Facebook’s Id Is Showing – By Alexis C. Madrigal (The Atlantic) / Jan 8 2020
An executive’s leaked memo suggests that the company wants to return to the pre-Trump world.
Was Facebook responsible for the election of Donald Trump in 2016? Trump’s campaign says yes. Most of his opposition says yes. And now a ranking executive at Facebook, Andrew Bosworth, says yes. “I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks,” Bosworth wrote in an internal “Thoughts for 2020” post that leaked yesterday, and that he subsequently posted in full. “He didn’t get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica.”
So what did get him elected then?
First, you have to know who is talking here. Bosworth, known inside and outside Facebook as Boz, is the company’s id. As one of Mark Zuckerberg’s computer-science teachers and a very early employee, Bosworth has unusual latitude to say the quiet parts of Facebook’s self-conception out loud. He does this in posts that Facebook employees can read—and although they are far from official announcements, this isn’t just some guy talking or even a hot-mic moment. Boz is Facebook rootstock, and what he says reflects, at the very least, part of the conversation swirling around the company’s executives. (I reached out to Facebook, and the company had no further comment on the memo.)
The crux of Bosworth’s post is that Facebook, fundamentally, doesn’t need to change. Maybe some tweaks here and there (“get ahead of polarization and algorithmic transparency”), but the system as a whole is sound. In the Facebook mind-set, this seems to suggest that the social network does not meaningfully distort the “natural” preferences that people have. Whatever mess you see on its platform, it is the same mess that exists out there in the world, and Facebook is a fair playing field on which seekers of attention are rewarded roughly in accordance with their quality.
This is the context for the crucial line in Bosworth’s post: “[Trump] got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.” In other words, Donald Trump earned the Electoral College victory. Facebook played a crucial role, but merely as a conduit for fair-and-square campaigning. Trump’s campaign was running orders of magnitude more types of ads than the Clinton campaign, and it does seem like it was effective.
It’s easy to imagine the continuation of the argument: Would anyone blame the medium of television for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 victory just because Kennedy was so much better than Richard Nixon on TV? One might even ask the same thing about the direct-mail revolution—and its great kingpin, Karl Rove. Would you ban the mail just because some political operatives got good at using it to win elections?
Since the 2016 election, many different and sometimes conflicting critics have sprung up. Among the complaints: an openness to exploitation by bad-faith actors like Russian operatives, the propensity of the system to propel conspiracy theories and fake news, a lingering sense that the company has not fully accepted responsibility for the content that courses through its pipes, and a fractal irresponsibility epitomized by the company’s slow-motion responses to Facebook-inflected human-rights crises, such as that in Myanmar (also called Burma).
Continue to article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/facebook-boz-memo/604639/
