Peter, my barber, pays his bills cutting hair. Sure, I often socialize at his shop, but that does not mean he runs a social club. Let’s make it very clear: Facebook is not a social network, it’s a marketing platform. We may like to socialize here, but Facebook’s business is to sell data. Their true customers –those who actually pay the bills– are the marketers buying our information.

To be useful to marketers, data must be voluminous, clear and actionable. Facebook is most profitable when it collects as much data as possible, from as many people as possible, as fast as possible. Above all, this data must be clearly categorized in order to be monetized. So what does this mean for your feed?

Let’s say your friend shares an interesting article about a hot-button issue. The text is nuanced and comprehensive, and it makes no absolute moral judgements. You spend 15 minutes reading it, and find it so enlightening you share it and give it a like. Unfortunately for Facebook, your reaction took too long and generated an inconclusive data point, as it it did not reveal your clear personal stance on the topic. To make things worse, by sharing it, you are now encouraging others to leave Facebook’s walled garden. Not surprisingly this kind of content is not favoured by the Facebook algorithm.

In the same time you spent reading the article, you could have scrolled through dozens of simplistic posts and reacted to them. Memes, cartoons, photos, quotes, slogans, product reviews, celebrity gossip… the algorithm loves them all, as they quickly reveal and reenforce your tendencies and preferences. Conservative or liberal, pro-life or pro-choice, Pepsi or Coke, DC or Marvel, the labels are irrelevant as long as the platform can quickly and conclusively categorize you. This allows Facebook to assemble the personality profiles that marketers require in order to target us more efficiently.

Seeing that simplistic posts generate engagement, pages are incentivized to create more of them, while users who crave social validation are incentivized to share them. This generates a vicious cycle. The problem is that as nuanced conversation shrinks and disappears, polarization grows. Actually, the most simplistic and divisive posts often generate the most engagement.

Provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen, The Facebook Papers reveal a company well aware of its negative social impact, but more concerned with profits than with people. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg did not set out to build the most efficient social polarization engine the world has ever known, but the business model Facebook continues to pursue and optimize has nevertheless unleashed it upon us all.

For over a decade, Facebook’s internal motto was “move fast and break things”, and that it has certainly accomplished. It has undermined democracy, eroded civility, and dramatically reduced the range of social discourse. Maybe it’s time for the company’s leadership to slow down, acknowledge the damage and fix what they broke.

Notes:

1- I am well aware of the irony of publishing this on Facebook, but considering that social media users are the intended audience of this article, it makes it the ideal forum.

2- I am well aware that no one is forcing me, or anyone else, to be on Facebook. That said, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus) has gained such dominance over our online interactions that it has become increasingly difficult to escape it. Furthermore, I can completely leave all of Meta’s services, but I’ll still have to live in the polarized and misinformed world it has helped create.

3- I am well aware that I don’t offer a solution to the stated problem. Restructuring the economic incentives of social media platforms is a daunting task that will require complex and nuanced conversations. The exact kind of conversations being systematically eroded by social media in its current state.

4- I am well aware that technology has a huge potential to improve our lives. But technology is not intrinsically beneficial or democratic. It all depends on how it is structured, commercialized and regulated. What is disheartening is that every time there are serious concerns about Facebook’s questionable practices –from the Prism Program to Cambridge Analytica to the Facebook papers– the company’s leadership reacts dismissively.