Why we should stop trusting Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Insta - October 24, 202

By Helen Pitt

If you haven’t listened to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s warnings about her former employer, you should. Her testimony to the US Congress this month was as compelling as former premier Mike Baird’s appearance last week before the Independent Commission Against Corruption, which is examining whether Gladys Berejiklian breached public trust or encouraged corrupt conduct during her secret relationship with former Wagga Wagga member Daryl Maguire.

The key word in both these cases seems to be “secret”. And how keeping something secret can breach our public trust.

Haugen, a former product manager, quit Facebook earlier this year and told the congressional hearing that FB’s products were knowingly harming children and fuelling polarisation. “Profits before people” was the ethos of the California-based company when she worked there, she explained. They knew they were harming our mental and physical health, particularly that of our children and most vulnerable, and went ahead nonetheless. What she revealed was the degree to which the company willingly preyed on our vulnerabilities by using tech tools to understand our biases. Without telling us.

Then this week Haugen warned Australian MPs that we should force the company to reveal the secret internal data on how it keeps its users engaged. In other words, addicted. Haugen likened her stance against her former employer to those who fought Big Tobacco companies before it was revealed they knew how dangerous their products were, and yet also put “profits over people”.

As Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s former speechwriter Kate Losse revealed back in 2018, his mantra was always “Companies over countries”.

“If you want to change the world, the best thing to do is to build a company,” he had said.

Both Losse and Haugen’s evidence suggests that, in Facebook, Zuckerberg has almost created a cult with more reach than the CIA. Of course, it is not alone. I hate to think of the amount of information Big Tech companies such as Google, TikTok, Twitter, Insta, Pinterest and YouTube have on us.

I took myself off Twitter after one too many hacks, and I’m getting close to doing the same with other social media sites. But will that make a difference?

Most of us have watched The Social Dilemma, and The Social Network, and know social media is anything but social. It is way more anti-social and insidious than we first thought.

But if the events of the most recent years, from the pandemic to the Trump presidency, have taught us anything, it is that this form of media is the strongest vehicle there is for disseminating political and public health misinformation. Research presented in The Social Dilemma found “fake news” spread six times faster than real news. Anyone whose ever worked in a newsroom, sweating to deliver the truth, will tell you: this is an alarming trend.

What are we to do about it?

First, understand why we should be angry. A reminder of Haugen’s damning evidence: she shared a wad of secret company documents, including research showing Facebook knew its sister site Instagram was intensifying body image and mental health problems among young girls. And other documents that showed Facebook had failed to crack down on drug cartels and human traffickers. The company knows how to make the internet safer, but refuses to, Congress heard. The lead Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, Marsha Blackburn, was spot on when she labelled Facebook’s behaviour as “abuse of customers”.

But we can write story after story warning people of the dangers. Most of us know the dangers, yet still we partake, sending huge profits Big Tech’s way.

But unlike politicians, who we can vote out of office if we feel they have breached our public trust, how do we fight back against companies we feel have deceived us? Especially when they’re based in Silicon Valley. And why should publishers of legitimate news, such as this masthead, be liable for defamatory comments posted to Facebook and other sites about our stories?

Leaving these social media sites en masse might send a signal: their behaviour is not OK. But it wouldn’t be enough. A global investigation – is this a job for the United Nations or the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – might expose the degree of deception cooked up in their secret war rooms. All of it, largely unregulated.

Donald Trump has had a whacky idea. Banned from Facebook and Twitter, he says he’ll create his own social media platform.

But maybe that’s not such a crazy thought for the rest of us. We don’t need to storm the barricades, as Trump supporters did on January 6, but could we mount our own online resistance? The People’s Platform. Surely there are some young developers out there we could recruit to the cause?

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(The Sydney Morning Herald)