Failing to take on Facebook will result in 'grave consequences': tech columnist
Gizmodo editor Brian Kahn penned an editorial in which he argued that if Americans let Facebook get away with their behavior that it will end up like the oil spills that "big oil" gets away with.
Writing Wednesday, Kahn cited whistleblower Frances Haugen, who testified this week about disturbing details involving the Facebook algorithm and the intentional efforts the site made to lead users into extremist groups. At the same time, the site's sister network, Instagram, was outed for knowledge that it was causing psychological damage to teens using their site.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg was dismissive of the complaints, and has been accused of parroting excuses once used by Big Tobacco to justify promoting addictive cigarettes to youth in the 1980s. But Kahn believes that the comparison is closer to big oil.
"Facebook is about much more than culture. Its products essentially make it the oil of the internet, an indispensable part of what makes the world tick. And if there's a lesson from the past four decades, it's that not regulating it will come with grave consequences," he explained. Companies like Facebook have their own self-funded "research" that can justify anything.
"If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?" Zuckerberg wrote in his statement.
Kahn recalled the Exxon climate research of the 1970s that proved a 1982 prediction that carbon dioxide would lead to climate change. Exxon executives celebrated themselves for the amazing research and then proceeded to make things worse.
"And like Big Oil, Facebook appears to have decided that information was too dangerous to its bottom line to make public. Instead, Facebook has worked to ingrain its products further into people's lives," he wrote.
"Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own. That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now. I have testified in Congress multiple times and asked them to update these regulations. I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important related to elections, harmful content, privacy, and competition," wrote Zuckerberg.
His plans don't include breaking up Facebook, however, which is something that lawmakers and the FTC have suggested.
"We've seen the deleterious effects of Big Oil continuing to play a key role in the global economy. The world now has a choice of decarbonizing or frying," wrote Kahn. "And thanks to four decades of delay, winding down fossil fuel use must happen at a breakneck pace to avert the most catastrophic climate change scenarios that will leave billions of people impacted. The International Energy Agency found, for example, all new oil exploration must end next year to have a fair shot at meeting the 1.5-degree-Celsius (2.7-degree-Fahrenheit) target in the Paris Agreement."
He hoped that it would serve as a cautionary tale for the tech world.