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.
