Perhaps the most remarkable but little-remembered story of Facebook’s rise to social behemoth is that from 2009 to 2012 it was actually a democracy. Facebook’s users could vocalize the issues affecting them the most and issues that attracted sufficient number of users could actually be placed to a formal vote, with the results legally binding on Facebook itself. While the reality was slightly less utopian, with limits on the kinds of issues that could be brought to a vote, the process was overall a genuine form of democratic representation by Facebook’s users in the site’s governance. Unfortunately, we failed to vote and so the site took away our democratic rights and morphed into the digital dictatorship it is today. As rumblings grow for Facebook to turn back into a democracy, we would do well to reflect on this chapter in the site’s history and what it means for the future of representation in our digital walled gardens that increasingly control the global flow of information.
As Facebook’s influence over the digital landscape has grown to encompass nearly a quarter of the earth’s entire population, there has been growing scrutiny over the representativeness of its policies, especially those governing acceptable speech and how it uses the private data of its two billion users.
A growing number of policymakers and pundits have called for Facebook’s two billion users to have more say in its policies, creating the same kind of democratic governance structures that have become the most effective structures of modern states.
Yet the problem with these calls are that they ignore the fact that Facebook actually was a democracy for three years. While the company exercised considerable control over what could come up for a vote and many of the issues it is grappling with today were not among those it surfaced to its users to vote upon, the fact remains that Facebook was still a limited democracy.
Most importantly, unlike many of the “democratic” experiments of its peers, these votes were not “advisory” votes that merely provided “feedback” that could be readily dismissed. The votes were actually legally binding upon Facebook, giving its users a very real voice in its governance.
Unfortunately, Facebook’s users did not exercise their right to vote and thus the company eventually stripped these rights and transformed into today’s digital dictatorship.
The story of Facebook’s transition from democracy to dictatorship is actually a fascinating look at the scaling issues inherent in direct representation. As Facebook grew, it became harder for any meaningful percentage of users to be mobilized. Indeed, this is one of the reasons today that most “democracies” involve fulltime legislators representing their constituents rather than requiring a popular vote for every policy change.
However instead of transitioning from a popular democracy towards one with representatives reflecting the views of their constituents, Facebook simply removed all mechanisms through which its users could instill their will on its governance.
Most importantly, Facebook’s story reminds us that despite how important we claim our democratic ideals are to us and how much we are willing to fight for a representative form of governance, we cannot actually be bothered to exercise those rights when it matters.
Facebook offered all of us the right to a democratic form of governance in which every Facebook user could choose what future they wanted for the company. We couldn’t be bothered to exercise those rights, so they were taken away.
For all the calls to restore some semblance of representative governance within Facebook, the unfortunate truth is that we simply don’t care about our digital rights anymore.
If Facebook announced tomorrow that every one of its policies was being put up for a vote and that we could decide to put an end to its use of our data, halt its targeted ads, force new concessions regarding security and so on, the reality is that few of us would actually take the time to vote.
It is not an issue of getting Facebook to give us a vote. The real issue is getting the public to care anymore.
Putting this all together, Facebook was once a democracy but we didn’t exercise our rights so they were stripped away. Simply giving us back those voting rights is unlikely to have any meaningful change on Facebook’s governance structures, since the deeper issue is not our lack of voting power but rather the fact that we simply aren’t willing to exercise it.
In the end, society seems entirely comfortable rushing towards 1984.
