This trove of internal documents revealed by whistle-blower Frances Haugen shows that the social giant’s leadership knew what they were doing. If they didn’t, they were deliberately not reading their internal research and shocking findings.

The Facebook Papers have been widely reported on by numerous news organisations, laying bare just how damaging Facebook’s apps and out of control hate speech and misinformation are to youngsters’ mental health.

Facebook “went a little too far on the revenue side and not enough on the judgment side,” says former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“The disturbing thing is that people have said a long time ago that Facebook was doing this, but people said, ‘Well, they didn’t understand or they didn’t measure it,’” Schmidt told Bloomberg. “And what we learnt in those disclosures is that these companies – and Facebook in particular – knew what it was doing.”

It is a touch of the pot calling out the kettle, given how dangerous Google’s data-gathering operations are, and the way its YouTube division has become the internet’s cesspool. Schmidt acquired the video service during his time as CEO and it’s a consequence-free haven for misinformation, conspiracy theories and other fact-free drivel.

Facebook is now worth $934bn and last month rebranded itself as Meta in a move widely seen as trying to shrug off its reputation for being uncaring and profit-focussed. It hasn’t worked. There is nothing intrinsically different about The Company Formerly Known As Facebook (TCFKAF), as it is already being called.

Meanwhile, former Facebook investor Roger McNamee believes the social network should face six different criminal charges for its conduct.

“I think there are at least six areas where felony investigations are warranted,” he told the Web Summit conference. These include allowing human trafficking through its platform, for which it was “paid to enable it to happen,” as well as the January 6 insurrection that resulted in the storming of the US’s Capitol Hill.

McNamee, an early investor who became a mentor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, believes Facebook is out of control. “Extracting the essence of our humanity in data form and then using it to manipulate our behaviour is as unethical as child labour and it should be banned the same way that child labour was banned,” he added.

None of these are new criticisms, but TCFKAF is a past master as ignoring its own mistakes and pretending it alone can fix the problems it has created. It’s akin to President Cyril Ramaphosa telling South Africa that only the ANC can fix Eskom, broken by years of its incompetence and corruption: “which other party do you trust to ensure that electricity is restored here?”

Meta, or TCFKAF, is the problem. Its business model of turning its users into data points to sell to advertisers has made it an almost $1-trillion company and its founder immensely rich. It made $86bn last year in revenue. This is a surveillance capitalism gravy train that nobody intends to get off of. Don’t expect a sudden rush of morality from Zuckerberg and co.

• The article first appeared on Financial Mail

The post Facebook isn’t changing, even though it knows it’s wrong appeared first on Stuff South Africa.

Even after Twitter banned political adverts, Facebook is sticking to its guns over allowing them (including patent lies) despite this controversial category only bringing in less 1% of its revenue next year.

Zuckerberg is painstakingly defending Facebook’s bizarre policy of not fact-check adverts from politicians. “At times of social tension there has often been an urge to pull back on free expression,” he recently said. “We will be best served over the long term by resisting this urge and defending free expression.”

Over at Twitter, it’s much clearer: “We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally,” tweeted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.”

Part of his reason, he tweeted, is that “A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.”

Not that difficult, is it?

But not seemingly for Zuckerberg, who said during the quarterly earnings call with analysts “We estimate these ads from politicians will be less than 0.5% of our revenue next year.”

Facebook’s annual revenue grew to US$55.8bn in 2018, from $7.87bn in 2013.

In the 12 months ending Q3 2019, Facebook earned $66bn.

Half a percent would be about $330m to $400m for Facebook, which now has 2.45bn monthly users. Why all the sweat over such little revenue?

The main rationale, most commentators suggest, is that Facebook doesn’t want to upset the right-wing lawmakers, who it fears most and many of whom are in the US government and might vote against it in inevitable anticompetition hearings.

I’m certainly not buying Zuckerberg’s argument that instead of banning political adverts, they should be more clearly labelled. As you read this quote, it’s easy to notice how seemingly out of touch with reality he might be, unless I’ve lost my nose for irony: “I believe that the better approach is to work to increase transparency. Ads on Facebook are already more transparent than anywhere else. We have a political ads archive so anyone can scrutinize every ad that’s run.”

Firstly, nobody reads the fine print in adverts, about where they are from. Secondly, so transparent that the Leave campaign in the UK broke electoral rules over funding.

As Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who broke the Cambridge  Analytica story, said in her powerful TED speech earlier this year: “This was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for a hundred years, in a once-in-a-generation vote that hinged on just 1% of the electorate”.

Namechecking the “gods of Silicon Valley” – Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Dorsey – she said, “what the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken, and you broke it”.

Luckily elections in South Africa aren’t as dependent on social media as they are in the US, where over half of the adult population get their news on Facebook. But that’s won’t last forever.

This column first appeared in Financial Mail

The post Facebook still lets politicians lie while Twitter bans political ads appeared first on Stuff South Africa.