and managing director of Elevation Partners, has been writing critiques of Facebook and sounding the alarm about social media manipulation of election campaigns since mid-2016. Because Facebook’s business is fueled by profits from advertising, he writes in the current edition of Washington Monthly, it draws on its “vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals” to offer advertisers the option to pinpoint their messages to small slices of the population. (Same goes for Google, he says.)
Not only can advertisers micro-target tailored messages to the people most likely to respond; they can also hide their inflammatory messages from others who might be offended by them, McNamee writes.
“Algorithms that maximize attention give an advantage to negative messages,” McNamee says in the article. “Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy. The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.”
Internet platforms have created “billions of individual channels, each of which can be pushed further into negativity and extremism without the risk of alienating other audience members,” McNamee writes. “To the contrary: the platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas.”
In other words, McNamee thinks Facebook is sort of re-engineering people’s brains. The more a person’s beliefs are reinforced, the more resistant they are to contrary facts, he argues. “Facebook takes the concept one step further with its ‘groups’ feature, which encourages like-minded users to congregate around shared interests or beliefs. While this ostensibly provides a benefit to users, the larger benefit goes to advertisers, who can target audiences even more effectively.’’
McNamee is calling for a number of regulatory remedies:
—-A moratorium on acquisitions by huge platforms that, he says, maintain their monopoly power over online communication by snapping up potential competitors.
—-A ban on digital bots that impersonate humans and give readers the impression that many people support their own biases.
—-Consumers should be able to see what attributes are causing advertisers to target them. “If Facebook and Google had to be up-front about the reason you’re seeing conspiracy theories—namely, that it’s good for business—they would be far less likely to stick to that tactic,” McNamee writes.
—-Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others should have to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received, McNamee writes.
—-A limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by Internet platforms. “Customers understand that their ‘free’ use of platforms like Facebook and Google gives the platforms license to exploit personal data,” McNamee writes. “The problem is that platforms are using that data in ways consumers do not understand, and might not accept if they did.”
——Consumers, not the platforms, should own their own data. “In the case of Facebook, this includes posts, friends, and events—in short, the entire social graph.” (The issue of data ownership is gaining in importance across many sectors, from healthcare to smart homes and devices.)
“Algorithms can be beautiful in mathematical terms, but they are only as good as the people who create them,” McNamee writes. “In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.”
Photo Credit: Depositphotos
