A bit of holiday reading
I’ve been reading Sarah Wynne-Williams’ alarming insider account of working at Facebook up to and during the 2016 election in the US (Careless People: A story of where I used to work). Before reading it, I had assumed that the Facebook algorithm settings which privileged outrage, anger, hate-speech and the like had more or less automatically worked in Trump’s favour in that election campaign. It was the algorithms, stupid, the workings of the machine.
Turns out, that was naïve. Wynne-Williams tells us that Facebook’s involvement in Trump’s election was far more deliberate and far less machine-like than that. The algorithms played their part, but they were themselves carefully curated and deployed by those charged with generating profits for the company.
Over that campaign period, Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, working with their programmers, advertising copywriters, media buyers, network engineers and data scientists. Using the data tools Facebook had designed for commercial advertising, they microtargeted users and tweaked their ads for maximum engagement. Literally millions of bespoke messages were sent out, delivering political advertising, misinformation, fake news, inflammatory posts and fundraising calls. The result, Wynne-Williams writes, was the invention of a ‘new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House’.
Actually, it was the business, stupid.
Why? Well, it certainly wasn’t about the politics – the folks at Facebook could care less about that. And it seems that it wasn’t especially about delivering Trump his victory. They could care less about that as well – in fact, it seems as if they had assumed Trump was likely to lose. And Facebook is as disinterested in political ideologies as it is in the public good.
No, it was just about the money. The Trump campaign was one of Facebook’s top advertisers, globally, and the corporation’s enthusiasm for Trump was driven by the high levels of user engagement his campaign was able to generate as it flooded the zone with outrage, anger, fear, hate, lies and just plain bullshit.
Moving fast and really breaking things
Wynne-Williams’ title, ‘Careless People’, draws explicitly on F.Scott Fitzgerald’s famous description of his characters Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, who cared little about cleaning up the mess they had made of the lives around them. But, on the evidence she provides, Zuckerberg and co are not at all careless. They are intensely, crazily, venally, focused. And the mess they have made, continue to make, is not just confined a bunch of folks living in the Hamptons. This one is global and its consequences, from time to time, are catastrophic.
What this book describes is moment after moment when the damage Facebook was creating was brought to the attention of Zuckerberg or one of his executives. There is no question, according to Wynne-Williams, that Facebook knew it was doing harm to the children and teenagers it was targeting with misinformation, with attacks on their self-esteem, with encouragement for self-harm, with gendered and racial abuse. But they did nothing about it.
And there is no question, according to Wynne-Williams, that Facebook’s intervention into the political dynamics of a country such as Myanmar played a part in generating the catastrophic events that were to unfold there. Again, and despite frantic warnings from some of their more enlightened colleagues who could see the disaster unfolding, they did nothing.
It’s worse than you think
I understand that much of this is what we kind of expected to learn from such a book, but as you read, it is hard to avoid spluttering with disbelief at the moral bankruptcy, and the pure simplicity of the greed, that has driven this evil enterprise.
It is a sobering book, testimony from the coal face about the consequences of the free pass given to social media to do what the rest of the media cannot, along with the increasingly corrosive effects on what Facebook, ludicrously, likes to describe as their ‘community’. They have succeeded in shitposting their way into the social itself.
The next new low
Just as I finished reading Wynne-Williams’ book, I came across the notorious video that the White House posted a few days ago. US politics gets more like an episode of South Park every day. Trump’s video post has an AI generated image of him wearing a crown while piloting a plane which is dumping shit all over his enemies at the No Kings protests.
Trust Donald Trump to take us to the latest ‘new low’ in political debate, reducing it to a juvenile battle between (in this case literal) shit posts over social media.
As our political parties in Australia continue to invest in building up what they like to call their ‘social media game’, maybe it is only a matter of time before this becomes an acceptable feature of politics in Australia as well. God help us.
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