• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, December 15, 2020

Mark Zuckerberg has managed to do something almost no one else has been able to do. He has actually been able to find one small patch of common ground between the far right and the far left in American politics. It seems everybody hates Facebook, even if it’s for different reasons.

The right hates the fact that they’re not given free rein to say whatever they want without Facebook tagging their posts as misinformation. And the left worries about the erosion of privacy. And antitrust legislators feel Facebook is just too powerful and dominant in the social media market. Mark Zuckerberg has few friends in Washington -- on either side of the aisle.

The common denominator here is control. Facebook has too much of it, and no one likes that. The question on the top of my mind is, “What is Facebook intending to do with that control?” Why is dominance an important part of Zuckerberg’s master plan?

Further, just what is that master plan?  Almost four years ago, in the early days of 2017, Zuckerberg issued a 6,000-word manifesto. In it, he addressed what he called “the most important question of all.” That question was, “Are we building the world we all want?”

According to the manifesto, the plan for Facebook includes “spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science.”

Then, two years later, Zuckerberg issued another lengthy memo about his vision regarding privacy and the future of communication, which “will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.” He explained that Facebook and Instagram are like a town square, a public place for communication. But WhatsApp and Messenger are like your living room, where you can have private conversations without worrying about those conversations.

So, how is all that wonderfulness going, anyway?

Well, first of all, there’s what Mark says, and what Facebook actually does. When he’s not firing off biennial manifestos promising a cotton-candy-colored world, he’s busy assembling all the pieces required to suck up as much data on you as possible, and fighting lawsuits when he gets caught doing something he shouldn’t be.

You have to understand that for Zuckerberg, all these plans are built on a common foundation: Everything happens on a platform that Facebook owns. And those platforms are paid for by advertising. And advertising needs data. And therein lies the problem: What the hell is Facebook doing with all this data?

I’m pretty sure it’s not spreading prosperity and freedom or promoting peace and understanding. Quite the opposite. If you look at Facebook’s fingerprints that are all over the sociological dumpster fire that has been the past four years, you could call them the Keyser Söze of shit disturbing.

And it’s only going to get worse. Facebook and other participants in the attention economy are betting heavily on facial recognition technology. This effectively eliminates our last shred of supposed anonymity online. It forever links our digital dust trail with our real-world activities. And it dumps even more information about you into the voracious algorithms of Facebook, Google and other data devourers. Again, what might be the plans for this data: putting in place the pieces of a more utopian world, or meeting next quarter’s revenue projections?

Here’s the thing. I don’t think Zuckerberg is being wilfully dishonest when he writes these manifestos. I think -- at the time -- he actually believes them. And he probably legitimately thinks that Facebook is the best way to accomplish them. Zuckerberg always believes he’s the smartest one in the room. And he -- like Steve Jobs -- has a reality distortion field that’s always on. In that distorted reality, he believes Facebook -- a company that is entirely dependent on advertising for survival -- can be trusted with all our data. If we just trust him, Facebook will all be okay.

The past four years have proven over and over again that that’s not true. It’s not even possible. No matter how good the intentions you go in with, the revenue model that fuels Facebook will subvert those intentions and turn them into something corrosive.

I think David Fincher summed up the problem nicely in his movie “The Social Network.” There, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin nailed the Zuckerberg nail on the head when he wrote the scene where Zuckerberg’s lawyer said to him, “You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.”

Facebook represents a lethal mixture that has all the classic warning signs of an abusive relationship:

• A corporation that can survive only when its advertisers are happy.
• Advertisers that are demanding more and more data they can use to target prospects.
• A bro-culture where Facebook folks think they’re smarter than everyone else and believe they can actually thread the needle between being fabulous successful as an advertising platform and not being complete assholes.
• And an audience of users who are misplacing their trust by buying into the occasional manifesto, while ignoring the red flags that are popping up every day.

Given all these factors, the question becomes: Will splitting up Facebook be a good or bad thing? It’s a question that will become very pertinent in the year to come. I’d love to hear your thoughts.