Who to Blame

It may be my imagination, but it feels as if there is an ever increasing moral outrage over Facebook's  willingness to be used by entrepreneurs, political entities or countries to manipulate people and their opinions. Whether or not it was the creators/owners of Facebook's intention to allow this to happen or whether it is just because of poor designs and incompetence seems to be a matter of some debate. Regardless of why it was allowed to happen, it is now apparent that a some countries including Britain and the USA are discussing what to do. Of course the USA is involved as it may be that their president was one of those entrepreneurs and/or political entities who used Facebook to manipulate people's opinions; Britain is starting an investigation because a British company may have been one of the partners in the above alleged manipulation; Russia which denies any involvement  in any such manipulation is none-the-less assumed to be one of the initiators of the alleged manipulations.

Political parties who didn't win the last election or who see a chance to rack up some points of the ever present campaign trail see allegations of fraud on such a large scale as low lying fruit to be picked. However their moral outrage has some validity. People who thought that such social media sites such as Facebook  were at least somewhat secure; that as long as they did say anything too outrageous or show pictures of themselves that were too revelling that there was nothing that could happen to them, that no one was really interested in what they showed or said. For people to find out that in fact someone was mining data from their post, that someone was actually was keeping track of what they looked at, who they "followed" and what they "liked" are understandably somewhat concerned. For people to find out that some of the things posted or reposted by friends or friends of friends may not have been true must make them wonder as to who they can trust. To find out that their opinions can be so easily manipulated must make some of them feel vulnerable.

The owner/creator of Facebook has vowed to stop such flagrant misuses. He does so, I suspect, in an awareness that if his company does not make all of the right noises and at the very least look as if they are fixing the problem, governments will try to find ways of limiting social media's capacity to mine and manipulate data. While it is not clear as to whether or not governments in a free and open society can do anything, it is good to know that at least some people are aware of the potential problems.

There is however, a solution to the potential mining and manipulation of date. Quite simply people need to stop assuming that free services such as Facebook exist to serve the public. All of the service on the internet exist for one purpose-  to make money for the owners/inventors. Why would Google or Yahoo or Facebook use massive amounts of electric energy, maintain huge warehouses full of date storage/processors if they didn't make money. Anyone can look up the value of those companies - where do people think that value comes from? The money those companies make comes from them selling the information we freely give them. Is Facebook responsible if I give them information without any coercion, if in their multipage fine print contract (that virtually no one reads) is explicit that the information will be shared or do I share at least some the responsibility if I use their services?

If I read and repost stories that I like - without any attempt to verify the accuracy of those statements - who is at fault? Is it solely the responsibility of the author of a potential wrong story or is it the thousands of people who re-posted it? When is it my responsibility to realize that almost of the news feeds etc are about things that I care about and contain stories that either I agree with or that cause me to be outraged? At what point is it my job to edit the information that I read?

There is no doubt that social media can be wonderful vehicles to share information. But I would have hoped that by now, there would be enough of us who were bright enough to know that the purpose of capitalism is to make money and that therefore we should be rightly suspicious of any entity that on one hand purports to want to do good and on the other hand makes their developers rich.