the world and more like an empire headed by a man who seems tone deaf by design.         

  

In sum, Facebook has many enemies this ad boycott most likely won’t be the last but as the public protestations of employees, lawsuits and former executives indicate, the problem that’s eating at facebook maybe closer to home.  

    

    

(The Big Disrupt) Mass Surveillance: Why the golden age of surveillance is set to continue no matter who wins in November

If there has ever been an election that has vindicated the concerns and criticisms of every thinker from Plato onwards about democracy, it would be this one fought by Hillary and Donald Trump. 

Both candidates are highly divisive figures in the public eye and even more so in their own parties as Clinton is seen as a figurehead of the democratic party establishment by its liberal base and Trump draws the ire of his own party's establishment as the billionaire revels in his outsider status. 

Trump eerily mirrors a character Plato describes that could turn a democracy into a tyrannical state and seems to provide a terrifyingly accurate characterization of much of his support who are largely voting for the man rather than his policies which, so far, have not been articulated at any length beyond the phrases "build a wall", "were gonna win again and win big", and last but not least "make America great again". 

While Clinton is a far cry from Plato's conception of who should rule, she is by far the most accomplished of the two as a former senator and secretary of state, a quality Plato would approve. The thought of Plato can provide insights today but his great mind unfortunately doesn't provide into a slightly more complex issue over who should lead, privacy. 

We would have look to more contemporary thinkers with minds no less gifted than Plato's but, on the whole, the thoughts of great minds so matter little in an age where our relationship to privacy is ephemeral at best, easy to deny, and ceded almost reflexively. In an age like this, is it a surprise that possibly the most hawkish proponents of mass surveillance our vying for the highest office? 

Our relationship to privacy however has been hampered severely by a spike in terrorist attacks kicked off by the harrowing 9/11 attacks which swung the balance between security and liberty firmly in the favour of the former. To this day, leaders still make fear based arguments when arguing about impinging our right privacy and with the recent spate of attacks across the globe, these arguments have intensified and have largely helped to set the poisonous tone and mood surrounding this election cycle.       

Both Clinton and Trump have been strident to say the least about their intentions to  continue mass surveillance programs should they become president especially in response to terrorist attacks. 

In response to the Brussels attacks, Clinton expressed in an CNN interview that to avoid similar attacks happening in the U.S., there would be the need to increase surveillance capabilities as well as a greater police presence  on the ground. While these may seem like common sense proposal in the face of an attack, Clinton's prescription seems glaze over the fact that mass surveillance is at an all time high and yet attacks are happening at a greater level of frequency. 

Trump, on the other hand, has taken his desire to surveill U.S citizens to a level that has drawn criticism. Back in November, Trump voiced his desire at a rally to track Muslims and surveillance on mosques  and also to build a database on members of the faith which has drawn unfavorable comparisons by opponents to what Nazis did to Jews.   

Trump also publicly stated that he lands firmly on the side of security in the classic liberty v security debate and while Clinton hasn't made statements as strong as Trump's regarding where she stands on the debate, it's quite clear where they stand. Why they favor security over privacy could be simply because the security argument is more convincing. A more complex reflection might be to consider the rather fleeting relationship both Trump and Clinton have with privacy. Both Clinton and Trump have been in the public eye for decades and have had everything from their personality, dress hairstyles, pitch, parenting skills and business and political failures scrutinized and laid bare for all to see.  

With this mind, it would seem common sense to presume that both candidates would value highly what much of their adult lives have lacked and would seek to preserve as much as they could for their fellow citizens. However, it seemed their experience has taught them that privacy is the most abstract constitutional right of them all, so abstract it may not exist at all. 

It would be hard to blame two very public figures to subscribe to the "privacy is dead argument" which  gained currency in  post 9/11 and has become a mainstream point of view since the Snowden leaks. Their complicated relationship to privacy can also explain why Donald Trump wished he could have voted for the controversial patriot act and Hiliary Clinton voted for it twice. 

In any case, Clinton's and Trump's relationship with privacy may not matter as it would prove rather difficult for any president to roll back the unprecedented level of surveillance since whether they're favour the fourth amendment or not. Any president willing to take on powerful agencies such as NSA, CIA and FBI would have to display a level of political courage that's scarce  in today's political class, never mind Clinton or Trump. 

In sum, whatever happens in November, you can expect from at least then to the next presidential election cycle that you're privacy is no less private than it was before as two very polarizing figures with a complicated relationship with privacy are look set complicate our relationship to privacy as much as decades in the public eye has theirs.