Richard Connor: Sure, we like Facebook – but it’s a giant out of control

Moon over Colorado – friends liked this on Facebook. (Photo by Richard Connor)

A friend phoned recently to facetiously compliment me.

“Congratulations on joining the 21st Century and using Facebook,” he said. “You’ve started using it right before social media becomes government regulated.”

How prescient that warning appears today as Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, attempt to defend, defuse, explain and apologize, sort of, for the egregious data mining of Facebook users’ personal information by a company called Cambridge Analytica.

That company, which provides voter profiling to political campaigns, obtained information about Facebook users and their friends from a researcher who had collected the data in the course of developing a personality quiz app for Facebook. Cambridge Analytica then allegedly sold voter profiles based on the information to political clients, including Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

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As The New York Times explained on March 22: “The reaction to the Cambridge Analytica disclosure has been severe. Politicians in the United States and Britain have called for Mr. Zuckerberg to explain how his company handles user data, and state attorneys general in Massachusetts and New York have begun investigating Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. A #DeleteFacebook movement calling on people to close their accounts has also gathered steam.

“In Washington, there have been more calls for regulation of internet companies like Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg’s troubles there were illustrated by the final passage on Wednesday (March 21) of a bill to combat sex trafficking. The bill would lift liability protections that internet companies have enjoyed for content that users post on their platforms. Facebook and other internet giants had quietly fought the bill for more than a year, but eventually dropped their opposition.”

Prior to this latest debacle it was discovered that Russian agents mined Facebook data as part of Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by, among other things, creating phony ads and fake news about political candidates.

Beyond all that, Facebook has for many years been accused of falsifying its audience numbers – figures that affect the company’s ability to attract advertisers who pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Facebook’s coffers.

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Facebook is also known to extract shackle-like non-disclosure agreements from those it does business with to prevent those companies from going public with complaints about questionable or suspicious business practices.

Facebook and other social media will be government-regulated before long. Count on it. My friend was right on target.

Inflated or not, Facebook’s audience numbers are massive – the company claims 50 billion – yes, billion with a b – monthly users. Facebook is an enormous, powerful train surging down the track at us. It derails regularly but is soon back on track and chugging dangerously along.

That’s why it has to be stopped.

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True, I came to the party late. About a month ago I began using Facebook regularly in order to test reaction to my columns but mostly because of a renewed interest in photography. My posts reconnected me with many people and also brought new friends to the page. The comments were encouraging and validated my work. Several were inspiring. The photo that drew the most response was a black and white picture of an early evening moon over the Colorado mountains. A column I wrote about my friend Marty Richter and an accompanying photo were shared with literally hundreds of people.

So, I have found the experience rewarding even if time-consuming. The experience has also shown me what I previously thought about Facebook. Yes, it has billions of users but they are an older demographic, folks at least in their mid-40s and more likely in their 50s and 60s.

Younger people use Instagram and Snapchat.

Demographics aside, Facebook is a company that needs to be brought under control. Some of those controls, unfortunately, may challenge the First Amendment and the right of free speech. That would concern me greatly.

Facebook is tremendously effective and useful for communicating certain types of information. Photography seems to draw well. Inspirational messages work. It’s great for Happy Birthdays and sharing family news.

But information that seems perfectly innocent and harmless when shared with friends and family can be extremely dangerous when it falls into the wrong hands. And as we have now seen all too often, Facebook is alarmingly careless when it comes to keeping information from ending up in the “wrong hands.”

The company and its founder have not been worthy stewards of the public trust. Facebook is too big and too rich – and the people who run the company obviously believe they are above the law and not subject to traditional standards of personal accountability and business ethics.

What to do? The best advice I’ve seen comes from technology journalist April Glaser, writing about the #DeleteFacebook movement for Slate:

“… sure, delete Facebook if you can. The company may not deserve your trust or your business, and you’ll have more free time to do other, better things. But if you can’t quit, that’s OK, too. That’s why #DeleteFacebook is the wrong message: It frames this as an issue of individual consumer choice. But it’s really a problem in search of a solution either from Facebook itself – changing its service so that its users really can feel safe – or from the government, which may need to step in and blow the whistle on Facebook’s entire business model.

“If you think Facebook is worth deleting over its issues, then call your elected official to regulate the company, as well as other companies, like Google, that profit from harvesting our personal details to sell ads tailored to us across the internet. Because it’s becoming clearer that we can’t trust these companies to regulate themselves, and these conversations about user privacy, security, and well-being are incredibly important for those who can’t afford to not be on Facebook.”

Richard Connor is president and publisher of the Fort Worth Business Press. Contact him at rconnor@bizpress.net