Mark Zuckerberg ushered in the new year pledging to address the many woes that now plague his company by “making sure people have control of their information,” and “ensuring our services improve people’s well-being.”
As much as we may want to believe him, Zuckerberg’s sudden turn toward accountability is impossible to take seriously. The problems Zuckerberg cited, including “election interference” and “hate speech and misinformation,” are by-products of the features of social networks, not bugs. How do we explain Facebook’s years of ignoring these developments? Some headlines have blamed the internet. Others criticize Facebook’s management. A powerful November exposé in The New York Times describes Facebook’s executives as having “stumbled,” first ignoring warning signs of meddling during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and then trying to conceal them. Other analysts conclude that the problem is Facebook’s size, arguing that it should be broken up into smaller companies. Unfortunately, none of these explanations brings us any closer to grasping the real issue.
Facebook is an exemplary company—if you are a fan of “surveillance capitalism,” my term for businesses that create a new kind of marketplace out of our private human experiences. They hoover up all the behavioral data they can glean from our every move (literally, in terms of tracking our phones’ locations) and transform it with machine intelligence into predictions, as they learn to anticipate and even steer our future behavior. These predictions are traded in novel futures markets aimed at a new class of business customers.
Surveillance capitalism was invented by Google more than a decade ago when it discovered that the “data exhaust” clogging its servers could be combined with analytics to produce predictions of user behavior. At that time, the key action of interest was whether a user might click on an ad. The young company’s ability to commandeer its data surplus into click-through prognostications became the basis for an unusually lucrative sales process known as ad targeting. In 2008, when Facebook faced a financial crisis, Zuckerberg hired Google executive Sheryl Sandberg to port over this scheme. (Facebook and Google did not respond to a request for comment.)
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