Facebook must be hit where it hurts for its zero morals cash-grabbing policies and only people power will work
The social media giant's goal is to have every person on the planet using their platform and they'll stop at nothing to achieve that, writes Clare Foges
IT was a good day to bury bad news.
Last week, while Americans basted their Thanksgiving turkeys, Facebook quietly released a turkey of its own: The admission it had hired a PR firm to link critics of the company to George Soros.
Seeing as nutjobs the world over see Soros as the Jewish leader of a Jewish conspiracy that runs everything in a very Jewish way (and did I mention he is Jewish?), this is disturbing news.
It raises a familiar question: Who will check the power of this unpleasant company?
I witnessed Facebook’s arrogance many years ago at a lunch for its chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
Most of her speech was forgettable tech twaddle but one moment startled.
Sandberg told us rather airily that Facebook’s user base, then about a billion people, was only the start.
Things would only begin to get fun once all six billion of us had been coaxed on to the platform. It felt like we had slipped into the pages of a dystopian novel.
Here we were, pushing cheesecake round our plates while a tech titan told us her plans for global domination.
Today we are all well acquainted with the arrogance of Facebook.
Its growth-at-any-cost attitude was best summed up by a leaked 2016 memo written by an executive.
It said: “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good . . .
“Maybe [that] costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”
Maybe Facebook will allow data to be pillaged. Maybe it will develop algorithms that lead to echo chambers for racists and extremists.
Maybe it will sit on its hands while hate-filled content festers and radicalises. Who cares? It’s all grist to the far more important mill of growing the platform and fattening profits.
Every time we hear of Facebook’s latest scandal, our stock response is to call on governments to act.
We grew up in a world where conventional authority could bring companies such as this to heel.
The Government could put its foot down, the judge could bring the weight of the law down, the regulator could lay the rules down.
But that was the old world. With their borderless businesses and vast profits, these companies represent a new world.
In the jargon of the tech age, they pride themselves on being “disrupters” — but now it is not just old business models they are disrupting, but old power models.
Witness Mark Zuckerberg’s no-show when representatives from Britain, Canada, Ireland, Argentina, Brazil, Latvia and Singapore gathered last week at an international grand committee in London to grill him on the misinformation that is rife on his platform.
Although these nations have a combined population of some 368million, and although their elected representatives have asked for the pleasure of his presence many times, again and again they have been rebuffed.
He is busy washing his hair, or perhaps one of his grey T-shirts.
So desperate is the struggle to hold Facebook to account that the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee has been forced to invoke a rare parliamentary mechanism to seize documents relating to the company.
This follows Britain’s laughable rapping of Facebook’s little blue knuckles over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
For enabling the illicit harvesting of 87million users’ data, the social network was fined £500,000 — equivalent to about ten minutes’ worth of sales.
The empty chair and the empty fine are reminders that these companies seem to sail beyond the rules that govern the rest of us.
This is what is truly galling about the gods of Silicon Valley. Not their wealth, not their success, not the liberal Californian chumminess that is so at odds with their grasping business model — but their arrogance.
They see national tax regimes as pesky obstacles to dance around.
They get requests from law enforcement to help with investigations or provide evidence, and appear to treat them as optional.
Our Government talks tough about clamping down on the tech giants — taxing them, shaming them, bringing them to heel — but nothing meaningful ever happens.
Increasingly I feel we are looking for checks on the power of Facebook, Google etc in all the wrong places.
We must instead look to advertisers and consumers.
If conventional power will not force them to change (and social responsibility will not prick their conscience), the only lever we have is financial. They must be hit where it hurts. This much was suggested last week by the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee, which for years has raged against the tech giants’ relaxed approach to extremist material.
Its chairman, Dominic Grieve, said: “We strongly consider that action which affects . . . profits will hit home harder than an appeal for them to ‘do the right thing’.”
Some advertisers are stirring. In February Unilever threatened to pull its business from Facebook.
A newspaper investigation into YouTube, which found big brands’ adverts appearing on videos of terrorists and white supremacists, encouraged Marks & Spencer, Pepsi and Tesco to withhold money from the platform.
Earlier this month Rishad Tobaccowala, from one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies, said: “Facebook will do whatever it takes to make money. They have absolutely no morals.”
There is the sense of a dam breaking and, in encouraging more businesses to pull their advertising from the tech giants, users have a part to play.
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Sure, boycotts can seem a bit weak against the might of global corporations but the more we log out of these platforms, the more pressure will be applied to businesses to quit them too.
As someone who came off Facebook years ago after finding it a miserable time thief, I can thoroughly recommend doing so.
The world still turns, real friends remain.
A boycott may feel a bit old-school in the 21st Century, but in a world where the tech giants can not (or will not) be brought to heel by governments, in a time when they do as they please and do great damage, people power may be the best weapon we have.
- Clare Foges is a former No10 speechwriter.
- ©The Times/News Syndication.