“In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. . .” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook post, July 7, 2016
Four years ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, announced that “the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people.” It took the platform a little more than eight years to reach one billion users, and just less than five years to get to the second billion. Now it is estimated to be more than 2.9 billion. Close to two-thirds of its users visit the site at least once a day.
It’s not just dominant in the United States. In many other countries, including Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, the European Union, Ecuador, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Peru, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, and Vietnam, Facebook is the dominant online social network, with between 40% and 90% of the local population using it (source).
There is no other human entity on Earth as big as Facebook; no country, no business, no single religious denomination.
Remarkably, though it is seventeen years old and worth nearly a trillion dollars, Facebook is still run and controlled by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. At every step in its growth, Zuckerberg has led every key decision about the company’s strategy and policies. Changes in Facebook’s design, in how it handles user privacy, in who it allows to join, in what it allows people to post, in how it enables advertisers to target users, and in key features like News Feed, which delivers an algorithmically curated stream of personalized information to every user, all have come at Zuckerberg’s direction or with his approval.
Once it was said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In our digital age, coders are the unacknowledged legislators, determining the rules and pathways that we use to connect with each other. And one coder, Mark Zuckerberg, is the unacknowledged president of the largest nation on Earth, which I call Facebookistan. And no one elected him. If Facebookistan is a government, it’s a dictatorship.
For years, a handful of technology writers, social justice organizers and cultural critics from around the world have raised questions about Facebook’s rising power, but those concerns were largely ignored, especially in the United States, the company’s birthplace and home. Facebook was a darling of politicians from both parties, who welcomed its spread and reveled in its reach. With their tacit approval, Facebook built a giant garden for its users, walled off from the truly open Internet. And then, taking advantage of its popularity, it started copying and replacing older public forms of civic engagement with new ones that only live inside its platform. To participate in something as generic as a Facebook group or as specific as a Facebook town-hall meeting with your elected representative, you had to be a member of Facebook. Imagine being told that to attend a public meeting of your school board or to join a local community organization, you had to agree to let a private corporation amass a dossier about you. But few rebelled against Facebook’s steady annexation of the public sphere, since its services were so convenient and engaging, and since “everyone else” — including nearly all our public leaders — was “already there.”
The real Faustian bargain that makes Facebook possible, that its users are not its customers, but actually the product that it sells to its real customers — advertisers — wasn’t nailed down until several years into its development, in 2008, when CEO Zuckerberg brought in a seasoned veteran of Silicon Valley, Sheryl Sandberg, as his chief operating officer. Until then, the company had raised several rounds of private investment based on the promise that the fantastic growth of its user base could eventually be converted — monetized is the term — into earnings. Sandberg, who had previously led the development of Google’s online advertising division, convinced Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook’s leadership to turn the company into an advertising platform. Two years later, it turned profitable; two years after that, Facebook held its initial public offering.
We now know, from research published by company data scientists, that Facebook has the power to change its users’ moods merely by changing how many positive or negative posts it surfaces in their feeds. We also know that it can increase voter registration by reminding people of upcoming deadlines, and it can increase voter turnout by showing people that their friends are voting. We have to trust Facebook when it says that it is not abusing these powers to the benefit of any partisan cause (a subject I have written about often, including for Mother Jones). Internal documents obtained by the Australian show that while the company tries to downplay its ability to influence political choices, it tells advertisers that it knows exactly which buttons they should press to sell themselves to impressionable young people. We should assume the same is true for other audiences.
All of this is well known now. The most recent round of revelations from Francis Haugen’s whistleblowing just reinforce these facts. We now know that many youthful users of Facebook and Instagram report that these platforms make them feel worse about themselves. We know that despite Zuckerberg’s professions of support for free speech, that he cozies up to authoritarians in places like America, India and Vietnam. We know that despite his claims that his AI systems are blocking more hate speech than any other platform, that in fact it is failing to action more than 90% of the problematic content that flows through it and that it is woefully under-resourcing community moderation in many developing countries, while enabling genocidal campaigns in places from Myanmar to Ethiopia.
Even if you aren’t on any of Zuckerberg’s creations, they are on you. They track users and non-users alike all over the web. And the fact that most of your friends, family, neighbors and co-workers are on it means your world is warped whether you like it or not.
It may be that Facebookistan is a hyper-object. A problem like climate change. Something so big we can’t get our minds around it.
The question is: Can we escape from this world-shaping company? (Perhaps not — others have tried before to organize people to quit and failed.) Or can we shape it to better ends?
I don’t know the answer, but I’m glad that many people are working on these questions. We’ve pulled together some of them for today’s unconference on “Logging Off Facebook: What Comes Next?” and I look forward to reporting on the fruits of our conversations.