Facebook is drawing criticism not only from politicians and users but from other tech companies as well. According to Yoree Koh in The Wall Street Journal, “A succession of Silicon Valley rivals have stepped forward in recent weeks and months to speak out against the social-media giant, some reprising old points of contention, others reacting to revelations about its handling of user data and of deceptive or manipulative content on its platform.”
They may be doing this out of genuine concern or to deflect attention from their own companies, she adds. She quotes Roger Kay, president of market-research firm Endpoint Technologies Associates, as saying, “Certainly a political stratagem would be to point to this one entity that’s just gotten into trouble and say, ‘they’re the problem, not us.’”
Koh reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook has criticized both Facebook and Google for the way they collect personal data, although he acknowledged that Apple could improve its privacy efforts as well. She adds that Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has said addictive social media should be regulated as a health issue. And Facebook alumni, such as former president Sean Parker, have criticized the company’s thought process as well.
Koh also notes that Google AI engineer François Chollet “…has sought to draw a line between his company and Facebook.” In a blog post at Medium, in which he emphasizes he is expressing his own views, not Google’s, Chollet aims to raise awareness about “…the highly effective, highly scalable manipulation of human behavior that AI enables, and its malicious use by corporations and governments.”
Chollet lists several vectors, including the following ones, an AI can use to manipulate you:
- Negative social reinforcement. The AI will present your views that it doesn’t want you to hold only to your friends who hold the opposing view, drawing harsh criticism.
- Positive social reinforcement. The AI will present your views that it wants you to continue to hold only to your friends holding the same views, drawing support.
- Sampling bias. The AI will present to you only views from your friends that it wants you to hold.
- Argument personalization. To change your viewpoint on an issue, AI will present to you information that has been effective in prompting the same viewpoint shift among others.
Chollet’s recommendation? “Instead of letting newsfeed algorithms manipulate the user to achieve opaque goals, such as swaying their political opinions, or maximally wasting their time, we should put the user in charge of the goals that the algorithms optimize for.”
His choice is search—“…a tool that you deliberately use to reach specific goals, rather than a passive always-on feed that elects what to show you. You tell it what to it should do for you.” And with search engines—unlike a social-media network—“If they fail to be maximally useful, there’s essentially no friction for users to move to a competing product,” he says.
Of course, social-media critics like Chollet, Benioff, and Cook have their own critics. Koh at The Wall Street Journal quotes Michael Pachter, a technology analyst at Wedbush Securities, as saying comments like Cook’s are “…exploiting an unfortunate situation at Facebook.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times editorial board attributes problems not to Facebook but to lax privacy rules. The board cites the European General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect next month, saying, “The new European rules are not perfect—they include the so-called right to be forgotten, which allows people to ask companies to delete personal information that they no longer wish to share. That could be implemented in ways that limit free speech. But the Europeans have made progress toward addressing some of the problems that have recently been highlighted in the United States.”
Update: Ezra Klein at Vox has an interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, available as a podcast and as an edited transcript.
