The great connector morphed into the great divider
Did you know? Facebook is dead. Not sidelined, not marginalized, not under fire. But literally dead.
At least in Hebrew, that is.
When Facebook last week announced its rebranding as Meta, Israelis were all over it. Because meta, in Hebrew, means dead, or dead woman to be specific.
Many laughs were to be had over this, because, to get meta about it (pun intended), it’s funny because it’s true. Facebook has been under significant fire in recent weeks. It took a whistleblower and a Congressional hearing, but Americans are finally waking up to the outsized role Facebook plays in their lives and, more importantly, the outsized role Facebook has played in sowing the discord and divisiveness that have come to define contemporary American political and social culture.
Among the testimony that emerged in Congress was that Facebook tweaks its algorithms to cement its users within echo chambers, feeding them with links that are essentially clickbait, serving to deepen and entrench prior points of view — regardless of whether the links take users to stories that are factually correct.
Specifically, one Facebook researcher shared that a test case was conducted in which a dummy account was set up for a conservative woman who showed a preference for content from mainstream, but conservative, news sources. Within a day, the algorithm was recommending content from a QAnon group; and within a week, content about the debunked theory that Barack Obama is not a US citizen.
It takes little imagination — because nearly every one of us is a social media user — to see how this “account,” within a relatively short period of time, could become radicalized. The person is already inclined to think a certain way, and suddenly reams of “information” are presented that appear to prove his or her point of view.
A similar test case could be done for a progressive and no doubt the results would be the same — just on the other end of the political spectrum.
There is something malignant about this, and it casts an extremely dark shadow on Facebook that it must be held accountable for.
Once upon a time, the misinformation was easy to spot. It was found on tabloid front pages, ridiculous but fun stories about aliens landing on earth or Elvis still alive in an attic somewhere. There was an understanding that the content was almost certainly untrue.
It’s easy to blame Facebook for every misinformation ill. But that would be too simple. While it’s true that their algorithm is a powerful tool and the reason the company is extremely profitable, every user also has agency. Regardless of recommended content, every user retains the ability to not click, to question what he or she reads, to not engage in a conversation, or not believe every “statistic.”
There is an impulse in contemporary society to segregate and categorize people according to political beliefs. We choose to read content or follow users that we know will entrench our views. We relish typecasting our fellow human beings, drawing immediate and incontrovertible conclusions. We opt to see everything through a binary, black-and-white, or more accurately blue-and-red lens. As has been shown, Facebook contributed to this cancerous growth, but was Facebook the inventor of it, or did the platform parlay an opportunity?
Neither answer lets Facebook off the hook, but neither does it absolve its users in their acquiescence.
Facebook has been a powerful tool in connecting people across the globe, creating communities through its groups and creating a platform that helps family and friends share their lives in ways that were never previously possible. In that regard, it has done an enormous amount of good and, jokes aside, has enlivened and enriched people’s existence, not deadened it.
But as Facebook has grown and embraced a new role of information purveyor, it has allowed profitability to supersede journalistic ethics. It put the cart before the horse, and the horse bolted.
Now Facebook must regroup, must honestly assess its role in sowing discord and spreading misinformation, and figure out a way forward, where the platform is, like it once solely was, a source for connecting people — not dividing them.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
