Good luck fixin’ it, Mr. Zuckerberg. We say that in all sincerity but with some skepticism. It won’t be easy to “fix” Facebook, as founder Mark Zuckerberg said will be his “personal challenge” for 2018. Yet, the first step is recognition of the problems.
Zuckerberg met the new year with the admission that Facebook has made “too many errors” and has a lot of work to do “protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation-states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”
While Facebook enjoyed record profits in 2017 (revenue grew 47 percent) it otherwise suffered a rocky year, facing criticism for Russian interference in the 2016 election, spreading propaganda and fake news, and driving other societal ills related to technology addiction.
Now Congress has been asked to look into whether Facebook has, with Google, established a digital advertising duopoly. On Wednesday, a Senate committee will hear testimony from tech firms on “Terrorism and Social Media: Is Big Tech Doing Enough?”
Zuckerberg plans to consult with experts in history, civics, political philosophy, media, government and technology. He owes it to his users to reveal what these experts say. A good start on the “fix” list would be more transparency. Experts to date have suggested explaining how news feed algorithms work, verification of real people, an optional filter for unverified accounts, stricter scrutiny of political and interest-based advertising, and less focus on stoking “negative emotion” resulting in echo chambers and polarization.
We question whether cutting back on the sharing of news stories from credible sources, as recently announced, is the right fix for the platform of 2 billion users with a presence in most countries. Nearly half of American adults get some news from Facebook. They will still see articles shared by friends but posts from publisher pages will be less visible, raising questions of whether they will see more content that reinforces their own ideologies and some countries see less diverse news.
Zuckerberg has made his new year’s resolution a tradition: learning Mandarin, eating only meat he’s killed himself, reading a book a week, touring the country to talk to regular people.
This one can’t be a passing whim. The problems are complex, as the corrections will be. Facebook must accept responsibility for its impact on the world, and the public deserves to be kept informed all along the way.
— The Dallas Morning News