Facebook just suffered the ugliest few weeks in its history, and I'm not talking about its shares plunging over 40% in the last four months.
The company allegedly sold user data to businesses in secret deals, according to emails and internal documents released this week by U.K. lawmakers. Facebook has for years been collecting Android phone data — dates, times, call lengths, call recipients, phone numbers and text messages — even when people weren’t using its app, and it sold the personal data of over 87 million users to the political analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, even though only about 270,000 people signed up to use it.
But the recent documents show it also considered bypassing user consent by circumventing Google's pop-up permission request.
“This is a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective," one Facebook product manager writes, "but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it.”
This led CEO Mark Zuckerberg to issue a carefully worded denial. "These emails were only part of our discussions," he said. "We've never sold anyone's data.”
But that's cold comfort, because such tactics should never have been entertained in the first place. And it's not the only scandal the company has recently endured.
Facebook admitted last month that in Myanmar — where it's so widely used, many mistake it for the internet — it failed to prevent the military from spreading anti-Rohingya propaganda.
This propaganda incited violence against the Rohingya, who have suffered forced migration, rapes, massacres and had their children beheaded and burned alive.
News broke days later that a South Sudanese child bride had apparently been sold on the site, prompting the local director of one children's rights group to remark, "This barbaric use of technology is reminiscent of latter-day slave markets."
To be fair, South Sudanese human rights lawyer Phillips Ngong has said the auction didn't even take place on Facebook, and that it only went viral because the dowry was so high. But this part of the story won't make headlines, and the bruise to Facebook's reputation will remain.
About a week after that, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said firms like Facebook and Amazon "are distorting the market and our politics” and that the federal government should therefore use antitrust laws to break them up.
Now this week, Robert Hannigan, the former head of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.'s counterpart to the NSA, said when asked if Facebook is a threat to democracy:
Potentially yes. I think it is if it isn't controlled and regulated. But these big companies, particularly where there are monopolies, can't frankly reform themselves. It will have to come from outside."
But where and how to draw that line is a complex problem, and many will surely doubt the government's ability to do it well. As Zuckerberg himself once wrote, Facebook can be a tool for democracy or an instrument of oppression, and "There is no single solution to these challenges, and these are not problems you ever fully fix."
You do get better, however, and Facebook is improving, having expanded its security team by thousands and shutting down propaganda networks. Indeed, its security expenses are so significant they partly account for its shrinking profit margin. Still, it can and should do better. As Brandi Collins, senior campaign director for the civil rights advocacy nonprofit Color of Change, says:
Facebook was created based on this premise of human engagement. But it was built without a human rights frame, and so what we've seen as its grown over 2.2 billion people is that it's shaping political discourse, its having impacts from a psychological and sociological standpoint on all of these different communities around the world but it's without a human rights frame. And so what we've seen are all sorts of shenanigans on their platform, which are replicating models of discrimination that are outlawed in our county, and in other countries, but can't be regulated."
But however much it improves, it will never be good enough. That's the nature of some of the problems it now faces. As Facebook becomes a larger part of human society, it will become increasingly involved in human problems that can never fully be resolved, and for which it will therefore always be partly to blame.
It's therefore our responsibility to make sure Facebook remains an instrument of democracy and connectivity because, as has always been the case, its power ultimately lies with us.
