YOU DON’T NEED FACEBOOK

by Josh Cake

18 February 2021

If Maccas didn't like an Australian law and responded by removing vegetables from all of their products, you could get angry at them for not providing you with vegetables, or you could just eat vegetables somewhere else.

If this change seems massive or catastrophic, it is worth questioning whether you were too reliant on one private company for something that is a) essential b) easily found elsewhere.

Facebook is as much of a news website as McDonalds. Facebook is a private company that offers people a service: the chance to share content with each other for free. When you engage with this service, your behaviour IS the product.

As I discuss in my TedX talk, Facebook tracks every click, non-click, quick scroll, slow scroll, pause, scroll back - every single action - in order to figure out your emotional state. Facebook then sells this data on your emotions to advertisers. Links to news websites were just a part of this - the company can still harvest emotional data and make money from advertisers with all the other content included in its service.

Facebook is neither a news source nor a public service - it can publish or not publish whatever it wants. It will publish some pretty evil stuff, if you pay - Sacha Baron Cohen accurately pointed out that it would have run ads for the Final Solution had it existed in the 1940s.

Like any private publishing company, it has the right to choose exactly what it publishes. Unlike most private publishing companies, its aim is to dissatisfy.

The longer you scroll, the more information it gathers on you - ultimately, it wants to show you things that put you in the perfect vulnerable state for a targeted ad. Hint: happy people don't buy as much as discontent, stressed, fearful people.

A number of non-media pages have lost their content on this first day of Facebook's response, including unions, women's rights organisations, and AFLW (not AFLM). This is most likely not deliberate - Facebook has even removed all content from the Facebook page of Facebook, which cannot be in their interests.

These errors come from a rushed, glitchy rollout that suggests "send a message first, sort out details later", most likely done with quick and nasty artificial intelligence. Machine learning will absorb prejudices from the society in which it is trained. Unless programmers deliberately work to avoid this, AI is never a neutral, unbiased machine, but an algorithmic reflection of human structures. If our societal structures are sexist, artificial intelligence will learn from us to be sexist.

A common complaint is that Facebook has stopped showing posts from the ABC during a bushfire. It has no responsibility to show ABC bushfire updates - Facebook is not a public broadcaster in the same way that Maccas is not a public nutrition authority. That is the ABC's job.

Now is a great time for Australians to break the habit of relying on a totally amoral, profit-driven, monolithic corporation to filter through essential content from the ABC, and return directly to the public broadcaster for essential updates.

If you want news, go directly to news websites. If you love the debate that ensues from the mixing of news and social media, you can try Twitter, but they'll harvest your emotional data too.

It's worth noting that Rupert Murdoch and Peter Costello own over 90% of Australian news media between them, and that this level of monopoly leads to significant bias and misinformation - CIVICUS downgraded our democracy from 'open' to 'narrowed' in 2019. You can always search for independent news sources, or even look at how other countries report on Australia.

Facebook without news is like Maccas without vegetables - if this change affects you, this is good news. It's a wake-up call to change your media habits. If we learn to go directly to independent news outlets, Australians won't just cope with this change - our national conversation will improve.