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Scandal in Cambridge Analytics Facebook
It doesn’t feel like it was long ago that I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a nondescript office building on University Avenue in Palo Alto, see mark Zuckerberg holding up a fist with a slight smile and say, “domination!” as a way of closing our weekly Friday meeting. By the time I left the company in 2011 to become a professional writer, “domination” was a real possibility.
It was 2005, and the whole world lay before Facebook. I am a former English graduate turned employee of Facebook where I started with questions, then moved to marketing and, before, finally, in 2009, becoming a statement of Zuckerberg and the author of the blog. While in 2005 the site was growing rapidly with users in the College and some of the best numbers by any venture capitalist never seen, not yet released to the General public.
That year, Zuckerberg would often wear a t-shirt that says “Sloths” on it, signaling an Ironic laziness — for him and for many of us, the idea of “domination” seemed so half seriously, half jokingly fantasy how to install mission.
Some days I wonder if he was completely serious. What “dominance” on Facebook, which at that time was a fun social network for University students similar? Were there any disadvantages to connecting anyone and everyone in the world and for one company to control these connections?
But whenever I had doubts, I would think, “Facebook needs to be much more than now, before the ‘domination’ do not be afraid.” And with that, I wanted to rush back to work growing Facebook. It was our shared passion as a company: scale and ask questions later.
As Facebook continues to grow, so not my problem
As Facebook grew exponentially, destroying milestones users per month, and the idea of the rule was believable, I began to look for signs that Zuckerberg and Facebook culture in General were aware of the potential downsides for our unhindered growth.
My job as the speechwriter for Zuckerberg meant that I helped him to formulate his internal and external communications, from blog posts company-wide emails. This meant that not only I need to understand the full scope of the mission, I need to be able to say it eloquently to others, and anticipate criticism. At the time I felt that the biggest threat to the popularity of Facebook has become, ironically, becoming the dominant point of monopoly power.
I’m afraid to begin, to deepen, when, at about the same time, Zuckerberg has begun to use the language of the state to talk about growing power in Facebook. “Companies in the country,” he told me one day, as we’ve discussed in the blog on purpose in Facebook. “If you want to change the world, the best thing to do is to create a company”, he added.
At the office where “fortune favors the bold” posters were hung in a prominent place, I could see the appeal of such ambitions. Unlike the country, the company has unlimited potential for creation and development, I felt, and social media companies that go beyond national borders could become a Meta-society of their own. Lines from the novel by Thomas Pynchon-the crying of lot 49 has often come to mind when I was thinking about the heady possibility of changing society in a digital format: “I project to the world?”
But the question I was afraid to ask was this: if we reach our goal, why should the world trust Facebook and Zuckerberg to shape and manage this new global Meta-community? Maybe Zuckerberg, who has considerable control over structure share Facebook, development of self-awareness and responsibility to manage it?
If my colleagues have asked myself these same questions, I did not see that this is being discussed on our internal forum pages or in conversations around the office.
Employees of Facebook are often brilliant and technically gifted. But the atmosphere we live are not encouraged to ask questions about power, at least publicly. Instead, internal conversations were focused on technical issues and growth; questions that can be answered metric — how quickly we grow and what technical problems we can eliminate, not introspection.
“We are building a social operating system,” colleagues would say, and when they said it sounded so neutral, so technically impartial, as we build a faster laptop instead of a machine capable of mediating in the world of personal relationships, not to mention political election, with increasing levels of complexity.
Culture Facebook then and as recent reports suggest, now there is one that — oddly enough, for a company built on the idea of wide-open communication — multiple immune from self-criticism and self-reflection. You might think that the company, disrupting the growth of social media records will welcome dialogue about the social impact of the product, as we were basically building a completely new social and communications infrastructure.
But even the early Facebook privacy scandal, the news of the launch where users are incensed that their Facebook activity is suddenly converted to “tales” for the night — was not met with discussion about how Facebook is quickly tilting people understanding of confidentiality and the relief that after several days of protest, the users came back to the fold. It seems that not much has changed with this new scandal.
The scandal in Cambridge the analyst brought these questions to mind
If a lesson from that to outside observers is that Facebook only cares about growth and profit above ethics is not entirely accurate. Because Facebook, the growth of ethical goal in itself. When the technical mission of Facebook is to connect people to themselves as itself a moral good, all efforts in this direction are made righteous by definition.
Ask questions about how this mission could go horribly wrong, then, may be seen as disloyal. “It’s so frustrating, I wonder if there’s a way to hire for integrity. We will probably be focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who have no moral principles and loyalty” as one Facebook employee recently put it in an internal debate. When asked about people who thought that Apple was better in private life, Zuckerberg claimed, these customers have “Stockholm syndrome”.
Then the scandal of the Cambridge analyst happened, what all these issues home to roost. The revelation that the company worked with the trump campaign and campaign of the British exit from the EU in the United Kingdom to use a shaded gathering data from Facebook to target political advertising has shaken the image of the company.
But Cambridge Analytics is a scandal not a scandal: everyone who ever worked for or with the Facebook platform knew that for several years, the platform data to third-party developers design. The scandal is that the world finally understands the consequences of this state of Affairs.
Still, Facebook doesn’t seem to have woken up with this moral dilemma, at least in such a way that is visible looks at the world. Perhaps, said internal rumblings in Facebook show that some moral self-reflection is developing; on the other hand, according to the employee’s comments likening anyone who questions or information leakage “wife beaters and suicide bombers” suggests that cultural atmosphere that does not tolerate self-criticism is alive and well.
There are signs of hope. It is reported that Facebook is taking steps to make anonymized data available to researchers to understand how intervention elections is on Facebook. Perhaps Zuckerberg is, finally, thinking about the mission of their company and moral responsibility. Users of Facebook, investors, and, I would say, people should demand that he do so.
But he can’t do it alone. Every person who works in Facebook also should look in the mirror and think about what this means and asking the tough questions. In the early days of Facebook, It was easy to dream and hope for the best, even when “move fast and break things”; in many ways we were more successful than someone who worked there back then could imagine. But now, when the dominant market position was achieved and the risks are clear, it’s time to set real constraints on the capacity of Facebook.
Kate losse is a writer based in California. Author of the boy kings: a journey into the heart of the social network, which details early Facebook culture during their stay there. Facebook declined to comment on the anecdotes in his book.
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