TechCentralTechCentral
    Facebook Twitter YouTube LinkedIn
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube
    TechCentralTechCentral
    NEWSLETTER
    • News

      Consortium makes unsolicited bid for state’s 40% stake in Telkom

      12 August 2022

      Actually, solar users should pay more to access the grid – here’s why

      12 August 2022

      Fixing SA’s power crisis is not complex: it simply takes the will to do better

      12 August 2022

      Telkom says MTN talks remain on track

      12 August 2022

      Analysis | Rain muddies the waters with approach to Telkom

      11 August 2022
    • World

      Tencent woes mount, even after $560-billion selloff

      12 August 2022

      Huawei just booked its first sales rise since US blacklisting

      12 August 2022

      Apple remains upbeat about iPhone sales even as Android world suffers

      12 August 2022

      Ether at two-month high as upgrade to blockchain passes major test

      12 August 2022

      Gaming industry’s fortunes fade as pandemic ends

      11 August 2022
    • In-depth

      African unicorn Flutterwave battles fires on multiple fronts

      11 August 2022

      The length of Earth’s days has been increasing – and no one knows why

      7 August 2022

      As Facebook fades, the Mad Men of advertising stage a comeback

      2 August 2022

      Crypto breaks the rules. That’s the point

      27 July 2022

      E-mail scams are getting chillingly personal

      17 July 2022
    • Podcasts

      Qush on infosec: why prevention is always better than cure

      11 August 2022

      e4’s Adri Führi on encouraging more women into tech careers

      10 August 2022

      How South Africa can woo more women into tech

      4 August 2022

      Book and check-in via WhatsApp? FlySafair is on it

      28 July 2022

      Interview: Why Dell’s next-gen PowerEdge servers change the game

      28 July 2022
    • Opinion

      No reason South Africa should have a shortage of electricity: Ramaphosa

      11 July 2022

      Ntshavheni’s bias against the private sector

      8 July 2022

      South Africa can no longer rely on Eskom alone

      4 July 2022

      Has South Africa’s advertising industry lost its way?

      21 June 2022

      Rob Lith: What Icasa’s spectrum auction means for SA companies

      13 June 2022
    • Company Hubs
      • 1-grid
      • Altron Document Solutions
      • Amplitude
      • Atvance Intellect
      • Axiz
      • BOATech
      • CallMiner
      • Digital Generation
      • E4
      • ESET
      • Euphoria Telecom
      • IBM
      • Kyocera Document Solutions
      • Microsoft
      • Nutanix
      • One Trust
      • Pinnacle
      • Skybox Security
      • SkyWire
      • Tarsus on Demand
      • Videri Digital
      • Zendesk
    • Sections
      • Banking
      • Broadcasting and Media
      • Cloud computing
      • Consumer electronics
      • Cryptocurrencies
      • Education and skills
      • Energy
      • Fintech
      • Information security
      • Internet and connectivity
      • Internet of Things
      • Investment
      • IT services
      • Motoring and transport
      • Public sector
      • Science
      • Social media
      • Talent and leadership
      • Telecoms
    • Advertise
    TechCentralTechCentral
    Home»In-depth»Facebook should stop pretending it has such high standards

    Facebook should stop pretending it has such high standards

    In-depth By Matthew Yglesias10 October 2021
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email

    Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen has bequeathed to the world a trove of documents about the downsides of social media. What the internal records show, she told the US senate last week, is that Facebook’s leaders “have put their astronomical profits before people”.

    This is, of course, true. It is also unsurprising. Facebook is a public company that aspires to maximise profits for its shareholders. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson argues that social media is “attention alcohol” — a product that is fun but addictive, and “unwholesome in large doses” — and the metaphor is even more apt than that: Beer, liquor and wine manufacturers and distributors also put profits over people.

    The difference is that, for the most part, they don’t pretend otherwise. There are all kinds of businesses, whether they’re making potato chips or reality TV, which thrive by taking advantage of human foibles and weakness. One of the things that makes Facebook exceptional — and helps explain the disgruntlement of many employees — is the refusal of Facebook’s leadership to acknowledge this obvious fact.

    It is true that the basic purpose of a business is to make money, even if doing so is bad for your cholesterol

    In the minds of anti-capitalists, the profit motive at the beating heart of the US economy is an indictment of the entire system. I remember being captivated and entertained by the 2003 documentary The Corporation, which quotes an FBI expert saying that if a corporation were a person (in more than just a legal sense), its single-minded focus on shareholder value would qualify it as a psychopath.

    Then I grew up and realised that industrial capitalism and the market economy have actually driven huge improvements in living standards. At the same time, it is true that the basic purpose of a business is to make money, even if doing so is bad for your cholesterol (think of those potato chips again) or degrades civic life by undermining the economics of local news (consider the rise of Internet advertising).

    High-minded

    Which brings us back to Facebook. What’s fascinating about the company is that it is held to an unfairly high standard not only by its critics, but also by its own executives.

    Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg angrily denied Haugen’s complaints as “just not true”. Speaking on behalf of Facebook employees, he said: “At the most basic level, I think most of us just don’t recognise the false picture of the company that is being painted.”

    I know people who formerly worked on various worthy-sounding Facebook initiatives —and they confirm both Haugen’s charge and Zuckerberg’s response. In practice, Facebook is not interested in making any changes that would result in users spending less time on Facebook, regardless of what other positive impacts those changes might have. Meanwhile, the rank-and-file employees with in-demand technical skills who make the company run actually do believe that they are engaged in something more high-minded than making potato chips.

    This is an idea deeply embedded in Silicon Valley culture. In 1983, when Steve Jobs was recruiting then-Pepsi executive John Sculley to Apple, he famously asked him: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

    Technology companies clearly have changed the world in ways that soft-drink companies have not. But today’s tech giants aren’t exciting start-ups anymore. Some still tackle big, tough technical problems (think of Google and self-driving cars), while others find niches of genuinely idealistic behaviour (think of Apple’s consistent drive to deliver world-best accessibility features for the blind). But no company is idealistic enough to compromise major profit-and-loss considerations for humanitarian concerns; ask Apple about human rights in China, for example.

    And what about Facebook? Its core business may well be closer to selling sugar water (or potato chips) than it cares to admit. It’s pretty clear by now that the invention of mass-produced sweeteners has been a decidedly mixed blessing for humanity — contributing to major health problems like obesity and diabetes, but also delivering doses of genuine pleasure to billions of people daily.

    Nobel laureate Paul Romer’s idea of a progressive tax on digital ad revenue to discourage gigantism makes a lot of sense

    If you tried to ban sugar, there’d be an uprising. Whether it should be regulated is another question, but there is no such hesitation when it comes to regulating social media. Nobel laureate Paul Romer’s idea of a progressive tax on digital ad revenue to discourage gigantism makes a lot of sense, but it would be neither desirable nor possible for a federal agency to micromanage content moderation decisions by private companies, as so many seem to want.

    Meanwhile, Facebook’s best strategy going forward might be to acknowledge the banal nature of its business. Like everyone else, it has products with pros and cons. All it really cares about is getting more people to spend more time using them.

    Such an admission would cause quite a PR headache, of course. But the larger issue is whether Facebook’s recruiting and retention efforts could handle that kind of bracing honesty.

    Uniquely vulnerable

    To return to those potato chips: Nobody drags American Big Snack executives before congress and accuses them of “putting profits before people”, even though everyone pretty much agrees that selling highly processed snack foods is not a particularly beneficent act. On the other hand, the junk food industry does not necessarily have its pick of the top graduates of the top schools every year.

    If Facebook admitted that it is essentially selling a digital version of sugar water (or potato chips, or any other suitably unhealthy alternative), it might attract less negative attention. But more of its employees might be inclined to jump ship. They could form or join exciting start-ups that better align with their values. Or they could or just to go work infusing non-tech companies with much-needed technical skills.

    It may be that, while all giant companies are in some sense putting profits over people, Facebook itself is uniquely vulnerable to this critique. Its core product is not tangible, like Apple’s or Amazon’s, and not obviously useful, like Google’s. If that is the case, then a smaller, less influential Facebook might be a net benefit for the world.

    Mark Zuckerberg

    It’s unlikely that Zuckerberg would agree — or, for that matter, that he would be willing undergo any exercises in brutal corporate self-reflection. Not so long ago, after all, he himself was a smart, hard-working, idealistic young Ivy Leaguer. He understood the potential of Facebook at a time when few did, and no doubt he sincerely believed that creating peer-to-peer interconnections at scale would have a more unambiguously positive social impact than turns out to have been the case. Still, it’s a heck of a great business.

    Over time, many corporate titans conclude that the relentless pursuit of shareholder value simply isn’t that satisfying once you’re already unimaginably rich. Bill Gates long ago stepped down from Microsoft to focus on charitable pursuits, following a trail blazed by Andrew Carnegie and other so-called Robber Barons of the distant past. Zuckerberg has the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, a foundation he started with his wife Priscilla Chan in 2015, but for now he is very much involved in the day-to-day operation of his company and the endless series of controversies it generates.

    The debates about those controversies tend to careen between absurd self-puffery and uninformed criticism. If the company — and its employees, starting with its first one — were more honest about what they do, then maybe the world could have a less fraught, more sensible conversation about the nature not only of Facebook but of social media itself.  — (c) 2021 Bloomberg LP

    Facebook Mark Zuckerberg
    Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    Previous ArticleBitcoin’s ‘incredible rally’ spurs biggest weekly gain in months
    Next Article Massmart’s big bet on e-commerce in South Africa

    Related Posts

    Tencent woes mount, even after $560-billion selloff

    12 August 2022

    Huawei just booked its first sales rise since US blacklisting

    12 August 2022

    Consortium makes unsolicited bid for state’s 40% stake in Telkom

    12 August 2022
    Add A Comment

    Comments are closed.

    Promoted

    Pricing Beyond CMYK: printers answer the FAQs

    11 August 2022

    How secure is your cloud?

    10 August 2022

    5 ways to make attack-path management more manageable

    10 August 2022
    Opinion

    No reason South Africa should have a shortage of electricity: Ramaphosa

    11 July 2022

    Ntshavheni’s bias against the private sector

    8 July 2022

    South Africa can no longer rely on Eskom alone

    4 July 2022

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    © 2009 - 2022 NewsCentral Media

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.