How the world is still reeling from the Zuckerberg punch
Ten years ago, the pace of technology, particularly in social media, was a trickle; now it’s a toxic torrent.
No one was prepared for just how damaging Facebook, and social media more broadly, would become.
The 2010s will likely be remembered most for the tech giants’ outsized influence on our lives and our collective inability to rein them in. Social media has disrupted democracy, dumbed down discourse and come at a cost to civil society that we can’t even yet fully understand.
The tech titans’ mysterious algorithms — of which we know virtually nothing — morphed across the decade from mere recommendation engines to the mastermind of what we see and read every day. In contrast to a newspaper editor or a TV news director selecting what stories were most important for people to read — even if they wouldn’t necessarily be popular — a non-human algorithm instead would pick what was most likely to gain clicks, “likes” and engagement.
The news value didn’t matter. What did matter was whether a user was likely to spend more time on Facebook because of the content, and not click away.
This was a whole new phenomenon and led to the “social media bubble”, which we’re only now starting to get a grip on. Facebook became incredibly good at knowing you — what or who your interests, likes, dislikes, friends and family were — then serving you content based on exactly that. Data about you was so valuable that Facebook sold it to third parties without your knowledge or consent. It fed it to advertisers who could sell you products you almost definitely would be interested in.
It also meant Facebook — and to a lesser extent Twitter — ensured users saw only news and other content that aligned with their interests. If you’re a far-left progressive, for example, Facebook knew that and made its news feed contort to your world view. You wouldn’t be shown anything from another point of view but simply have your own reinforced over and over again.
The decade began with so much promise for technology. Broadband was pretty much ubiquitous, and Australia under prime minister Kevin Rudd was set to roll out ultra-fast fibre broadband to every property that could receive it. The advent of cloud technology meant entrepreneurs could start global businesses from their garage, taking advantage of the power of data centres at a fraction of the cost. And by the early 2010s Australia’s love affair with apps was in full swing. Developers were dominating the Apple and Android app stores, raking in cash and creating whole new industries.
Social media, too, was once ripe with promise. Facebook was six years old by 2010, growing from its beginnings as a “hot or not” website for rating girls to a college networking platform. A couple of years later Mark Zuckerberg’s baby had become a fully fledged platform for connecting the entire world. Email was one thing, but Facebook allowed users to truly stay in touch via “statuses”, chat to each other in private messages, and upload photos of everything from their food to their cats to their bikini bodies, and everything between. Everyone was suddenly empowered to have an opinion about anything and everything, for better or worse.
User behaviour gradually changed, with the Facebook app becoming what people would check first thing in the morning, before the newspaper or the TV news. It was becoming more than a website, it was becoming the internet itself. By last month, Facebook had 2.45 billion monthly active users — people logging on to the app at least once a month — and 1.62 billion daily active users.
Facebook and Google reign supreme.
The impact social media had on society cannot be overstated. Russia used paid Facebook ads to manipulate the 2016 US elections, and the tech giant simply had no answer. Kremlin-backed groups paid Facebook to run ads such as “Veterans before illegals”, “300,000 Veterans died waiting to be seen by the VA” and “Cost of healthcare for illegals $1.1bn per year”. There’s still no adequate law covering lies spread via social media, and Facebook itself has proven it cannot be trusted to self-regulate. Zuckerberg recently defended his company’s policy of allowing politicians to lie on Facebook, declaring: “I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians.”
Russia reached 126 million Americans through its advertisements, further dividing an already divided country and allowing misinformation to run rampant.
In Australia, social media may have not had as direct an impact on our elections but it has affected our discourse. Twitter especially has become a confected outrage machine, with its users — many of whom hide behind an anonymous egg avatar — piling on to others whenever there’s perceived sexism, racism or anything offensive, however slight.
Of course much of this behaviour deserves to be called out, but not in such a toxic, highly targeted fashion. Twitter pile-ons leave no room for disagreement and have left their victims unable to work or even, in some cases, committing suicide. One cannot post a reasonable opinion, one that might even be considered mainstream outside the inscrutable walls of Twitter, without facing a maelstrom of malcontents who have nothing better to do than complain. It has reduced our public discourse to a shouting match, and our democracy is worse for it.
Online toxicity also has been matched with a cultural toxicity plaguing many of the tech giants themselves. Uber could be seen through one lens as a great success, allowing users to get from A to B with the touch of a button. On its arrival midway through the 2010s Uber was a revelation, threatening the existence of the quickly outdated taxi industry.
What people didn’t see, however — and this goes for much of the technology industry — was the real cost. Behind the scenes Uber was bleeding money as it expanded rapidly into new markets, and a culture of sexual harassment and “growth at all costs” was brewing.
Chief executive Travis Kalanick, who co-founded the company in March 2009 and was ousted in 2017, set an agenda at Uber in which it would land in a new city — say, Melbourne or Sydney — and operate illegally there until the government was forced to allow it to stay. Its aggressive approach has been a problem with tech across the board; move fast and break things, and leave someone else to pick up the pieces.
Other Silicon Valley tech companies have become virtual parodies of themselves, spruiking a better, happier world yet busing their employees past homeless shelters and paying a pittance in tax, neglecting roles they should be playing in their communities.
The malaise also manifested in smaller yet still significant ways. Screen addiction meant whole generations forgot how to talk to one another, and for many restaurants taking photos of food became more important than eating it. The advent of smartphones meant we were expected to be “always on”, and available to respond to emails and text messages late at night or on weekends, to the detriment of our collective mental health. Technology was meant to make us work “smarter not harder”, yet the fact it went with us everywhere we went resulted in a constant low-level anxiety. We’ve also become the “on demand” generation, unable to wait for anything and requiring instant gratification, whether it be food deliveries, or “likes” from Instagram and Facebook. Patience used to be a virtue; now it’s nonexistent.
There were some benefits to social media’s rampant rise that can’t be forgotten, and some helped shape the decade. The Arab Spring anti-government uprising that spread across much of the Islamic world in the early 2010s was driven largely by social media, with the likes of Twitter and Facebook enabling activists to communicate, spread awareness of their causes and drive change. The #MeToo movement, which brought down alleged predators such as film producer Harvey Weinstein and actor Kevin Spacey and forced an important conversation on power dynamics and sex.
The tech boom also led to Aussie entrepreneurs building global companies that give hope to a diverse economy beyond mining and banking. Take software company Atlassian, which started the decade small and now is listed on the US Nasdaq and worth more than Qantas and Telstra. It doesn’t hire salespeople, instead relying on word of mouth and tech collaboration products that work. Co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar are billionaires, in the top 10 on The Australian’s rich list, and wield more influence across corporate Australia than most top executives. Their rise wouldn’t have been possible without cloud computing.
There’s also something special — dare we say magical — about the ability to stream basically the entire history of music through your smartphone via the likes of Spotify and Apple Music. Swedish tech giant Spotify was founded at the beginning of the decade and has promised us a world of music at the touch of a button. It’s easy to take for granted now, but searching for your favourite band’s greatest hits takes five seconds, not five hours, and you can listen as much as you like for free (or for $9.99 with a premium subscription). Or think about Netflix — the chore of trudging to the video store to pay $10 for a new-release DVD rental has been replaced with paying $10 for a full month’s worth of TV and movies, all available with a click.
The flip side is we’re now grappling with subscription fatigue, with more and more services vying for a cut of your monthly subscription budget. Combining the likes of Stan, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Foxtel Now would soon add up to an amount that costs more a month than a Foxtel cable subscription used to.
Tech can and should be blamed for much, but there are signs the next decade could be brighter.
Governments around the world are waking up to the fact regulation is needed for the digital wild west. The EU has introduced General Data Protection Regulation, a privacy framework forcing tech companies to give users more choice when it comes to what data they hand over.
Australia too, at the end of the decade, has proposed new laws to tip the balance back in the favour of consumers, giving them more tools to protect themselves. It’s not the big whack many felt the tech giants deserved but at least it will give users much-needed freedom — freedom they should have had to begin with. And in contrast to conventional wisdom, artificial intelligence isn’t likely to tear through our economy. As long as we adequately prepare our children for the jobs of the future, AI will merely augment humans and allow them to do what humans do best: be creative, empathetic problem solvers.
As for social media, while Facebook is showing no signs of collapsing the way ill-fated forebears MySpace and Friendster did, it says it is moving to make its apps, which include Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, encrypted end to end. That already presents challenges for law enforcement but gives users a guarantee of privacy. Zuckerberg’s proposal to offer a digital “living room” rather than a “town square” is welcome, repositioning social media as somewhere people want to spend time.
There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle when it comes to the impact social media, and tech disruption more broadly, has had on our lives. But the right conversations are starting to be had and the Australian population is more empowered when it comes to privacy and our own data. Tech’s influence no doubt will be even greater in the next decade, but hopefully powerful lessons have been learned and we can yet avoid the tech dystopia so many still fear.
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