Time for Facebook to face a better future

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. Picture: Ron Sachs - CNP / MEGA

It’s hard to classify a company like Facebook. Is it a tech company, a media company, a publishing company, a data mining company or a communications company?

Mysteriously, it’s all of the above and a whole lot more. And oddly, a whole lot less.

What sort of company would publish a video of a brutal murder and allow a Mexican crime cartel to recruit killers on its pages? Or a company that facilitates sex slavery and trafficking in the Middle East?

What do we call a company that knowingly allows a vicious military junta in Myanmar to use its media resources to hunt down and kill ethnic minorities and dissidents?

There is nothing else to call it. It’s Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal has compiled a series called Facebook Files based largely on information and documents provided by former Facebook employees including manager turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen.

More than a third of the world’s 7.9 billion people use Facebook. Hundreds of millions more use its messaging app, What’sApp and Facebook’s photo video sharing and social networking app, Instagram.

Across the board, there appears to be little or no sense of curation, little or no editorial control and worse, no moral compass to the company. Virtually no one within the company’s senior management seems to care much about what content it publishes, especially the content created in the developing world.

Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as CJNG, is based in Mexico’s central western province of Jalisco. It has been identified by US anti-drug officials, including the FBI and the ATF, as America’s “biggest criminal threat.” It has an estimated 20,000 members. Its primary function is to smuggle cocaine and methamphetamine into the US, worth at wholesale level (rather than the exaggerated street level) at least $5 billion per annum.

It runs second to the Sinaloa cartel in terms of drug profits. Sinaloa remains a force to be reckoned with as a transnational syndicate despite the arrest of its titular leader, ‘El Chapo’ Guzman who languishes in a US federal prison. But the CJNG are arguably more dangerous. The cartel has been linked to several massacres in Mexico. CJNG members are heavily armed. Several years ago, the cartel attempted to purchase belt-fed M-60 machine guns and once took down one of the Mexican army’s helicopters with a surface to air missile.

One of CJNG’s Facebook pages featured a video of a man being shot in the head with arterial blood mist spraying from his neck. There was another photograph of a large bag filled with severed hands. Similarly, CJNG Facebook and Instagram posts reveal attempts to recruit and train hitmen in Mexico. These included clear instructions that those undergoing training would be severely beaten or killed if they attempted to leave their training camp.

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testifies about Facebook during a Senate Committee on Capitol Hill. Picture: AFP

Obviously, posts such as these are in breach of Facebook’s rules but little or nothing seems to happen. Most of the CJNG posts have been removed now but some featuring boastful gangsters with their guns remain.

In 2018, hate speech directed at Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya people escalated on Facebook pages. Much of it was driven by the Myanmar Army and it formed part of the justification for ethnic cleansing pogroms in the southeast Asian nation.

At first Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg deflected and denied but later that year, he wrote a letter of apology of a ‘to whom it may concern’ type.

It took more than a year for Facebook to act on a sophisticated human trafficking trade in the Middle East. On Facebook and Instagram shady employment agencies were allowed to advertise workers that could be supplied to employers in forced labour. Workers were subject to appalling work conditions akin to slavery and often were subject to sexual abuse.

The company did little but remove a few of the more outrageous pages from advertisers until Apple Inc. threatened to remove Facebook products from its app store and then and only then, did Facebook act.

On Wednesday morning AET, former Facebook employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, gave evidence to a Congressional hearing in Washington DC offering further evidence that the company’s site and apps, “harm children, stoke division and weaken (US) democracy.”

Facebook is under pressure to address its apparent ethical failings. Picture: AFP

The initial response from Facebook was that Haugen was a mid-level employee of little note and without the clout or access to make good on her claims.

But, in a rare moment of bipartisanship in the Capitol building, both Democrats and Republicans seem to have reached an agreement that something needs to be done about Facebook’s profit driven amorality.

The problem is the political leaders have no idea how to go about it. Many summoned ghosts from the distant past, calling for action similar to the break-up of the Bell System in 1982, where US telco giant AT&T was forced to divest in order to break down the monopoly in telecommunications services or face multiple prosecutions from the Department of Justice under US antitrust law.

That alone would be a terribly 1980s solution to a problem that exists in an entirely different communications landscape in the 21st Century.

It may form part of the answer but only a part. Facebook needs to be transparent so that its users know and understand the algorithms it uses to lure people into places they would otherwise not go. Facebook needs to undertake a more comprehensive curation process where misinformation is removed or not published at all. It needs to create and live by advertising standards that do not promote fakery and outright criminality. It needs to undertake a prohibition on data mining and the sale of personal information. Ultimately, it needs to ensure it is not the first port of call for criminal organisations.

These measures will necessarily affect Facebook’s bottom line but everyone from the multi-billionaire Zuckerberg down have run out of excuses and the profit at all costs approach has come to an end.

In the wake of Haugen’s testimony, Facebook issued a statement.

“It’s been 25 years since the rules for the internet have been updated, and instead of expecting the industry to make societal decisions that belong to legislators, it is time for Congress to act,” the statement read.

There’s just a sniff of deliberate disingenuity here. Playing the victim, if you like. What it is time for is Facebook to face up to its role as communications company, a publisher, a media company and subject its pages to a rigorous editorial process and more importantly be honest with its billions of users.