A growing number of early Facebook employees regret the world they created
I think people are confusing two things: Facebook and its first and main product, the News Feed (and to an extend, the advertising network embedded into it).<p>Facebook, or rather the Social and later, Entities Graphs are essential essential capacities. They are what really matters: who do you trust, who do you care about. Those are key, they are heavily defended from pretenders and they keep on unlocking a lot of essential value to any service leveraging it.<p>The best illustration of what that Graph represents is Messenger: you give some people the right to notify you (and a subset, access to an overlooked secondary Inbox); that service is essential. Having institutions like your airline, payments, be allowed in there is a big step forward. If Marcus manages that well, that extension will unlock a lot of the promisses of email, structurally removing the spam.<p>Having the News Feed inform that social and interest graph is a great way to get up-to-date information, but it comes with an indeed agressive behavioural growth hack. I do not believe that the level alarm around that is warranted, but what people see, political and social polarisation, etc. all those are real issues that Facebook Researchers have looked into. Other researchers have looked into that too, but usually with a very partial view and no access to extensive dataset.<p>I believe it is a problem that openly critical researchers can’t access that database; I don’t think that granting them access will necessarily help, though, because most media will happily apply a big selection bias on whatever comes out of academia, as they already do. But in spite of that limit, internal researchers have enough of freedom to point out issues. There are issues: they are a small team, too US-focused, tend to have liberal-intellectual bias, etc. but they feel, and are, responsible for those issues. More importantly, they are managed by people very willing to take in detailed, informed criticism.<p>Facebook changed their core values over what happened during the campaign. They willingly identified and explained what happened, shared details about ‘the Russian interference’ which was a lot of about weaponasing dissent than ads. They did that because, unlike “the press” they have the means, intellectual and technical, feel the responsability and see it as their mission to help democracy, not let the party of their owner win no matter what.<p>I do not think that Facebook can’t close the News Feed, or revamp it entirely. They believe that its overall impact on democracy is still clearly positive because they measure it (quite well, actually; I have doubts about other aspects of their methodology but not that one). They have identified key ways it is being abused and they are working on fixes.<p>The hearing in the Senate was an ignorant and populist pandering from politicians whom I otherwise admired, them insistently proving they couldn’t get the sense of the scale of the transformation, but Facebook is catching up faster than ageing politicians.<p>Wising up, they will implement soluitons, most of them invisible. I suspect one of them is flagging aggressively partisan groups, preventing rage-baiting. I wished one of them was raising the profile of “the smartest of your opponent”. I know they will try, measure, re-think and improve their solution.<p>And so will the people who think chaos raises their profile, but not as well -- because they can’t survive the scrutiny that Facebook willfully accepted.<p>I remember my history class (in France) about “the Dreyfuss case”, a deeply polarising debate in the early XXth century (in abstract: Country vs. Justice; in practice: should a French officer condemned of treason, transparently because of prejudice for his Jewish heritage, be freed after evidence proved him innocent?) but I’ve been an exchange students in enough countries to know every country had gone through something similar. No one was in charge, and the only solution then was to forget; the Dreyfuss case stopped becoming an issue with WWI.<p>Facebook is not responsible for Trump’s election, nor are they for Obama’s election; neither is Cambridge Analytica or any other single actor. But both those, and probably a couple more institution have the means to understand what happened, and provide some resolution -- the resolution pro- and anti-Dreyfuss never got. Well-intended actors will offer and implement solutions. Transparency in advertising (what Facebook suggested first) is little, but it will give people a sense of what is happening.<p>Don’t confuse Facebook, a project to make social trust something computer can process, with the News Feed, an implementation of it. The former is being defended; it stumbled by allowing fake profiles in, but learned from that; the other relies on behavioural hacks that are being analysed in detail, for the first time. A new threat on the later emerged last year and it is being patched. But if the issue is impulse control and cannot be leveraged for good, getting rid of the News Feed is not out of the question. As far as I can tell, it would simply make things worst.