I have been observing the coverage of the Facebook situation, including watching a little bit of the Senate testimony of Mark Zuckerberg (oy). I admit, I find most of the coverage perplexing, especially the outrage. Do people genuinely not understand how Facebook (and the internet in general) makes money for people? I assumed everyone understood this, but maybe I have insider knowledge I’m unaware of because I’m married to a man who does marketing for a tech firm. If that’s the case, let me share.
It takes hundreds and sometimes thousands of highly skilled (and highly paid) people and security tools to keep an online service running and growing. That costs millions of dollars. Whenever something is offered to us for free – a blog platform, a social media site, a video content provider, an app – the owners have to get money to run it. There are two main ways to do that: make us pay to use it or offer it for free and sell ads. Nobody has an unlimited ad budget, so they want to target their ads to the consumers most likely to buy their products. This has always been the case. It’s why you see different types of ads during daytime TV vs. primetime or on certain types of shows. One of my favorite games while watching a TV show is “guess the demographic.” Lots of estate planning and medication ads? Older folks. Lots of luxury car and glitzy travel ads? Upper middle class, middle-aged people. Those ads are placed there because the network helps the company understand the demographics and preferences of who watches certain shows and helps them place the ads. It’s the foundation of all marketing. To their credit, Facebook does not sell user information, unlike many other services people use without complaint. That’s not how they make their money. If we’re going to act outraged over an ad sales business model – again, they're selling ads to companies, *not* your data to companies -- we’re going to have to spread that around to every other service that helps companies and organizations advertise.
I’ve also seen some incensed assertions that Facebook is manipulating us into using their service. Yes, they are. Just like every other service we use. Stores offer coupons. Restaurants offer kids’ menus and delivery. Bars run drink specials. Every single business does everything it can to get you to use them over their competitors. Every single politician does everything she can to get you to choose her over her competitors. People attempting to persuade us to do one thing over another is part of the social experience, and it’s not wrong unless it crosses certain lines, like lying.
Another criticism I don’t understand is that Facebook is “watching” people. Yes, Facebook also does some monitoring, as do other services like YouTube, to prevent their platform from being used by people like child pornographers. None of us wants to see children being raped (or graphic violence, or any number of things) in our news feeds or on a YouTube video we stumble across. They monitor user activity, usually through automation, to prevent this kind of abuse and to gather basic information for how we use the site, so they can improve services and get us to use it more. See above about how they make money. Not monitoring would allow abuse to flourish.
Underlying all this criticism seems to be the idea that what people do online is private and that companies should provide products and services for free. There is no such thing as true privacy online. Anywhere. We can alter privacy settings and our behavior to make something more or less private (and we should), but everything we do online is traceable and potentially being watched by someone. Our credit card company is paying attention to our purchases to monitor for theft. Facebook monitors for safety reasons and to bring us things we might like, based on other things we like. Objecting to this is like objecting to a cop watching for speeders at an intersection or your boyfriend noticing you like lilies over roses and altering his purchases. This can be abused, certainly – if your boyfriend goes from noticing your flower preference to stalking you – but monitoring itself is a fact of life.
My concern with all this is the lack of understanding many people seem to have, but also because all the baseless outrage distracts us from asking better questions. Does Facebook have some things to answer for in terms of how its platform was used *by others* (key point…not by them but by others) to allow a hostile foreign power to sway our elections? Yes. Do they deserve criticism for how s-l-o-w-l-y they responded when this became known? I think so. But from what I’ve seen, their biggest crime seems to be naivete and a lack of critical thinking about how their tool could be weaponized. But if we spend all our time launching puerile personal attacks against Mr. Zuckerberg or acting outraged that ad companies are interested in making money, we’re missing the point. And as long as we keep distracting ourselves from the real issues, the more vulnerable we are to individuals and organizations who actually do want to manipulate us for nefarious reasons. Don’t be mad at Zuck. Be mad at Putin, his allies and unwitting accomplices within our own government, and their willingness to weaponize any tool to win.
No comments:
Post a Comment