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Why Facebook is Destroying Civil Society: In 218 Words
By Shlomo Maital
Social media are destroying civil society. Here is why, in 218 simple words. I base this blog on the brilliant words of a young Egyptian, whose Facebook posts initiated the massive 2011 protests that ousted Hosni Mubarak. He was interviewed on a recent BBC program.
Facebook and all social media earn fortunes in profit. In 2018 Facebook had $55 billion in revenues and made $22 billion in net income (profit), a 40% net margin!
Facebook earns money by advertising. Advertising is based on ‘eyeballs’ (number of viewers). So Facebook engineers build algorithms that maximize profit by maximizing ‘engagement’ (number of viewers).
Engagement is maximized by hatred and negative messages. Why? Psychologically, negative messages gain more attention than positive ones.
What role does truth play? Virtually none. You can post almost anything. Like the fake video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ‘stumbling’ on her words (didn’t happen). Facebook refused to remove it.
Result: Conventional media like newspapers are driven out of business by social media. The investigative journalism of newspapers is replaced by the vicious falsehoods propagated by social media, entirely to make short-term profit.
Result: A sharp decline in public trust, in the institutions that govern us — legislatures, politicians, political leaders and even the courts.
What can be done, when a lot of really bad people, like Russia’s “Fancy Bear” unit linked closely with GRU (KGB’s successor), use social media to screw up elections? What happens when economists pitch the idea that if you let greedy companies like Facebook maximize profits, everybody wins? What happens when people don’t yet grasp the immense harm social media are doing, let alone press for action to constrain them? What happens when the evil asymmetry of ‘hate drives out love’ generates $22 billion a year in profit, when just a decade ago Facebook LOST $56 million?
I have no idea.
Yuval Noah Harari: 21 lessons for the 21st C
By Shlomo Maital
Yuval Noah Harari
Historian Yuval Noah Harari has written two smash hit books: Sapiens (about the past – a huge bestseller, a vest pocket overview of human history and progress) and Homo Deus (about mankind’s future ). Now comes his third – about the present.
The book was reviewed by none other than Bill Gates, in The New York Times (Sept. 1-2).
The structure of the book is very well organized: Part I. The Technological Challenge (disillusionment, work, liberty, equality), Part II. The Political Challenge (community, civilization, nationalism, religion, immigration), Part III. Despair and Hope. (Terrorism, war, humility, God, secularism) Part IV Truth. (ignorance, justice, post-truth, science fiction) and Part V. Resilience (education, meaning meditation).
Harari writes in his introduction: What are today’s greatest challenges and most important changes? What should we pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?
As Bill Gates notes, Harari does not really offer ‘lessons’, prescriptions or solutions in depth, but instead, helps formulate the key questions – far more valuable, I believe. And he is basically optimistic. True, globalization (the amazing system of cooperation among nations, in which goods, services, ideas, technology, money and people flow freely among countries, driven by opportunity) is under assault. But it is irreversible and Gates notes, “though we took two steps backward in the past two years [since Trump’s election in 2016] before that we took a thousand steps forward.”
So why does it seem that the world is in decline? Because, Gates rightly observes, “we are much less willing to tolerate misfortune and misery”. And, he might have added, because the enormous resonating sound board of the media obsessively harps on the bad news, because it seems that is what brings them eyes and ears and ratings (and ad money).
One prediction of Harari that I think is correct: In the past, land was the source of wealth, then, machinery, then, technology and creativity – and today? It is, he says, data. It is as if social media mine our data (gold) for free, collect it (for free), then sell it directly and indirectly for a high price.
Harari thinks social media create political polarization, because they help people build cocoons, interacting only with ‘friends’ who share their views and consume only information they like and agree with, even if false.
Gates, still a hard worker, wants Harari to address THE fundamental question – when machine learning, artificial intelligence and other technologies give us longer, happier, wealthier lives, with little or no human labor – where will we find meaning in our lives? Why get up in the morning?
Perhaps that world is hard for us to imagine today. Perhaps we will have to deal with it in real time – if and when it happens.
TIMnovate 