On Why We Can’t Dismiss the Facebook Papers
Think of a large town, just sixteen short years ago. There are two town squares at either end, with a persuasive speaker on a soapbox in each. People drift by as they go about their lives and stop to listen. One speaker is filled with grievance and hatred, spewing out his distorted view of a world that he wants his listeners to reshape in the image of his anger and resentment. The other speaker is equally dismayed at the troubles and inequities he sees. He preaches a positive future that is reshaped to increase our confidence in our own abilities to solve those problems and entreats his audience to join him in reaching for our better angels. The audiences for both speakers come to his soapbox randomly they exposed to both points of view.

Then, some gain the ability to direct the negatively predisposed traffic to the negative soapbox speaker. The negative speaker finds a much bigger and targeted audience than ever possible and his following exponentially grows. The tools to direct the traffic are also available to the positive soapboxer, but there’s less excitement and momentum among that audience. This is essentially what Faceboook is doing. Directing people to the negative soapboxers and creating isolated audiences.

Most of us are just now learning about algorithms. But there are some among us who have a sixteen year start in exploring their potential. In the quest for profit and power, they have either agreed or been coopted into lending their talents to the negative outcomes of this mind-bending technology. One woman, Frances Haugen, a software engineer who became alarmed at the destructive use of social media, has now made us all aware of what is happening to us. She has collected a huge trove of proof that the skewing of public opinion and attitudes has been both purposeful and known to be damaging. She will go down in history as perhaps the most heroic and consequential corporate whistleblower of all time. Yet we stand in danger of her expose being denied and dismissed.

We are a society that highly prizes our willingness to hear all views. Many will defend Facebooks manipulations as a new-age expansion of the freedom of speech. Others will use that as a way to continue to massively profit or gain power. If we let that approach to this new technology become the starting point, it will be difficult to deal with its excesses. We are really in danger of losing freedoms we haven’t worried about before. The freedom of thought, the freedom manipulation and the freedom of a balanced exposure to ideas. Facebook channels people into “thought caves” and entraps those who are predisposed to negativity, in a sealed world that reinforces their worst impulses. If we were talking in terrorist terms, we would say they have been “radicalized”. Out of that comes a populace less able to “hear” a rounded set of ideas, emotionally stoked, and increasingly open to anti-social and violent solutions. It bars real debate, makes compromise impossible and leads to unbreachable chasms in a nation that is grappling with difficult changes that require mutual cooperation to overcome.

We are already part way down the Facebook rabbit hole and in a poor position to confront the dangers of social media. Yet we must deal with what is happening to us, or disintegrate into a completely dysfunctional and splintered nation. The task is daunting. It’s critical to hold on to our freedom of speech and the fair sharing of discordant ideas. The challenge of Facebook and social media as a whole, is that it can enhance our knowledge and access to each other, but we can’t afford it to eliminate our ability to use that broadened understanding in the pursuit of mutually beneficial solutions.

ihg 10-25-2021

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