Regulating Facebook will be one of the greatest challenges in human history

Consider all the ways that governments are proposing to rein in Facebook. The gamut runs from regulatory fines to threats to dismantle the behemoth. Some of these measures are counter-productive. Some are poorly thought out. Some are necessary. All are insufficient.

Regulators are trying to address Facebook as if it’s like companies they have encountered before. But Facebook presents radically new challenges. It is unlike anything else in human history – with the possible exception of Google.

Just this month the United Kingdom proposed a “duty of care” standard for platform companies to ensure they filter potentially harmful content. The government of Canada last week declared that Facebook had broken the lawby failing to protect users’ data from flowing to the political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica. Irish regulators started investigating Facebook for failing to protect users’ passwords. The government of Sri Lanka temporarily shut down Facebook and WhatsApp after a terrorist attack on Christians killed more than 250 people. And Facebook told its investors that it expects the US government to issue a fine of up to $5bn for violating a 2011 order that was supposed to prevent the distribution of personal data to the likes of Cambridge Analytica.

Each of these regulatory measures hope to address one negative consequence of Facebook at a time. No one, it seems, is prepared to consider Facebook (and its other global services, WhatsApp and Instagram) in its totality.

It’s as if governments around the world are addressing individual weather systems as they hit and do harm. But no one is considering the dangers of climate change.

Facebook is but one node in a matrix of surveillance systems covering every aspect of our lives

That said, Facebook is but one node (albeit the largest and most powerful one) in a matrix of surveillance systems covering every aspect of our lives. In much of the world, the major systems of surveillance are state-based. In the rest of the world, they are commercial. But data flow easily between states and commercial enterprises.

The problems Facebook causes or amplifies – data dumps, privacy violations, the proliferation of hate speech or other nonsense – are not glitches. They are not examples of Facebook failing. They are examples of Facebook working as designed.Advertisement

Facebook does three things. It collects records of our activities, proclivities, locations, and associations. It uses those data to position advertisements that have proven more effective yet less expensive than in any other medium. And it uses those data to choose for us what we shall see, read, and with whom we should interact through its system. Its algorithms structure our social lives so subtly we hardly notice. It influences what we consider true, important, and valuable in powerful ways we are only now starting to realize.

Overall, Facebook undermines our ability to communicate on our own terms, to deliberate about public issues in a sober and informed fashion, and to build trust among citizens. The macro effect is so much more dangerous than any particular abrogation of user trust or violation of privacy law.

Facebook is such a powerful and pervasive global system that confronting it demands radical new thought. It reaches more than 2.3 billion people, and that means more than 2.3 billion people regularly post videos, photos, and text to Facebook. They do so in more than 110 languages. The very idea that Facebook can police itself is absurd.

Beyond scale, Facebook operates across most of the world without serious competition for advertisements or attention. Among the five social media platforms with more than one billion users, four of them (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram) are owned by Facebook. The fifth, WeChat, operates primarily in China, where Facebook does not. The only platform that competes for attention with Facebook at that scale is YouTube (owned by Google), with about 2 billion viewers. But it performs different functions in our lives.

Here is the trick:…

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