Another Interesting 2020 Moment: User Reaction to Facebook
September 16, 2020
After years of letting online services operate like independent countries, a handful of the faithful have taken action. If the information in “Kim Kardashian to Freeze Facebook, Instagram Accounts in #StopHateForProfit Effort” is accurate, luminaries are using their orbital power to cause change. Elected officials lack the hands on experience with digital power houses that high profile cultural icons do. The write up reports:
Kim Kardashian West announced that she will join two dozen celebrities in temporarily freezing their Instagram and Facebook accounts on Wednesday because the platforms “continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation — created by groups to sow division and split America apart.”
What is interesting is that governments have shown less initiative than made-for-social-media stars. DarkCyber is intrigued that individuals closely associated with Facebook usage are demonstrating a behavior that appears to be “adulting.”
Unregulated, cowboy operations are spinning money. Corporate actions have motivated celebrities to organize and behave — for at least a day — in a way that calls attention to behaviors these individuals find reprehensible.
In 2020, a year of surprises and challenges, Kim Kardashian West-type individuals appear to be manifesting more moxie, purpose, and understanding than most elected officials, Silicon Valley go getters, and churn-centric Wall Street professionals.
DarkCyber is indeed surprised.
Facebook’s management is likely to greet the user response and 24 hour pushback with a bold, “Meh.”
Stephen E Arnold, September 16, 2020
Facebook: Luck of the Irish
September 16, 2020
“Facebook Takes Legal Action after Irish Regulator Threatens to Clamp Down on Transatlantic Data Transfer” illustrates that the company is consistent. The write up reports:
Facebook … launched legal action against Ireland’s data regulator, in an attempt to halt a preliminary order that could stop the company from transferring user data from the European Union to the U.S. The social media giant has applied to seek judicial review of the approach used by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission on the grounds it was premature for the IDPC to have reached a preliminary conclusion at this stage.
On the surface, it appears that Facebook wants to rely on the legal system, not the luck of the Irish, in its effort to sidestep certain constraints on its business. Is this action out of step with Facebook’s socially responsible policies? No. Facebook is acting in a consistent manner. Facebook’s tag line, according to one person on the DarkCyber research team, is “socially responsible.” Another team member understood that colleague to have used the word “reprehensible.”
Another perplexing issue which DarkCyber cannot resolve.
Stephen E Arnold, September 16, 2020
Facebook Management: The High School Science Club Method Reveals Insights
September 3, 2020
An online publication called The Daily Beast published “Facebook’s Internal Black Lives Matter Debate Got So Bad Zuckerberg Had to Step In.” How accurate is the write up? DarkCyber does not know. It is not clear what the point of the “real news” story is.
The write up seems to suggest that there is dissention within Facebook over what employees can on the Facebook internal communication system. The write up makes clear that Mr. Zuckerberg, the Caesar of social media, involved himself in the online dust up. Plus the article describes actions that are just peculiar; for example, this quote:
“[L]et me be absolutely clear about our stance as a company: systemic racism is real. It disadvantages and endangers people of color in America and around the world,” Zuckerberg posted. Zuckerberg added that while it was “valuable for employees to be able to disagree with the company and each other,” he encouraged Facebook staffers to do so “respectfully, with empathy and understanding towards each other.”
What’s the dividing point between an opinion and a statement which is out of bounds? Does Mark Zuckerberg referee these in bounds and out of bounds events?
Several observations:
- Facebook may be able to deal with pesky regulators in Europe and remind the government of Australia that the company has its own views of news, but managing a large company is a different category of problem. Dissention within an organization may not be a positive when regulators are keeping their eyes peeled for witnesses
- Employees within Facebook are manifesting behaviors associated with views and reactions to those views on the Facebook system itself; Facebook is a microcosm of the corrosive effect of instant, unchecked messaging. Will these messages be constrained by humans or smart software or both?
- Mr. Zuckerberg himself is offering a path forward that seems to suggest that a certain homogeneity of thought amongst employees is desirable; that is, disagree within boundaries. But what are the boundaries? Is it possible to define what crosses a shades of gray line ?
Net net: The high school science club management method which has gained favor among a number of Silicon Valley-centric companies is being pushed and pulled in interesting ways. What happens if the fabric of governance is torn and emergency fixes are necessary? Expulsion, loss of market momentum, de facto control of discourse, or insider threats in the form of sabotage, leaks, and unionization? That puts a different spin on social, does it not?
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
Facebook: High School Science Club Management in Action
September 3, 2020
The online information service Mashable published a headline which tells the story. And the story is a Dusie if accurate: “Mark Zuckerberg Blames Facebook Contractors for Kenosha Militia Fiasco.” The article states:
When it comes to mistakenly allowing a militia’s event page to remain on Facebook, even after concerned users reported it at least 455 times, Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that the buck stops with his contractors.
The essence of the high school science club management method is to infuse entitlement and arrogance with a pinch of denial. The write up notes:
According to Zuckerberg, the reason Facebook chose to tacitly approve an event page that, by his own admission, violated the site’s own rules, is because the non-Facebook employees tasked with enforcing his company’s Byzantine policies didn’t understand them well enough.
The HSSC approach to management may be institutionalized in some Silicon Valley type outfits. That’s super, right? The elite science club is never wrong; for example, “It is not our fault that the stink bomb triggered smoke alarms and two students were hurt rushing from the building.”
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
Facebook: Trouble Within?
September 2, 2020
How did my Latin teacher explain this allegedly accurate management method? As I recall, a member of the Roman army who dropped the ball would be identified. Then his “unit” would be gathered. According to Mr. Buschman, every tenth person was killed. The point of the anecdote was to teach the “meaning” of decimate; that is, every tenth or in 1958 lingo, destroy. Was Mr. Buschman on the beam? I have no idea, nor do I care. My recollection of decimation emerged as I read “Facebook Employees Are Outraged At Mark Zuckerberg’s Explanations Of How It Handled The Kenosha Violence.” The Silicon Valley “real” news outfit reported this allegedly accurate quote:
“At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services?” wrote one employee. “[A]nti Semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services.”
To quell what seems to be some dissention in the ranks, is it time to revisit Rome’s method of focusing a cohort’s attention?
A modern day Caesar might find inspiration in the past. The present and immediate future may not be doing the job.
Stephen E Arnold, September 2, 2020
Facebook a PR Firm? What about a Silicon Valley Cash Rich Intelligence Agency?
September 1, 2020
DarkCyber noted “Facebook, The PR Firm.” The main idea seems to be:
I [Can Duruk maybe?] saw on Twitter a leak from Facebook where the comms people were pleading to their coworkers to stop leaking to the press. The comms folks, in a weird form of irony, were so inundated with their moderation work that they had to ask people whose main task is to create more moderation work for the poorly paid and mentally traumatized people to please creating less work for them.
That statement combines the best of Escher and Kafka.
The write up notes:
I read Facebook less as a tech company, but instead a communications one. Not a telecom communications, but more like a PR / marketing consultancy. There’s nothing original about Facebook. It’s a company that hires people to build others’ ideas, and, more often than not, it does that better and faster than them too. And when it can’t do that, it just buys them outright. There is a lot of building, but the ideas are outsourced. But what Facebook is really good at is actually doing all this while fighting what seems to be a never-ending, at least since 2016 or so, PR battle while not giving an inch.
Is the entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg a reincarnation of Ivy Lee, a metempsychosis in the realm of online social media?
And the final line of the write up reminds the reader:
This, after all, is a company that once thought comparing itself to a chair was a good idea.
DarkCyber thinks the write up makes some helpful points. However, several observations emerged from our morning Zoom “meeting” among the team members who had the energy to click a mouse button:
- Facebook has internalized the mechanisms used by some intelligence agencies and specialized services firms; for example, the dalliance in and out of court with NSO Group
- Facebook can perform what can be called “beam forming.” The idea is to take digital bits, focus them on a topic or issue, and then aim the beam of content at individuals and groups. The beam works like a wood carver’s oblique knife. The “targets” are shaped as needed.
- The company can exert threats in order to apply pressure to entities with a perceived intention of doing Facebook hard; for example, the threats made to Australia if the social media giant has to pay for news.
To sum up, DarkCyber believes that Facebook has more in common with an intelligence operation than a PR firm. I mean public relations. Really? Does Facebook care about relating to the public? Money, clicks, users, tracking, and data for sure. But public relations?
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2020
Misjudging Facebook: An Insight Pandemic Blinds Pundits
August 24, 2020
The stories about Mark Zuckerberg’s TikTok activities have sparked some semi-pundits’ engines to turn over. The Wall Street Journal (a Murdoch outfit) and the Next Web (a Silicon Valley style “real” new service) are two examples. The savvy Roman emperor look alike may be the Force causing the TikTok starship to lose momentum. Definitely exciting, and, if true, Mr. Zuckerberg may have the strategic insights of Julius Caesar who smoked Vercingetorix. TikTok has been wounded, and it is a slick story about insider access, political power, and business.
However, there’s an even more interesting bit of punditry about Facebook. Navigate to “Content Regulation Lapses Cast Doubts on Facebook’s Biz Model.” The write up states:
the problem is not one of image. Repeated data and content regulation lapses on Facebook’s part have emerged, and these have rightly raised severe questions about their business model, and led to more attention, scrutiny and questioning from several governments across the world, including India.
Navigate to the source document for of this “Facebook will fail” lens.
News flash: Content moderation is holiday window dressing. Facebook provides advertisers with quite useful access to people who will purchase stuff and believe things. The anti Facebook advertising boycott went nowhere.
As long as Mr. Zuckerberg causes some information channels to believe he can influence the president of the United States to help him chop block TikTok at the knees, Facebook wins.
Clear thinking about Facebook is needed. News channels who push the Facebook influence agenda and pundits who miss the big picture are like Miracle Gro dumped on a moth orchid. Mr. Zuckerberg is able to operate in a big field just right for shaping into an extension of Mr. Caesar’s holdings.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2020
Instagram: What Does Suspicious Mean at This Facebook Outfit?
August 19, 2020
DarkCyber noted what could be construed as a baby step toward adulting or a much bigger step toward Facebook obtaining more fine-grained information. “Instagram Will Make Suspicious Accounts Verify Their Identity” states:
Instagram is taking new steps to root out bots and other accounts trying to manipulate its platform. The company says it will start asking some users to verify their identities if it suspects “potential inauthentic behavior.” Instagram stresses that the new policy won’t affect most users, but that it will target accounts that seem suspicious.
It seems that “inauthentic” means “suspicious.” Okay, what is that exactly. The write up quotes an Instagram something as saying:
This includes accounts potentially engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior, or when we see the majority of someone’s followers are in a different country to their location, or if we find signs of automation, such as bot accounts.
What addresses inauthenticity? How about this?
Under the new rules, these accounts will be asked to verify their identity by submitting a government ID. If they don’t, the company may down-rank their posts in Instagram’s feed or disable their account entirely.
When a moment of adulting or a data grab, the Facebook continues to be Facebook.
Stephen E Arnold, August 19, 2020
Facebook: Unified Messaging Comin’ Down the Pike
August 17, 2020
What does a monopoly do when regulators thinking about breaking up a big company do? That’s easy. The big company “integrates” its features, infrastructure, and services. If the big company does this “integration” in a clever way, going back to the pre-integration days is possible, but time consuming, expensive, and probably a job that will take more than a couple of days or a week.
“Facebook Is Sliding Into Instagram’s DMs. Literally” reports:
Facebook apparently began rolling out an update that integrates its Instagram and Facebook Messenger chat systems in the U.S. The new integration was announced quietly via a cheerful pop-up message that appeared to users when they opened Instagram on their phones on iOS and Android.
The article points out:
Allowing cross-messaging between Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp has been part of Zuckerberg’s master plan for some time. Although each of apps will remain standalone, Facebook is working on integrating their underlying technical infrastructure. This means that people who only use one of Facebook’s apps could communicate with others in its empire, even if they don’t use the same app.
That’s a good point; however, it is not the main point in DarkCyber’s opinion. The goal of Facebook is to be impervious to break up. Integration is Job One. The fact that Facebook can add to Apple’s woes is like a hot fudge ice cream treat with a cherry or small fruit on top.
Life for Facebook was easier before its methods made headline news and caught the attention of usually sleepy government officials. So, heigh ho, heigh ho, to integration we go.
Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2020
The WhatsApp Information Warp: Small Worlds and Willful Blindness
August 6, 2020
WhatsApp is part of the new Facebook. Messaging, not email, is becoming the go-to way to handle many online tasks. Need to make a voice phone call? WhatsApp first to set up a time. Want to buy contraband? Consult a WhatsApp group populated with fellow WhatsAppers. Want to get accurate information? Ask a person whom one knows or consult members of a small world.
“WhatsApp Adds Web Search Feature to Help Users Debunk Misinformation” explains:
WhatsApp users in Ireland can now quickly check the contents of forwarded messages in a web search to help expose misinformation… The trial is WhatsApp’s latest attempt to stop the spread of misinformation on the platform after it introduced a limit to the number of times a message can be forwarded on earlier this year. The company confirmed that the new web search feature would begin rolling out today on both Android and iOS for users of the latest version of WhatsApp in Ireland, the UK, the US, Brazil, Italy, Mexico and Spain.
Helpful? Facebook is just another member of a WhatsApp user’s world, a very small world. The user has WhatsApp individuals in his or her circle of friends or contacts. Facebook is just in that circle, whether its consists of five or fifty individuals. Small worlds are a way of cutting out noise and trimming big knowledge tasks down to a more manageable size. [Note below] A small world may be a function of human intelligence and help explain why individuals prefer to interact in digital echo chambers. A participant in a small world operates in a conceptual space with fewer risks, surprises, and push backs. Stanford wizards explain that “short path lengths between nodes together with highly clustered link structures necessarily emerge for a wide set of parameters.”
Small worlding may be a coping mechanism.
What happens when a widely used messaging service facilitates small worlds and then adds a workflow which defines what is and is not misinformation. The person in the small world, by definition, does not go looking for a broader context into which to plug an item of information. The WhatsApp user is likely to accept the designation provided by Facebook, which is the provider of the system, the context, and the signal about an item of information. Using an icon circumvents words. Over time, the WhatsApp user relies on the signal and the small world of friends and contacts to provide data, facts, ideas, and validation.
What users and possibly competitors and regulators may overlook is that WhatsApp does more than provide a handy messaging service. WhatsApp becomes a control mechanism either intentionally or unintentionally. Users, happy with the small world’s perceived value and functionality, become more satisfied with their small world. The small world is comfortable, predictable. Why question what one learns in a small world?
Why not? The WhatsApp small world is the digital equivalent of talking with friends and like minded individuals. Facebook, however, may not be a benign enabler and participant in a WhatsApp small world. Facebook can inject messages (advertising), shape content presented to clarify an issue, and herd members of many different small worlds toward a goal. Those in each small world do not, cannot, or choose to ignore a larger world.
WhatsApp warrants informed scrutiny because the small world phenomenon may put filter bubbles into a hypersonic chamber, accelerating molecules of thought to speeds unattainable outside of the WhatsApp machine. Determining what is and what is not valid information is a big play even for Facebook and WhatsApp in my opinion.
[Note] See also “Journalists’ Twitter Use Shows Them Talking within Smaller Bubbles”
Stephen E Arnold, August 6, 2020
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