Again, on Facebook

Since this column started in 2016, I have written many times about Facebook and its impact, a few positive but more about its extremely negative effects. It is mind-boggling how Facebook swiftly evolved as a platform for sharing personal information and updates among friends over a decade ago into one that manipulates its users’ attention. It shows the genius of people behind it but without the moral compass to guide their actions.

Facebook stands on the foundation of earlier generations of technological developments yet disparages the trust and goodwill that these older technologies have built over the years with society.

In his recently published book “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe”, Roger McNamee, Facebook investor and former adviser to its founder Mark Zuckerberg, accused the social networking company of taking advantage of people’s trust, “using sophisticated techniques to prey on the weakest aspects of human psychology, to gather and exploit private data, and to craft business models that do not protect users from harm.”

I invite you to read McNamee’s book. It has an e-book version available in Amazon Kindle for a couple hundred pesos. The author is already 64 years old, not exactly from a generation you would expect to quickly understand the nitty-gritty of new technology and its complex intersection with society.  But McNamee comes from a deep background in technological investments and owns a front-row seat of the technological disruptions in Silicon Valley over the past 30 years.

My generation is 20 years apart from McNamee’s. We are quite adept at using new technology but not as tech-driven as millennials and the Gen-Zs. Our class at UP High School, for example, was the first batch in the 1990s to take computer subjects.

Hence, we are a generation that cannot wash our hands of the responsibility to educate the public about technology and the ways it can contribute to the good of society, as well as to its ruin. We are young enough to grasp new technology, yet old enough to temper our dazzling experience with it with much caution.

This is where I draw much of the skepticism I have with Facebook. In McNamee’s words, Facebook is a “stew of unregulated capitalism, addictive technology, and authoritarian values, combined with Silicon Valley’s relentlessness and hubris, unleashed on billions of unsuspecting users.”

Lately, I have noticed a number of social media pages posing as pages about Cebu yet are actually pages where trolls wage a toxic battle to defend the incumbent local and national administration in the latter’s handling of this pandemic.

I have no problem with people expressing their opinions or claiming facts they believe are true. My problem is when some people hide behind the relative anonymity of social media to express distasteful views and take cheap shots at opponents – without the accountability that comes with in-person communication or within a community who check each other out.

That lack of accountability is what makes social media a toxic pool in a supposedly democratic forum. It unleashes our immature and raw side, and weaponizes our underlying hate and prejudices. Yet Facebook’s Zuckerberg insists on largely staying neutral when it comes to policing user content.

A recent piece of good news is that major advertisers like Coca Cola, Unilever and Starbucks have served notice that they have had enough of Facebook’s lack of accountability. They are boycotting the social network which caused the latter’s stock price to dive by more than 8 percent or US$56 billion in value overnight.

Are we finally waking up to Facebook’s dangers? I hope so, but this fight is far from over.