Jordan
Most of you probably already know that Facebook isn’t great for society at large. But you might not have heard it explained in the company’s own words and data, at least not until last week.
Frances Haugen Clip
when we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content. It erodes our civic trust. It erodes our faith in each other. It erodes our ability to want to care for each other. The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.
Jordan
That was Sunday night on 60 Minutes. A former Facebook employee revealed how, as she claims, the company consistently made choices even after doing extensive research to put profits over the platform’s impact on its users. So that was in prime time Sunday for the world to see and hear. And then came Monday morning.
News Clip 1
Around the world, Facebook users were greeted with this: an error message, telling them the site was offline…
News Clip 2
…major worldwide outage for Facebook here in the US and in countries all over the world, billions of users, Instagram and WhatsApp down for hours too…
James Corden Clip
People started noticing something was wrong this morning when they felt happy for more than 30 minutes.
Jordan
Naturally, an exposé, followed by a sustained outage, kicked off all sorts of conspiracy theories, the kind of conspiracy theories that usually proliferate on Facebook. And while none of them had any proof behind them, it is certainly arguable that Sunday and Monday were the worst days in the history of the mega company. But will it matter? Will people around the world realize, thanks to this prolonged outage, that Facebook and Instagram and especially WhatsApp have too much power over global communication? Will governments finally begin to take seriously the threat of Facebook as a competing nation state, one that already owns critical parts of global infrastructure? Or will everyone, as they have in the past, move on and hope it doesn’t happen again?
I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Jesse Hirsh is a researcher and a futurist. He writes a newsletter called Meta Views , which you can find at metaviews.ca. And we’ve been talking to him about Facebook for about three years now. Hey, Jesse.
Jesse
Hey, Jordan.
Jordan
why don’t you start by telling us what we know about why and how Facebook went down?
Jesse
Well, the short answer is Facebook and their key subsidiaries in Instagram and WhatsApp literally disappeared from the Internet because of an honest mistake. Now, unfortunately, it has to do with Facebook’s routing tables. And these are basically the databases that tell the rest of the Internet how to find Instagram, how to find Facebook. And the error basically removed all that information from the Internet, thereby removing all of Facebook’s domains like Facebook.com, Instagram, WhatsApp, so that not only were all of their services no longer available, but it turns out that Facebook also uses those same domains for things like building security. So not only could they not remotely access the computers necessary to undo their mistake, they couldn’t even get into the building. So they actually physically had to break into their offices and physically break into their data centers just to kind of hit the undo button and reverse an error. But unfortunately, it was such a catastrophic kind of cascading failure kind of error, that it took them offline for several hours and at a time when, rather than regard this as an innocent mistake, it sort of fanned the flames of sort of conspiracy and fears that Facebook was kind of up to some evil plan.
Jordan
Give me some context for that. What was going on that would make people associate this outage with evil and nefarious plans.
Jesse
I think part of it, quite honestly, is just the culture that Facebook currently operates in, that there is a general suspicion of their power and a general awe of the impact they have on our popular culture, that anytime anything happens to the company, I think there’s some suspicion. But in particular, there’s been a treasure trove of documents, basically a whistleblower who has leaked first to the Wall Street Journal , then as part of congressional testimony which has been going on this week, information about Facebook’s own research, Facebook’s own understanding of the human and social impacts of their apps. And that was making news at the end of last week and over the weekend. So I think it created this heightened awareness and the fact that it was a whistleblower had a lot of people thinking that maybe Facebook went online to kind of lock things down and make sure that no other whistleblower could obtain or download sensitive information. But in reality, it was just an honest technical mistake, albeit a rather large one. But I think it does speak to the kind of culture of suspicion and the way in which anytime anything happens with Facebook, we start to wonder if it’s part of some larger nefarious scheme.
Jordan
Can you tell me a little bit more about what we’ve learned in the Facebook files and what the whistleblower has revealed about the company?
Jesse
I mean, the primary thing we’ve learned is that Facebook can’t claim innocence. They can’t claim that they don’t understand some of the negative impacts or some of the social impacts of their technology and their platforms. And I mean, that really gets to the notion of responsibility and regulation, which is why this is relevant in terms of congressional testimony. But a lot of the stuff that the whistleblower has been focusing on is the impact on young people and the correlation between using Instagram and being depressed or feeling that you’re imperfect or that you’re flawed or encouraging eating disorders. And I think on a larger scale, we’re understanding the amount of research that Facebook puts into itself, because that is the bulk of the information that’s been leaked or that’s been distributed is that Facebook actually engages in a remarkable amount of research, some of which is very self-critical.
And part of what the whistleblower is arguing is that executives ignore this research. They ignore their own evidence that their apps do harm, they ignore their own evidence that conspiracy and disinformation are flourishing on the platform because it’s profitable for them to do so. The main argument that the whistleblower is making is that Facebook is making a deliberate choice to choose profit at the expense of young people at the expense of society. And that’s why this individual felt compelled to come forward. But I think it also speaks to this ongoing dialogue, this ongoing conversation of should Facebook be subject to regulation? Should there be rules that governments impose to better protect young people, or, at the very least, to limit the damage that Facebook clearly understands that it’s doing?
Jordan
We’ll get to the seemingly constant threat of regulations in a minute or two. But first, has Facebook or has Mark Zuckerberg responded to the allegations from the whistleblower? Because they do seem kind of damning, in particular to your point, that they’ve done this research and then ignored it.
Jesse
I mean, the answer is sort of. Yes, Facebook would tell you that they’ve responded, and their response essentially amounts to this information is taken out of context, that as part of the due diligence as part of the research that the company engages in, not only are they thorough, but that they are responsible and that they are engaged in corporate strategies and initiatives to mitigate all these harms and to fight misinformation and to combat conspiracy. So the company feels that they’re responding. But I don’t think the rest of us feel that they’re actually responding. I mean, it’s corporate PR, right? It’s political spin. It’s the kind of nonsense you hear from politicians, that suggests that Mark Zuckerberg is becoming a fairly skilled politician because he’s facing scandal after scandal and like water off a ducks back, it doesn’t really seem to harm him or harm the company, even though the outage did lower their share price and sort of did literally lower Mark’s personal value or personal wealth.
But I think fundamentally, even though this is really damning testimony and the idea that the company knows and understands the sort of negative impacts and social harms of their work, I’m not sure that any of that matters. And I think that’s almost what the company is saying that we’re doing our best here, isn’t that good enough? And unless governments do say no, then the fact that there are so many users who keep coming back to their platform day after day and are greatly disrupted when there’s an outage that sort of speaks to the company’s growing power.
Jordan
In terms of the outage itself. What did we learn about the place Facebook has in…? I wanted to say our society, but we kind of all know that it exists in our society for better or for worse, and a lot of people believe for worse. But it felt like a part of our infrastructure was down. And you certainly heard a lot of people talking about, especially for expats or immigrants with families still oversees, how WhatsApp is like a critical form of communication. And the thought that kept coming back to my mind is that like, this is when the power goes out, really for some people.
Jesse
And I think infrastructure is exactly the right word, because the nature of infrastructure is that you don’t think of it when it works and you feel it when it breaks. And I think it’s not just WhatsApp. WhatsApp is the issue of monopoly and acquisition that Facebook for years now has been buying up competitors rather than competing with them. That was certainly the case with Instagram, but it’s also the case with WhatsApp. WhatsApp as a messaging platform is essential for many parts of the world. And Europe is certainly one area in which WhatsApp is crucial. But I felt the most telling part of this outage was the Mexican government. That the Mexican government depends upon WhatsApp on such a level of intimacy that the outage basically immobilized the entire Mexican government, which is absurd. Both that a government would be using some private service, but then also they don’t have a backup plan. So when it goes offline, they’re be like, oh, well, what are we gonna do? And I’m not trying to blame the Mexican government. They were not alone. There were many.
And also here in Canada, even small municipal governments were themselves greatly disabled by this outage cause for a lot of people who live in cities, they don’t recognize that Facebook is the de-facto communications infrastructure for rural Canada. I live in rural Eastern Ontario. And as much as I would love to not use Facebook, I have to because it’s the only way that my municipality communicates which garbage day it is. Like I literally had to go on Facebook to figure out that, oh, this is glass this week and not paper, because that’s the only place that they make it available. And for so many small municipal rural governments to use Facebook, which is de-facto free and effective at reaching all of their residents. I mean, that’s the paradox here. We laugh about how Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram are kind of part of the infrastructure of our social fabric, but it’s because we don’t have the capacity for alternatives. Like most of these rural municipal governments just don’t have the expertise or the budget to do it themselves. And Facebook makes it free and easy, and has everyone there already. I mean, that’s why government regulation becomes such an important issue because they are a kind of infrastructure. And look, Facebook itself is a kind of identity infrastructure because so many other websites use Facebook as the basis by which you log in.
Jordan
Yeah, that was going to be my next question, is many people couldn’t even get into services that they pay for simply because for ease of use, they clicked log in with Facebook.
Jesse
And I think that’s the paradox that you don’t think about the implications of these choices until it happens. But I would push back and say, I’m not sure it’s always ease of use. Like, I think sometimes it’s the only option, right? And in other instances, the design of the website pushes you to use your Facebook login because the website maintainer benefits from using Facebook as part of their own infrastructure. So I don’t think we can always put this on the individual to make the right choice. You know, as I’m saying, in my own case, I don’t have a choice. I live in a community where everyone else has chosen, we’re going to use Facebook, and the cost to me of not using it is so high that I literally don’t have that choice. And that’s why I think the word monopoly is so relevant and the notion of government regulation so applicable.
Jordan
So what happens this time then? I mentioned as I introduced you that we’ve literally been talking to you about I feel like almost exactly this, maybe without the outage for three years now. And to your point, earlier in this conversation, there’s been constant threats by government for regulation. I don’t think this is the first Senate or congressional hearing we’ve had with Zuckerberg. I know it’s not. Does this change anything or is it, yeah, he’s just going to wait, it’s water off a duck back and we’ll get back to business?
Jesse
So I think it’s a little bit of all of the above. He is the Teflon dog, right? Like water does roll off his back. And it’s because he’s so wealthy and powerful. Like, there are very few companies as big as Facebook, as powerful as Facebook that are literally owned and controlled by one guy. So like that in and of itself is kind of a problem, right? That one human individual is tasked with the responsibility of making decisions that impact literally billions of people. That in and of itself is kind of a social harm. But then the larger issue of government regulation. Yes, I think that this does push that forward tremendously, not just because of the content of the whistle, not just because the whistleblower has revealed that Facebook really does know how bad Facebook is, which I think for governments, there’s a lot of gravity to that type of knowledge. But the outage, I think, really illustrates how essential this infrastructure has become for how we live our lives, for how we do things, and therefore maybe does require government oversight.
Because the paradox of Facebook being regulated is that ultimately it benefits Facebook. Like Facebook is going to be the ultimate winner of almost any kind of government regulation because it turns Facebook from being a pariah into a trusted and regulated institution, like banks, like electrical utilities, like all the other businesses that are regulated, that we tend to treat as if they’re too big to fail, as if they’re pillars of the society. So while, on the one hand, I sort of acknowledge that Facebook needs to be regulated. I’m also wary of the idea that upon regulation, Facebook will become more powerful. Hence why the issue of what do we do about Mark? Like, what do we do about Mr. Zuckerberg? Because I think that’s the other important political issue in all this because we don’t really want to turn him into a King, right? It’s more of the opposite. We want to fire him because he’s done a terrible job, and we want to turn regulation and management of the company to responsible adults who actually believe in taking care of the rest of us and not just exploiting our attention for profit.
Jordan
I won’t go down the yes or no road on regulation because we’re just going to have to wait and see what form these hearings take and what decisions are made. But I want to ask you about regulation and what that would look like if it happens, because making Facebook a more reliable part of infrastructure sounds necessary. On the other hand, when we first talked, like three years ago, we were talking about Facebook influence on elections, and you made a point, futurist that you are, that one day we will be using it as infrastructure to cast our ballots. And this kind of regulation would seem to take us right down that road, right? And make it even more powerful.
Jesse
And I think that’s really the dangerous position that governments are currently in because, you know, governments have been playing the hot potato game of regulating the Internet and regulating social media for a couple of decades, like sort of knowing they have to do it, but not wanting to do it. So they keep passing it on further and further and further. But now it’s so hot. Now the issue has become so politicized that there is a consensus that something needs to be done. And on the one hand, the wild card in all this is Facebook because Facebook is incredibly powerful. And what we’ve learned from this whistleblower is actually kind of smart, like they have incredible research capabilities, and they’ve hired some of the best researchers. So where three years ago, I would have argued that Facebook has no clue what is going on on Facebook. I can’t make that argument anymore. Right now. We’re at a point where Facebook actually does kind of understand Facebook, and that makes them even more dangerous because it means that if they don’t like any regulations that are imposed upon them, they can adapt. They can evolve, change, right? Like, as a company, they’re starting to become sentient because they are starting to become aware of what happens on their platform.
Here in Canada, we do actually know what the federal government is going to do in terms of its attempt to regulate Facebook in this context. And it’s a policy process called online harms. And it’s different than what used to be Bill C10, Which was the federal government’s attempt to upgrade the Broadcasting Act, which they were doing with this eye on Facebook and this eye on social media and this need to protect Canadian culture and Canadian journalism. But parallel to that has been a policy process around this concept of online harms, that these platforms, that bad actors on the Internet do harm to people, and we need to protect them. And that gives us a glimpse as to what the Canadian government is going to do, vis-a-vis regulating Facebook and regulating the potential harm that these companies and platforms can do. But unfortunately, pretty much everyone who has any expertise in online harms has been calling the Canadian government out for just being wrong and for the entire process being broken.
So, whether in the Canadian case or the American case, I am really skeptical and dubious as to whether any of this regulation is going to do anything effective whatsoever, and that instead this is just theatre, right? It’s just like a game in which Facebook keeps getting more powerful, governments continue to become less and less relevant and less and less able to do anything about it, which then leads me to my hypothesis from three years ago that Facebook is a government unto itself and that increasingly it’s just gonna declare independence and do whatever it wants to to do as much as I wish that weren’t the case.
Jordan
That sounds terrifying. The last thing I want to ask you about plays into that a little bit, and you may be touched on a bit. How equipped are our politicians, in Canada yes, but also in the United States and around the world, to even understand the kind of research that Facebook is doing, the kind of harms Facebook is causing and actually draft legislation? I think one of the things we saw from hearings last week were clips of senators just not understanding basic Facebook terminology. And that doesn’t bode well for being able to draft any kind of legislation related to them.
Jesse
No, I thought it was rather comical. I suspect you’re referring to the clip in which the Senator was like, Finsta. Will you shut Finsta down? And the Facebook exact is like Finsta is just what kids call a fake Insta, like the lack of comprehension by some politicians is unfortunately a huge problem. And on the one hand, certainly in the United States, less so, but still sort of true here in Canada, there is sufficient expertise. The Biden administration, to their credit, has hired some of the best and brightest minds who understand not only what Facebook is doing, but how to have our cake and eat it too. How to regulate Facebook in a way that preserves freedoms that empowers democracy. But at the same time still allows Facebook to be a successful business and still allows people to post what they want to post on it. There is a smart middle ground in which you can mitigate the harms of these platforms, and at the same time empower people to make the most of social media, to make the most of digital media. But really, it’s about political will. And that’s where unfortunately, we’re still not seeing that.
Because it’s not just that there are a lot of clueless politicians, which there are. There are very smart politicians, too, who totally get it. Unfortunately, none of them have the incentive to take on a powerful company like Facebook, Because the flip side to this, of course, is Facebook is spending millions on lobbying, and I wanted to say billions. I’m sure that’s an exaggeration, but if you were to aggregate what they’re spending on lobbying around the world, it might be billions. The point is that politics as a system has its own flaws that these platforms can leverage and can exploit. That even though the expertise fundamentally is there, it comes down to political will, which comes down to us as voters.
And this is where I could say we just had a federal election, and I’m pretty certain that even though misinformation and conspiracy was a big part of the campaign, I don’t recall anyone talking about regulating Facebook. I don’t recall anyone talking about the need to curb the harms of social media. It was just not part of the political discourse. And as a result, politicians do not necessarily have the mandate. They don’t have the will power to do what’s necessary. And I think that’s why these companies will continue their ascent to power.
Jordan
Jesse, thanks so much for this. I hope we can find the political will. If there’s one thing I know about Canada, it’s that the next election is not too far away.
Jesse
Thanks, Jordan.
Jordan
Jesse Hirsh, researcher, futurist, you can read more from him at metaviews.ca.
That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca, find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can also talk to us anytime via email at thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!] And of course, every podcast player you can possibly imagine, you can find us in there. If you don’t find us in there, let us know and we’ll get there.
Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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