In hours of discussions Tuesday between dozens of senators and Mark Zuckerberg, nobody hit on the real problem with Facebook. I’m talking, of course, about the narcissists.
Facebook says its mission is to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Yet the longer I use Facebook, the more I realize I really don’t want to draw “closer together” with some of my Facebook friends—the vast majority of whom aren’t actual friends in the ordinary use of the term, but rather a collection of former coworkers, casual acquaintances, and high-school classmates from more than two decades ago.
Science tells us that the human brain allows us to maintain relationships with about 150 people. The average Facebook user has more than 300 “friends,” and one of every six Facebook users has more than 500. Odds are, your Facebook feed is crowded with too many people you just don’t care about.
Back when it started in 2004, Facebook was a noble experiment. It held great promise: Instead of emailing friends or calling them, what would happen if you could connect with them all online, sharing jokes and photos and witty observations?
It’s time to admit that this noble experiment has failed. The promise of joyful and meaningful connection has given way instead to a bizarre amalgam of baby pictures, vacation photos, political diatribes, cat videos, memes, wry observations, banal holiday greetings, and probably a lot of other stuff I’m forgetting because it’s so forgettable. Much of social media has proved to be a divisive force, not a unifying one. It’s astonishingly addictive, but we all know it’s unhealthy. A review of academic research in Harvard Business Review last year was headlined: “The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel.”
If you spend hours per day on Facebook and feel bad about yourself afterward, that’s not a flaw of Zuckerberg’s platform. That’s on you. Same goes for the other objections to Facebook aired this week. Facebook users shouldn’t need Congress to protect them from their own inability to be skeptical, responsible, and aware.
Among the charges:
1. Facebook failed to detect Russian-backed election ads. Yet the ads were no more divisive than most of the other political bilge you read on social media. Why not just ignore them and move on, like you do with most Facebook content?
2. Facebook failed to police fake news. But if you read bogus stories about Bill Clinton confessing he’s a murderer or the pope endorsing Donald Trump, that means one of your “friends” shared a story from a suspicious site likely run by Macedonian teenagers, such as USAPolitics.co. How about not believing everything you read, or sticking to credible sources?
3. Facebook collects data about you and sells it. This is Facebook’s business model—how it makes money. Feature, not bug: $16 billion in profits last year on $41 billion in revenue, almost all of it from selling advertising. To be clear, we’re not talking about really scary personal data, like medical or financial records. It’s more like, Facebook knows exactly which Mexican restaurant you ate at three months ago on a girls’ night … because you checked in there and posted a photo of yourself drinking a margarita. The Washington Post actually quoted somebody “creeped out” reviewing her Facebook activity log who said, “I’m afraid to see what Facebook has on me … It surprises me that they have all this stuff.” Stuff she posted. It’s true that Facebook makes more data available than other companies, and that it was careless in allowing outsiders to harness the data.
Some senators seemed confused about the business model. In one well-publicized exchange Tuesday, Republican senator Lindsay Graham asked, “You don’t think you have a monopoly?”
Zuckerberg replied: “It certainly doesn’t feel like that to me.”
It’s tempting to think that with 2.1 billion users, Facebook must be a monopoly, but that’s not true. Facebook’s customers are advertisers. To increase revenue last year, Facebook focused on three initiatives—all of them to help advertisers, according to its annual report. Advertisers have a lot of choices. Facebook has about one-fifth of the U.S. digital ad business. Google has twice as much.
Facebook users are not the customers. We’re the content providers. And we’re working for free.
Advertisers show up any time you have big numbers of people. That’s why there are billboards on interstates and why corporations spend millions to put their names on sports stadiums. With Facebook’s data, advertisers can target you based on interests you have expressed.
Now, though, Facebook is too full of people: people who bicker, complain, and overshare. For now, I’m planning to decamp mostly to Instagram, where I have a more tightly corralled group of actual friends and there are more photos and less texts. Teens are ahead of us on this one: In addition to their main Instagram accounts with hundreds of acquaintances, some have secondary accounts for close friends, called “finstagram,” or “finsta.” (Yes, I know Instagram is owned by Facebook.)
Or better yet, instead of wasting time flipping through a news feed, maybe I’ll just pick up the phone and call a friend.
