Zuckerberg’s view of privacy is self-serving

Mark Zuckerberg recently published a 3000-word manifesto on the future of his company. Pic: AP

Mark Zuckerberg runs a company whose users comprise about a quarter of the people on Earth.

Any big political campaign anywhere in the world will spend millions on a site that has become the foremost battleground of propaganda, fake news and incitement to genocide.

There has never been a British cabinet minister with Zuckerberg’s power.

And yet, writing a column scrutinising his pronouncements still feels like a strangely lightweight pursuit, compared to doing the same with, say, Chris Grayling.

Anyway. Last week Zuckerberg published a 3000-word manifesto on the future of his company. If you still don’t grasp that the future of his company is about more than just his company, then read that first paragraph again, and come back to me.

Zuckerberg’s big idea is that Facebook can “pivot to privacy”, thereby fixing most of the problems which Facebook is credited by many, including me, with helping to cause. Given Facebook’s former mission to render privacy effectively extinct - in 2010, Zuckerberg decreed it no longer a “social norm” - this feels almost satirical. Clearly, though, he means it. Alas, it won’t fix anything for anyone. Except, perhaps, for him.

Broadly speaking, the harm caused by social media falls into two categories. On the one hand, these sites and services have stripped away our privacy. On the other, they’ve made us radical, extreme and odd. Or so I think, but by all means log on to Twitter to wish me a violent, unpleasant death if you disagree.

Some examples might help. First, consider the case of Felix Ngole, who this week is appealing against the decision to throw him off a social work course at Sheffield University for posting on Facebook that “homosexuality is a sin” and “the devil has hijacked the constitution of the USA”.

Second, consider that of Glyn Secker, who was readmitted to the Labour Party after a suspension, following the intervention of Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray. Secker, who is himself Jewish, had been an active member of a notoriously antisemitic Facebook group. Internal Labour emails fretted about statements such as “Jew = Zionist = Israel = Jew”. “We would normally suspend for this,” one email had said.

Without calling for tiny violins, both men have suffered from both of the harms of social media. On privacy, both said something in one context and then unexpectedly had to account for it in another. Both also found themselves saying things that, without social media, they might not have done. Ngole might have gone on a demo and Secker could have put up his hand at one of those events where Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t notice he’s sitting next to a bloke whose T-shirt shows Woody Allen’s head on a spike. Probably, though, if they had said something similar, it wouldn’t have been so extreme.

Sean Parker, the Facebook co-founder, has spoken frankly about social media’s “social-validation feedback loop” that gives you an addictive hit for views and likes. I think myself of how my own views have hardened these past ten years, albeit only into a harder form of middling wibbliness, and about how and why. In process, if not in degree, none of this is so different from the radicalisation of Shamima Begum, groomed online by ISIS, or the glamorisation of self-harm that seduced poor Molly Russell, whose father blamed Instagram for her suicide. You find your tribe, you prove yourself to it, you adjust to its norms.

Paradoxically, though, we only know about this sort of harm because of the other one. It is Facebook’s leaky privacy which allowed Sheffield University to become aware of Ngole’s views on gays, and which confronted Labour, much that it gave a toss, with Secker. A few years ago the pre-eminent political concern about social media was not that it leaked too much, but that it leaked too little, offering near-unbreakable encryption to any criminal, terrorist or paedophile who fancied it. On the surface, Zuckerberg’s new plan looks like an attempt to push that pendulum back towards privacy.

But the idea that “the wrong humans read your stuff” is a fairly niche view of social media’s privacy problem. Of greater concern is the way your online existence becomes a monetised stream of data. We mortals may feel that the actual words we type are an important part of this, but the Zuckbrains know better. Your location, your clicks, your likes, your purchases, your networks: all this is where the dollar lies. Facebook has no intention of turning away from any of it.

The more important problem, though, is that we will continue to become extreme, radicalised and odd, only now nobody else will know. Inside the bar the fight goes on, only now the shutters are down. Worse still, through encryption (and apologies but I can’t think of a bar-themed analogy for this) none of this is even Facebook’s problem any more. Next time, called to account for whatever social or political horror his company appears to have facilitated, Zuckerberg can just shrug and protest not only ignorance but impotence, too.

Do not mistake Facebook’s intentions for a good thing. I know I always say that, but this time it’s definitely true. Zuckerberg might be quite sincere in his awe-struck horror at the power of his own creation, and his own power at the head of it.

His manifesto, though, sets out to solve only that precise problem. Rather than seek to fix the chaos it has helped, his company now plans to back quietly out of the room, leaving us all raging on.

The Times