Despite two days of Congressional testimony last week, 10 hours of questioning, and wide-ranging media analysis, Mark Zuckerberg has gotten away with a sleight of hand so brilliant it hasn’t yet been noticed: His testimony deployed the greater enemy theory — pointing the blame at Russia to distract from Facebook’s own manipulation.
Russia is the perfect decoy because its manipulation of U.S. elections and the Brexit vote is both true and important. But that doesn’t mean Facebook should get away with its own business of manipulation.
When Zuckerberg says Facebook is in an “arms race” with Russia, he’s painting a picture of Facebook as the American good guys and simultaneously taking the focus off Facebook’s permitted sale of powerful online weapons to domestic politicians and commercial advertisers.
Don’t think Russia’s use of Facebook to manipulate U.S. elections or the alleged data breach by Cambridge Analytica are, as he suggests, Facebook’s worst nightmare. Quite the reverse. There’s nothing more useful to a company that is tricking its own 2 billion users than for third parties to be tricking the company. This “nightmare” is a dream come true for the company with the real skeleton still in its own cupboard.
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When Zuckerberg concedes that Facebook didn’t do enough to contain the data breach, he’s being disingenuous. Accepting the company was naive in being duped only serves to bolster the notion that it was robbed and is victim and underdog. This admission is the pill he swallows to look sick and vulnerable.
And when he goes on to feign fear of Russia’s sophisticated online skills, he’s just doing so to turn up the spotlight on the enemy by making it look more scary. Any collateral damage the company suffers to its reputation from furious users is cheap compared to the cost of the world looking the skeleton in the face.
The decoys and doublespeak are all part of a well-crafted narrative to distract us from the fundamentally dangerous business activity over which he presides. In short, he’s engaging in a ‘Look, the enemy’s over there’ strategy, when, in fact, Facebook is the enemy within.
Indeed, if Facebook didn’t track people’s online behavior and allow advertisers to personalize messages, it would have been of zero value to Cambridge Analytica or the Russians.
Facebook is, in essence, providing public manipulating tools to politicians, online retailers, and anyone else needing them. The fact that this can be done legally is Facebook’s dirty truth.
Technology’s ability to collect your data, compare it with big data, use predictive behavioral algorithms, and customize messages to manipulate you based on your likely reaction, has reached the point where Big Sister knows you better than you know yourself. We can’t protect ourselves as individuals, so government needs to step in, just as it did when DNA technology promised babies could be custom-designed to order. Online manipulation is the most dangerous out-of-control technology still at large, and it’s operating in plain view.
When will the world focus on Facebook’s essentially corrupt business model? Almost all of the company’s revenues are predicated on its parasitical relationship with its users’ data and what it can do with it. Zuckerberg should be lying awake at night in fear that the penny will drop. If politicians turn their attention to online manipulation, most of the company’s half trillion dollars of value will rightly evaporate into the ether from which it came.
Mark Dixon runs boutique mergers and acquisitions advisory firm the1.com and previously cofounded BreakingViews.com. His editorials have appeared in such publications as San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, South China Morning Post, Le Nouvel Observateur, and Shanghai Daily. He also produces art under the pseudonym ‘Mr. Twist’.
