Introduction:
In the ongoing dispute between two tech giants, Facebook and Apple, the former has recently considered filing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple's app store policies. The claim levied against the smartphone giant is that the Apple App store discriminates against third-party apps in favor of their own ones. There has been no legal action taken by Facebook yet, and they have also not announced any plans concerning the conflict. However, if one reads between the lines, it becomes clear to see that this is just a legislative continuation of their existing unrelated conflict. Ergo, in order to find out the reason for their opposition, media and journalists have pinpointed the defining moment that began the corporate feud.
The majority of the opinion and news articles on the situation reference this as the defining moment: the interview held by the co-founder of Vox, Ezra Klein, and starring the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, as a guest. The interview was one of Vox’s series, “Vox Conversations”, that they published on their app, and it was conducted on the 18th of March, 2018. Their interview's conversation focused on how Facebook's issues regarding privacy and ethical concerns were addressed by Zuckerberg in the past, and how he plans to deal with them in the future.
I’ll provide a very concise version of what each person said in the interview while keeping the same general message of the original transcription on Vox’s site:
The Interview Transcription Summed up Into a 2 Minute Read:
Note: This summary is my "sentence" paraphrasing of the whole 50 minute interview's transcription, so it is not word-for-word. Quotes are italicized and the main "dispute" quotes are bolded.
Klein: You said that Facebook is now more like a government than a traditional company.
Zuckerberg: We have to deal with more disputes than other companies, like "a government", and I work on making Facebook more democratic, but it is not a great current state.
Klein: Right, if Facebook "gets it wrong", the scale is governmental, like election legitimacy and ethnic violence. Is Facebook too big for normal company governance and incentives?
Zuckerberg: Facebook tries to deal with problems responsively. As for governance, we have the benefit of free reign from the "whims of short-term shareholders" so we can design products & decisions for the community's best interest.
Klein: As you have short-term freedom from your voting shares, you also have more power and there is no democratic governance in Facebook because there's no election for CEO, is it less accountable that way?
Zuckerberg: Facebook wants to create governance that reflects content & community more than short-term shareholders, and it's good if we do it well. The issues for Facebook are transparency, an independent appeal process, and we can do a private/public independent appeal process in the future.
Klein: One thing that's been "damaging for Facebook over the past year" (2017-2018), is a concern over not being able to trust statements on how bad the "fake news" problems are. I'm interested to hear you broach "independent institutions" as a form of transparency.
Zuckerberg: Good point. We didn't have an understanding of "where the state of some of the systems [is]. In 2016, we were behind having an understanding and operational excellence on preventing things like misinformation, Russian interference. And you can bet that's a huge focus for us going forward." We have 14,000 people working on security and community operations and review. We worked with German, French elections, and the special election in Alabama and learned to better find fake accounts and misinformation.
Klein: What about the tools of punishing misbehavior? Russia would get sanctioned hard (hypothetically) if Hilary Clinton wins after they tried hacking the election systems. Facebook can't do the same thing, as it "doesn't have the ability to punish". So do you have capacity for sanctions and can you increase the cost of using Facebook for these "kinds of efforts"?
Zuckerberg: We approach this by dealing with 3 categories of fake news: spammers, state actors, and nuanced real media outlets with varying accuracy/trustworthiness. We can solve the first by removing their ads and the systems learn to remove their content, state actors like Russia, you can "never fully solve" and "we can't do this all by ourselves", so we try to work with local governments to punish them; the real media outlets are challenging because there's "quite large free speech issues" To improve on this, we push up the most trusted news sources after surveying people.
Klein: That third approach can cause a "huge return to incumbency", if Facebook ranks their News Feed by privileging trusted old sources, it's going to be hard for new organizations to break through.
Zuckerberg: We're thinking about that point, and we try to "give everyone a voice. That's so deep in our mission." To avoid the broadly trusted shift in Facebook news affecting all organizations, we do it incrementally. We try to make viewed content have meaning to the community. An incorrect notion which is one of the things people criticize Facebook on is that "people say 'Hey, you're just ranking the system based on what people like and click on.' " This is incorrect, because we "moved past that many years back" because of clickbait. We design algorithms to map what "people are actually telling us is meaningful to them. Not what they click on, not what is going to make us the most revenue, but what people actually find meaningful and valuable."
Klein: One of the things people talk about is whether monetizing user attention as a business model induces problems. In an interview the other day, Apple CEO responded to the question of what he would do in your shoes with the argument, "He said, ‘I wouldn’t be in this situation,’ and argued that Apple sells products to users, it doesn’t sell users to advertisers, and so it’s a sounder business model that doesn’t open itself to these problems."
Zuckerberg: "You know, I find that argument, that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can't afford to pay." We're focused on serving people, and "to the dissatisfaction of our sales team here" focus on community rather than advertising. "But if you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford. I thought Jeff Bezos had an excellent saying on this in one of his Kindle launches a number of years back. He said, “There are companies that work hard to charge you more, and there are companies that work hard to charge you less.” "... "On the contrary, I think it’s important that we don’t all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me."
Klein: I have sympathy for the advertising model as I also am in one, but it can blind us to incentives. Does diversifying the model help, like paid subscriptions on WhatsApp?
Zuckerberg: We got rid of that feature.
Klein: Well there you go, shows what I know.
Zuckerberg: But keep going.
Klein: You don't need to only serve rich people to grow from the attention model. The attention and advertising model pulls one into getting more and more attention for profit. In an interview with Tristan Harris, a Facebook critic, he responded to the announcement of changes that reduced the time people used Facebook by dismissing the amount reduced "He couldn't do that by 50 percent". What do you think about protecting from the costs to this model?
Zuckerberg: I think that our responsibility here is to make sure that the time people spend on Facebook is "time well-spent". We researched what drives well-being, and social media is broken into connecting/building relationships and content consumption. The former is positive, and posts from family and friends reminds users of these relationships. Content consumption doesn't, and because of this it does not "as" correlated with long-term well-being. We're prioritizing showing more content from these interactions, and that took time spent down a little bit. That will build a stronger community and business, regardless of Wall Street's concerns.
For the rest of the interview, Klein touches on easier questions including: Is Facebook taking the advertising market from journalism organizations, does Facebook as a social infrastructure helped bring the world together or apart, is Facebook too big to manage the global scale of news effectively, and what will you look for in the 20-year time frame if Facebook succeeded in its ideals of improving the world.
The Most Quoted Part in Vox’s Interview
The main focus of various news articles and op-eds that populate the feed, when one searches about the feud between Apple and Facebook, is this transcribed section of the interview:
“Ezra Klein:
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gave an interview the other day and he was asked what he would do if he was in your shoes. He said, “I wouldn’t be in this situation,” and argued that Apple sells products to users, it doesn’t sell users to advertisers, and so it’s a sounder business model that doesn’t open itself to these problems.
Do you think part of the problem here is the business model where attention ends up dominating above all else, and so anything that can engage has powerful value within the ecosystem?
Mark Zuckerberg:
You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.”
Who is In the Right: Facebook or Apple?
The argument is a non-starter. The round goes to Tim Cook, as Zuckerberg’s answer frankly doesn’t make much sense at all— and I’ll explain why. As a master of the business model of attention, Zuckerberg characterizes the argument of Cook as “glib”— meaning insincere and shallow— missing the forest for the trees. In the interview, he forms a counter using the false premise that Cook is implying he “can’t” care about non-paying users with his business model and argues that advertising is the only way to reach this audience without prejudice. What a massive leap of logic to make: going from Tim Cook’s actual claim, “you view your customers as products”, to "that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you”. Zuckerberg's feigned unawareness is so unbelievable that it is almost funny, and when you are listening to the actual interview on Vox, the humor in this confusing answer is worth its weight in gold.
No, Zuckerberg, funny as it sounds—the CEO of the world’s biggest smartphone company is not wrong about the impersonal ambitions behind your smartphone application. You are not the owner of a small community-led, fact-based journalism site that puts ads on the side margins; you’re the owner of a billion-user media site that is complicit in advertising fake news that misinformed at least tens of millions; you’re the owner of a massive data poacher that collects enough data to warrant a majorly negative response from a Congressional subpoena; you're the owner of a pocket-lining monopoly that has been sued in 2020 by the Federal Trade Commision for anti-competitive conduct; you’re a sly businessman making a profit off of minutes, keeping users on your platform through suggestive manipulation of feed based on chilling off-platform data tracking; you’re a wily orator who obfuscates the meaning of “well-being” to mean reading posts from friends rather than getting off the internet to interact with them face-to-face. And most likely much, much more that we don't know about.
Let’s analyze the next argument Zuckerberg brings up:
" But if you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford. I thought Jeff Bezos had an excellent saying on this in one of his Kindle launches a number of years back. He said, “There are companies that work hard to charge you more, and there are companies that work hard to charge you less.” And at Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use."
The next argument that the Facebook founder brings to the table is that Apple is the one charging a premium to their users for their products, causing “Stockholm syndrome” among those who follow Apple’s side of the argument. Rather, in his opinion, Facebook is the one giving a “free service”, to its users by “working hard to charge them less”. Cue the smoking advertisements that played on TV, until the 1970s’ wave of restrictions, that convinced multiple generations to sacrifice their longevity for something “cheap” and “enjoyable”. Facebook in 2018: well if I don’t say, I must be doing something great for society by taking a billion users’ data, sometimes even without their knowledge, and selling it to advertisers so they can continue using our “cheap” and “enjoyable” platform. Of course, the side-effects of continued use include getting radicalized by an echo-chamber of “Facebook Friends” and/or losing touch with reality. To borrow a term from the Internet, the product may be different but the cancer is the same. The one and only thing that Zuckerberg is right on is that Apple makes its profit in a visible and transparent manner— which is a good thing.
A little word of advice to Zuckerberg and the Facebook board: Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world, and their biggest profit comes from phones — phones that connect a chunk of their users to platforms like Facebook, so he knows what apps do to these people firsthand. The monetization of user attention is like breathing air for Facebook, the only question is how much air can it suck in until the vapid social media leaves nothing but CO2 to pollute the world.
A Breakdown of the Recurring Themes of the Interview
The interesting thing is that— while the news articles on that small portion of the interview was what drew me to this topic— the whole interview was in itself a multitude of symptoms proving the exact diagnosis that Cook made. The first thing that I noticed when I read through the transcription of the interview that Vox co-founder Ezra Klein had with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is canned answers— so many canned answers. To me, it felt like the interview was almost scripted. Since the interview was not formatted in a way to press hard questions— there are no real counter-questions to interviewee responses, the interviewer just asks a different question after it is answered— it was easy for Zuckerberg to weasel out with strategic canned answers. The structure of the interview was from easy questions to harder ones, mainly driven by the recurring theme of advertising. On the subject, she questions how Facebook’s relations to others in the industry are and what side they will pursue: generating clicks for Wall Street money or pursuing a less attention-based model. With the majority of Zuckerberg's responses to Klein’s questions pertaining to how Facebook will change their bad practices, his canned answers are a strategy to avoid answering honestly.
For an example of this strategy in action: Zuckerberg describes the 2016 elections as a failure and a learning experience from which Facebook made progress; they ensured safety in the global elections that followed by cracking down on misinformation and bad actors. However, what answer does he provide after she presses him on what he is doing for state actors like Russia? No real answer except a denial of responsibility. Here’s what his strategy was to avoid seeming like he is stating nothing: divide and conquer. He brings up the three categories of fake news, one being spammers, state actors, and then real news media with occasionally dodgy trustworthiness. In-depth, Zuckerberg goes through the methods that they deal with the first category, where they reduce the amount of funds that they accrue from advertising to smoke them out of the woodwork. The third category is also chock-full of content, and he talks it up about how free speech is a hard issue to deal with in terms of media corporations, and how he is focused on community response to determine “trusted” news sources. The second category being the one of importance is of course the one where he says the least.
“That’s basically the Russian interference effort. And that is a security problem. You never fully solve it, but you strengthen your defenses. You get rid of the fake accounts and the tools that they have. We can’t do this all by ourselves, so we try to work with local governments everywhere who have more tools to punish them and have more insight into what is going on across their country so that they can tell us what to focus on. And that one I feel like we’re making good progress on too.”
What does he mean by they can’t do it by themselves? Four score and two verbal paragraphs ago, he flaunted the security that their 14,000 employees provide the community of Facebook from the issue of fake news; now he says that preventing fake news from state actors is an impossible task that needs to be directed to governments rather than businesses. I’ll talk more about the flagrant issues that arrive from this statement later, after I clear up the empty-can strategy Zuckerberg makes great use of. He divides the question into thirds— three categories— in order to diffuse the attention, and then sandwiches in-between an actual denial, “You can never fully solve it”, with a positive outlook slapped on at the end. Recall that Zuckerberg constantly boils the solution down to iterative improvement, and conversely one can critically infer that his true model to make Facebook better is doing the same things with no definite results. So the interview answer should have been much shorter, "I believe we can't fully solve it, and it will happen again."
But what trickery shouldn't one expect from the interview of someone who’s so well versed in the attention industry? The issues from the statement that he diverted to governments, mentioned earlier, stemmed from a lack of guide rails preventing accountability in the interview. Beginning from when Klein debuted the interview with a comparison of Facebook to being a government, the whole issue of accountability was derailed. Klein gave soft-ball questions that asked what Zuckerberg thought of Facebook as being too big, while not trying to put “down” the position of Facebook as just a company, nothing more. The fact that they spent multiple minutes worth of the raw interview discussing how Facebook can be juxtaposed to a government— in the way that they deal with fake news, managing the news feed in other countries, and the pressures of being “too big”— is alarming doublespeak and is fundamentally misguided. Fact is: companies are supposed to solve issues that occur on their platform. Regardless of what country fake news originates from, bad actors and misinformation can be easily filtered and flagged through keywords including links to known fake news sites. Even smaller companies like Twitter and YouTube have completely automated the process of filtering to a science, and they have had little trouble with the law over “free speech”. That’s because companies are free to censor content contrary to their TOS, of course, as long as you don’t have any shareholders or monetizable users from that country preventing your action.
Additionally, Facebook's power is compared to a government again and again through this interview, and I am just going no, and no. There is a reason why we have laws preventing conflict of interest and rules on monopolies and that is because democratic countries wouldn’t want companies to reach governmental power in any industry, public or private— period. Unethical practices and a lack of moderation over a billion users is a highly preventable and terminal company issue, not a "small misstep" from a "government-like" social entity. It’s not about whether Zuckerberg plans to retire to a farm in South America or whether he plans to farm the “attention” industry and make its consumers into harvestable ”products”; it should not be up to companies to decide if they want to have governmental level power in the first place. If that question even has to be asked it should have been made by the real government, along with a hefty sanction, fines, and a drastic legislative reduction of Facebook’s ability to capitalize on its massive userbase. In this broken system where a dystopian data hog, Facebook, has over a billion users—more than any journalist organizations combined— and was allowed to have bad enough security to leave foreign influencers in an election unmoderated: if Facebook claims to have the responsibility of a government, they certainly aren’t showing any accountability of that level. Let's just look at the circumstantial evidence: what of Zuckerberg's claim of increased security from the number of employees that Facebook has hired?
In the interview, Zuckerberg proactively and frequently markets the security of the company.
“Right now in the company, I think we have about 14,000 people working on security and community operations and review, just to make sure that we can really nail down some of those issues that we had in 2016.”
According to the statistics of macrotrend.net, Facebook’s employee count has soared to over 4 times as large as in 2018, to 58,000 people in 2020. (MacroTrends) In a similar social media sphere, Twitter, under CEO Jack Dorsey has accrued somewhere above 4,900 people as last reported in 2019. That’s an order of magnitude of difference smaller, like the difference between a 7.0 and a 6.0 on the Richter scale, and yet there is no discernible improvement Facebook made on Twitter's security to be seen anywhere.
In this case, the facts speak for themselves. Facebook’s net worth may be worth 2 orders of magnitude greater than Twitter, and their social media platform may dwarf their competitor's; however, their security issues have been completely unaddressed from 2016 until now, whereas Twitter has had nowhere near the level of scrutiny from their news policies as Facebook’s recent years since it was founded. All 50,000 employees of theirs couldn’t stop the spread of the information network of “Stop the Steal” rioters in this last round of inaction on election misinformation in America. So what are the employees for if they aren’t performing this critical job? They’ve been hired solely to pursue the attention model and continue creating value in Facebook’s primary source of profit.
That’s right, the ad-revenue that Zuckerberg claims to be generated as a side-focus to the Facebook community and security of information is absolutely the main focus of his drive to add Facebook employees. Employees are hired to provide value to a company. For Facebook, that value is extracted from the attention and advertising model that Zuckerberg claims isn’t their priority— yet they’re the biggest social media employers in town. Despite his grand morals portrayed within Vox’s interview, Facebook’s crusade for more employees is irrefutably not for the security of their platform. It’s a logic derived from Zuckerberg’s own hidden words: security sure isn’t their focus, because it’s “never possible to fully solve”, so deductively, hiring new employees means that they need more peddlers and engineers to make profitable deals from their main industry— the advertising industry. Zuckerberg is right, Facebook's main focus has always been on their community; this applies as long their community is limited exclusively to Wall Street investors.
Citations:
Federal Trade Commision (FTC.gov): https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-sues-facebook-illegal-monopolization