Last month The New York Times published an investigative report outlining how Facebook’s executives have dithered and obfuscated facts in the face of mounting scrutiny. The most damning disclosure from the report concerns Facebook’s relationship with Definers Public Affairs, a Republican-connected consultancy firm that applies the tactics of political opposition research to the corporate world. According to The Times, Facebook commissioned Definers to undermine a coalition of activist groups that are critical of Facebook by portraying them as agents of the billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
You read that correctly. Facebook actually trafficked in one of the most tired and baldly anti-Semitic tropes of alt-right paranoia; that George Soros is an evil Zionist hell-bent on conquering the world with his money. Specifically, Definers circulated a dossier to conservative news outlets such as Breitbart detailing how a number of groups in the anti-Facebook coalition received funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (while omitting the fact that these same groups receive funding from numerous other entities, including the Ford Foundation and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy Project).
Before I dissect the cadaver of this latest PR blunder, let me recap the series of crises that have enveloped Facebook since 2016. Facebook has faced blowback over its failure to halt Russian trolls from spreading misinformation in the run-up to the presidential election; its use by Myanmar’s military as a conduit for disseminating anti-Rohingya propaganda; its aid in fomenting further anti-Islamic rancor in Germany and Sri Lanka; the disclosure that the political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica gained access to 50 million user profiles through a third party; and recognition of the vital role WhatsApp—the Facebook-owned messaging service— played in the mob killings of at least 24 people in India and Mexico who were falsely accused of child abduction.
All of this, along with a growing body of research that shows social media websites diminish heavy users’ capacity for self-esteem, empathy and critical thinking, and one can be forgiven for regarding Facebook with a jaundiced eye these days. Even figures within Silicon Valley have been disowning Facebook. Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice-president for user growth at Facebook until 2011, expressed remorse at a Stanford Bussiness School event last year and told his audience that his former employer “is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.”
What sets the revelations about Definers Public Affairs apart from Facebook’s past missteps, though, is the degree to which Facebook executives were complicit in Definers’ opposition research. A week after The Times released its investigation, Elliott Schrage, Facebook’s outgoing head of communications, published a memo wherein he admitted to directing Definers to attack Facebook’s critics for receiving grants from foundations affiliated with George Soros. But in an indication of Facebook’s moral rot, Schrage never apologized. Rather, he defended Definers’ work by claiming that funding from Soros-backed philanthropies nullifies the credentials of the anti-Facebook coalition as a grassroots network. More startlingly, The Times reported last week that Sheryl Sandberg asked Facebook’s communications staff to look into Mr. Soros’s financial interests in tech companies after he criticized Google and Facebook in a speech at the 2018 World Economic Forum.
I am not a fan of billionaires, nor do I approve of some of the monetary adventurism George Soros oversaw in the 1990s as a Wall Street speculator. But in an age when the U.S. president is tweeting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, domestic terrorists are sending pipe bombs to the president’s opponents (including Soros) and gunmen are slaughtering synagogue-goers, discrediting one’s rivals by linking them with Mr. Soros is a blatant contribution to the miasma of hate and lies that has poisoned this country and the wider contemporary world.
But I do not think the top brass at Facebook is inherently malignant. To adopt that narrative of vilification would be to capitulate to the same atmosphere of hatred I decry above. What the Definers debacle reveals instead is how captive Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have become to their own creation and the goal of growth at all costs. Forget its 2.2 billion worldwide users. Facebook can’t even get a grip on the decisions being made at its Menlo Park headquarters.
In short, Facebook is too big for the good of both itself and a functioning democratic society. So I would urge any objector to Facebook’s actions to punish the company where it hurts: delete your Facebook account along with any WhatsApp or Instagram accounts you might be maintaining (Instagram is indeed owned by Facebook).
Facebook is a corporation that profits by selling your personal data to advertisers, so depriving it of its revenue stream could at least signal to its leadership that it needs to change its business model to something a bit less cold-blooded. But if Facebook were to continue hemorrhaging members and eventually go the way of Myspace, then so be it.
A common response to criticism of social networking giants has been that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are vehicles for social activism, and without them we wouldn’t have the #MeToo phenomenon or the Resistance to the Trump presidency. The problem with this reasoning is that countless social justice movements have flourished and achieved concrete successes in the absence of social networking sites. Leaders of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement pulled off the March on Washington and the Mississippi Freedom Project without any nebulous Facebook event pages. More recently, a coalition of as many as 60,000 activists used private email chains to coordinate protests that ended up shutting down the 1999 Seattle WTO conference.
So activism will survive without Facebook (or Twitter). The same can be said of digital social networking. A number of experimental projects online are probing the potential of confederated social networks; essentially, decentralized networks that are operated by a community of users as opposed to a company (Mastodon is a prime example).
Most importantly though, you will survive without social media. Yes, shunning the major social networking sites will be hard at first; most of your friends probably use Facebook or Instagram. But if your friends are genuine, then they will send you text messages with important updates you might be missing online. Odds are also good that you know at least two or three people who are privately uncomfortable with the ways their Facebook and Instagram feeds are warping their lives, and your disavowal of those platforms could set a trend in motion.
After all, most people do not want to be associated with antisocial behavior, and Facebook has proved time and again that it is incapable of conducting itself in an ethical manner. Government regulation can reign in some of Facebook’s excesses, but social media giants ultimately derive their power from their users, and I think it’s time Internet users pulled the plug on a company that still operates according to the dorm room-concocted motto, “move fast and break things.”