The media establishment has begun to see sense in a user-owned Facebook — but in curbing surveillance capitalism, let’s separate the baby from the bathwater

Social media users must do more than refuse to be stripped of their data like helpless moos — postgutenberg [at] gmail.com

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Let’s not forget — in imposing long overdue restrictions on data-gathering by the social media giants — that without the broadcasting platforms they have given us, the software engineer Susan Fowler might have got nowhere with bearing witness to sexual stalking and degradation at Uber. She might not have galvanised a movement with its silly ‘#metoo’ hash tag** and nonstop, numbing repetition of words like ‘harassment’ and ‘abuse,’ and lent it the gravitas it needed.

In other words, let’s not throw out a near-miraculous baby — direct, unmediated, all-points broadcasting — with the bathwater. Without internet chattering about her clear, self-evidently truthful account of her Uber managers’ attempts to bully her into choking down her anger with her persecutor and living with chronic persecution — because his work was seen as invaluable to the company — intermediaries like media editors and lawyers would have interfered with her choices of words and evidence, and put brakes on her telling us precisely what she wanted us to know.

She also had her well-deserved luck of perfect timing.

Four years ago, almost no one wanted to hear about the grave risks in the massive collection of intimate data about us by Facebook,  that we joined other critics in referring to as the surveillance business model. Almost no one was prepared to do anything about Facebook helping itself to this information without our permission, or offering any form of compensation for it. Or about the fact that this company actually rejected proposals for letting people pay subscriptions for the service it offered us, because it perceived the power in giving it to us in exchange for the unrestricted freedom to delve into our minds to construct detailed psychological profiles of us to sell to advertisers or anyone else prepared to pay for them — the capacity to use ‘likes,’ as John Naughton has reminded us today in The Observer, ‘to predict accurately a range of highly sensitive personal attributes, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender.’

Few were moved, then, to support arguments that a Facebook based on other people’s information should rightly be owned by those people — in some form of mutualisation or cooperative venture, as we proposed on this site in 2012 in a post titled ‘A Better Facebook …’ republished here last November.

Five years later, last Wednesday, the New York Times presented, as if this were a brand new idea, the otherwise commendable suggestion by three scholars — Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms and separately, Nathan Schneider in 2016: ‘[W]hat if a social network was truly run by its users?’ In a newly published book they have written together, Heimans and Timms note the unfairness of what we — like many others — have been pointing out for years: the injustice of ‘the creative output of billions of people’ being turned ‘into a giant, centralized enterprise, with most users sharing none of the economic value they create and getting no say in the platform’s governance.’

Nathan Schneider was virtually repeating exactly what post-Gutenberg proposed in 2012, in pointing out that a ‘new, improved Mark Zuckerberg wants to be perceived as a force for good in society — and [… is reportedly …] clashing with the strictly business-oriented senior executives in his company over this…. If he’s serious, why not acknowledge that Facebook’s users supply the personal information about themselves that he has exploited to get rich […] and flip ownership of his company over to Facebook’s members?’

A better justification of the NY Times’ reputation for fair and critically important reporting was in a recent story illustrating the ability of faraway foreign countries to use social media’s records of our exchanges with our friends and acquaintances to control us. No, it was not about evidence of Russia interfering in the U.S. presidential election or in the Brexit vote in Britain, but about China censoring commenters on its policies using social media platforms outside China, and owned by foreign companies, and punishing one company, Mercedes-Benz, for featuring the Dalai Lama in one of its advertisements.

The report by Paul Mozur began: ‘Within its digital borders, China has long censored what its people read and say online. Now, it is increasingly going beyond its own online realms to police what people and companies are saying about it all over the world.’

If the Chinese can do this, anyone can.

We apologise for the irritating, Cassandra-like, we-told-you-so tone of this entry, but post-Gutenberg predicted precisely such a consequence from data-gathering by social media companies — in 2013. As we noted here on 15 January 2014:

Not for ages has there been a pudding quite as over-egged as the one presented as the news story of 2013 – the Orwellian mass surveillance exposé which, as it unravels, shows the UK and US governments hardly initiating nonstop monitoring but, rather, striving to keep up with companies like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google in gathering intimate information about us and watching what we do.

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Last September, this blog warned that the blinkers needed to come off too many commentators on the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ – to let them appreciate that we should be protesting not just about spooks but anyone amassing personal data about us. In an entry about reader-commenters on newspaper sites correcting the unbalanced coverage of mass surveillance, we said: 

Stores of information, once they are gathered, can acquire new owners. 

Lately, we have seen a suggestion on various sites that the social media giants should be turned into public utilities. This would be the wrong solution. We need distributed, decentralised ownership — by social media users — to avert the abuse of any form of centralised power. Abuse by surveillance capitalists, or our governments, or anyone else’s.

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** We prefer the more constructive, spine-steeling, #NeverthelessShePersisted.