the leadership is the problem. from a systemic perspective, it's incentives (borne of societally-mediated values). you don't change systems by treating symptoms, but rather the incentives.
Facebook intentionally focuses attention on Zuckerberg. "By all means, pump out memes about Android Zuck. Pay no attention to the inherent evil in our business model that cannot be fixed without destroying the company, or the shareholders behind the curtain who will keep right on pushing that business model because it makes them piles of cash."
> According to an estimate from CNBC last year, that means Zuckerberg and insiders control about 70 percent of Facebook’s voting shares, with Zuckerberg controlling about 60 percent. So whatever shareholders are voting on, Zuckerberg and those closest to him get to have the final say.
So the rest of the "leadership" are effectively Zuckerberg's proxies. Absolutely nothing Facebook does is beyond his control.
[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/30/18644755/facebook-stock...
The market doesn't care about user privacy or ethics. The market only cares about making more money than was made before. They only care if the source of data (us) get so fed up we stop giving them our data.
With Zuckerberg controlling 60% of the votes (and thus able to remove any of them unilaterally), the board has exactly one person they need to keep happy.
Zuckerberg could decide tomorrow that Facebook should be converted into a christian singles dating site, share price be damned, and the board would comply or they would be replaced.
The tech boom has put, at various points, incredible power in the founders hands to dictate the terms of how corporate governance works. In the case of Facebook, Zuckerberg has controlling interest in the company. He can overrule shareholders and the board via his special class of shares.
An even more egregious example is Snap (NYSE: SNAP) - shareholders who purchase common shares of Snap don't even having voting rights at all. Between Evan + Bobby - they have 90% control of the shares. Even if you buy 100% of the available shares, you cannot even vote on company governance - let alone have any sort of control over the business.
- "tech has a causal effect on society"
- "society has a causal effect on tech, tech is a mirror"
At this point it seems pretty patently obvious that the reality is both? Technology is subject to pre-existing flaws in society, but also has the capability to amplify and worsen it.
> the popularity of these posters demonstrates that their userbase is increasingly low rent
It's worth considering if exposure to FB is what is causing the userbase increasingly "low rent". Yeah, FB didn't invent partisanship, misinformation, nor authoritarianism, but I think likely it is worsening it.
Absolutely, Zuckerberg is basically a younger, less human version of Rupert Murdoch. He's going where the money takes him, and he's happy to exploit a profitable niche. My point though is that it's increasingly clear that Facebook's audience is becoming just that, an aging niche, and that's not a great place to be for a social media platform. We know what happens to those.
Just like Rupert Murdoch's various tabloids, exposure does indeed affect the consumers of that media, and it becomes an ouroboros of tabloid-type hysteria. I don't think that's what bothers facebook though, just the fact that this type of niche audience is a loser in the long run.
A few counter points can be made here.
Yours is a very US centric view. As one example, in several Central and South American countries, Facebook is everything. It's where everybody is, and this weird western idea that mingling with old people is "not cool" isn't a thing there.
Facebook is nearing 3 billion ACTIVE users. Astonishing to call that a niche. It isn't shrinking or stagnating, it keeps growing.
Last, the obsession with non-teenage users somehow being the death of a social network is ridiculous. Most people in this world are not teenagers. Adults have all the money, and all the political money.
Who cares what teenagers think is cool? Teenagers are idiots and they don't have any money. They aren't going to grow up in your service, they'll dump it within 2 years.
There is no reason that social networks have to be run by firms as unethical as Facebook (i.e., there is no reason for social networks to be run as unethically as Facebook's is run). Please don't bore us with any "the market is always right" arguments. The people in "Western" nations who have decided to use Facebook less (and perhaps, other social networks more) have better taste and more agency than the people you're talking about. Those people should also acquire better taste and more agency.
How do you know?
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-myanma...
It is not just tech. It is pretty much everything else on the internet and media. No one is telling me the pros and cons anymore. After I read the pros I have to go and dig up my own list of cons or vice versa. No one is finishing the sentence with "having said that" and round off with some counter argument. Most are so consumed by their own ideology they fail to see anything else.
>It's worth considering if exposure to FB is what is causing the userbase increasingly "low rent". Yeah, FB didn't invent partisanship, misinformation, nor authoritarianism, but I think likely it is worsening it.
I would argue had any other Social Network raised instead of Facebook during the Web 2.0 era the effect would had been the same. I once try to make a smaller social network to force an opposite view on their feeds to try and balance things. Holly mother of god the backlash were insane. My conclusion was that this sort of extremism is a function of human nature. Before social media people would buy news paper they prefer or fit their own ideology.
"The only way to understand the Press is to remember that they pander to their readers' prejudices."
- Sir Humphrey Appleby
Internet "press" is no different to press in the 80s. Only at a much greater scale and fully automatic.
Its mind boggling how much of that show is still relevant today.
FB bought Oculus because they're beholden to Apple and Google in the mobile space; if VR is the next major platform (Zuck thought it was 10 years away in 2015) and Oculus is the market leader, it weakens Apple/Google's control on them.