Over the past few years, Facebook has repeatedly found itself in hot water. After a series of privacy breaches tanked public trust, it also failed to address how its platform was used to spread disinformation in the U.S. and abroad. And the company still faces continued concerns about deleted or heavily regulated content.
Now Facebook has found its answer: to focus on private messages, not on its news feed which cannot be fixed. That’s a good solution for the company, but don’t expect it to cure social media of its social ills.
In a long blog post on Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his vision for the future of the company, and it has more to do with encryption than widely broadcasting user-created content. As he put it, “I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms.”
For Facebook, that’s not a bad path forward — minus, of course, the profitability issue that selling ads on messaging services doesn’t actually make money and isn’t consistent with the company’s current business model.
But setting that aside, a focus on privacy and encrypted messages across its platforms frees the company of the complex issues of content moderation. After all, if you can’t see the content, you have have no responsibility to moderate it and, consequently, play arbiter of social acceptability.
Zuckerberg acknowledged as much, writing in his post: “We face an inherent tradeoff because we will never find all of the potential harm we do today when our security systems can see the messages themselves.”
That gives a lot of answers for a company increasingly facing regulatory scrutiny. It doesn’t, of course, address underlying issues exacerbated by the emergence of social media.
In countries where the encrypted messaging service WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) already dominates, such as India, the encrypted messaging platform has introduced new problems. It has, for example, presented a real challenge for law enforcement efforts to crack down on fake news and violence incited with content shared on private chats that are untraceable and difficult to gain access to.
Although that’s quite different than the public facing issues of electoral disinformation propagated by Russian operatives in the U.S. among other problems, it points to the same issue: Bad actors use social media to prey on existing tensions and divisions. In both cases, social media itself isn’t the root of the problem but an amplifier.
Clearly, this shift to private messages won’t prevent abuse of platforms for dangerous and illegal communications. It will allow the company to wash its hands of direct knowledge of a much broader societal problem that it can’t fix.
