“Yes/No/Ok, But”; Klonick; and Cottom

Clearly, Facebook Is Very Flawed. What Will We Do About It? Klonick, Kate . New York Times (Online) , New York: New York Times Company. Oct 1, 2021.

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FULL TEXT Two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal published “The Facebook Files,” a damning series based on a cache of

leaked internal documents that revealed how much the company knew about the harms it was causing and how

little it did to stop it.

In a hearing on Thursday, senators on the consumer protection subcommittee accused Facebook of hiding vital

information on its impact on users. “It has attempted to deceive the public and us in Congress about what it

knows, and it has weaponized childhood vulnerabilities against children themselves,” Senator Richard Blumenthal,

the chairman of the subcommittee and a Democrat from Connecticut, charged.

I’ve spent the last six years researching how platforms govern speech online, including a year inside Facebook

following the development of its Oversight Board. While the “factory floor” of the company is full of well-

intentioned people, much of what the series has reported confirmed what I and other Facebook watchers have

long suspected.

The Journal’s reporting showed that Facebook regularly gave preferential treatment to elites if their speech was

flagged on the platform; that it implemented shoddy solutions to mitigate the harmful mental and emotional health

effects of its products on teenagers; and that it underinvested in enforcing its own rules about what is allowed on

the site outside of the United States. The series has stirred the now familiar outrage at Facebook for failing to take

responsibility for how people use its platform. While these revelations are disturbing, they also point to some

opportunities for reform.

One of those opportunities is redefining how Facebook determines what a “good” product is. For much of its

history, the company’s key metric has been user engagement —how long users log in, the pages they spend time

on, which ads they click. The greater the user engagement, the more valuable Facebook’s ads, and the more profit

for shareholders. But the “Facebook Files” stories have put to rest any doubt that this narrow concept of

engagement fails to capture the platform’s real impact —both the bad and, yes, the good.

Facebook is perfectly capable of measuring “user experience” besides the narrow concept of “engagement,” and it

is time those measurements were weighted more heavily in company decision-making. That doesn’t mean just

weighing harmful effects on users; it could also mean looking at and measuring the good things Facebook offers

—how likely you are to attend a protest or give to a charitable cause you hear about on Facebook. However it ends

up being calculated, it needs to be transparent and it needs to become a bigger part of the company’s decision-

making going forward.

The series also revealed that Facebook had conducted its own research into the harmful effects of Instagram, the

popular photo-sharing platform it acquired in 2012, on the mental health of teenage girls but downplayed the

results. For social-media researchers, these revelations confirmed much of what we already knew from multiple

third-party studies showing that cellphones and social media are bad for teenage mental health. (And long before

smartphones and Instagram, social science placed similar blame on fashion magazines and television.)

While calling out Facebook for its mistakes and omissions may seem like a win, berating the company for its

flawed internal and external research projects does not mean this type of work will become more ethical or

transparent. The outcome is that it doesn’t get done at all —not by Facebook or anyone else —and if it does, the

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results stay hidden.

Other popular platforms are also part of the problem. Snapchat supposedly studied the effect of its platform on its

users’ mental health, but never released the results. Instead, it announced new intervention tools. After the

publication of the “Facebook Files” series, TikTok rolled out “mental health guides” for users.

These moves reveal what companies are trying to avoid. If you look inward and investigate the harms your

platform has caused and it turns out to be too expensive or too hard to fix them, it stirs up the exact kind of public

relations storm Facebook is now enduring. From these companies’ perspective, the alternative is simpler: If you

don’t study it, there’s nothing to reveal.

Between Facebook’s internal research and reports last month on the company’s failed program to share its data

with outside social scientists, executives across Silicon Valley at other companies are most likely breathing a sigh

of relief: They’ve managed to dodge pressure from outside researchers to interrogate their own practices.

The series’ most damning takeaways were the revelations around how Facebook has handled content issues in

Africa, Latin America and Asia. While Facebook applies its community rules globally, those rules can’t possibly

adhere to the wide range of cultural norms of Facebook users around the world. Understanding those differences

requires more and better people to constantly revise the rules and enforce them.

Last week, Facebook announced it has spent more than $13 billion on safety and security since 2016 and currently

employs 40,000 full- and part-time safety and security workers. For 2020 alone, this puts the costs in this area

between $5 billion to $6 billion —or about one-tenth of the company’s overall costs. To put this all in perspective, in

the United States there is roughly one law enforcement officer for every 500 people. Facebook has 2.8 billion

global monthly active users; that means just 1.3 people working in safety and security for every 100,000 users.

There is no quick fix for content moderation. The only way to do it better is to hire more people to do the work of

“safety and security,” a term that encompasses all who both directly and indirectly write, revise and enforce

Facebook’s community standards. According to Facebook’s S.E.C. filings, the average revenue per users in the

United States and Canada in the last quarter of 2020 was $53.56. Europe, its next-largest market, accounted for

only a fraction of that at $16.87, with Asia-Pacific users at just $4.05. “Rest of World” was just $2.77 per user.

Those numbers don’t necessarily reflect where Facebook ultimately ends up investing in safety and security. But it

does help explain one powerful set of incentives that might motivate the company’s priorities.

The “Facebook Files” series is motivating change. But it will take more than breathless reporting to make sure that

reform happens in effective ways. That will require laws demanding transparency from platforms, a new agency to

specialize in online issues and more science. Whistle-blowing gets us halfway there. We have to do the rest.

Dr. Kate Klonick (@klonick) is a lawyer and an assistant professor at St. John’s University Law School. She is a

fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and the Brookings Institution, and currently writing a book

on Facebook and Airbnb.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this

or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

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Subject: Law schools; Mental health; Decision making; Social networks

Business indexing term: Subject: Social networks

Location: United States--US Asia

Company / organization: Name: Facebook Inc; NAICS: 518210, 519130

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Identifier / keyword: Facebook Inc Instagram Inc Social Media Corporate Social Responsibility Computers

and the Internet Teenagers and Adolescence Mental Health and Disorders Wall

Street Journal Regulation and Deregulation of Industry United States Politics and

Government

Publication title: New York Times (Online); New York

Publication year: 2021

Publication date: Oct 1, 2021

Section: opinion

Publisher: New York Times Company

Place of publication: New York

Country of publication: United States, New York

Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals--United States

Source type: Blog, Podcast, or Website

Language of publication: English

Document type: News

ProQuest document ID: 2578051273

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Last updated: 2021-10-11

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