By Grace Fan (PO ’23)
For many of us, Facebook has been around for as long as we can remember. Though it might have started as an innocuous platform to connect people, it has transpired into a media platform that breeds misinformation, conspiracy groups, and a toxic environment for its users. Its monopolistic reach into almost all aspects of society has proved to be detrimental to not only our political landscape but also to the lives of the individuals that have grown to rely on their platforms.
A recent publication by the Wall Street Journal detailed the more problematic aspects of Facebook, including the detrimental effect that the platform has on the mental health of users, its harmfully polarizing algorithm, and many more. The article only goes to support recent claims and concerns that Facebook’s wide reach and influence is not being addressed by the company itself and consequentially is having drastic impacts on not only the political landscape but the mental health of Facebook’s users. This information was brought to the Journal’s attention through Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook that gathered documents containing the Facebook’s own internal research results that were crucial to the formation of the WSJ’s Facebook Files series which detailed the various problematic nature of Facebook and it’s growing detrimental monopolistic hold on our society.
In fact, the WSJ report showed that data they acquired from Facebook’s internal research shows that Instagram was associated with issues like “anxiety, depression, suicidal thought, and body image issues.” In response to the leakage of their internal documents and the claim that Instagram is detrimental to the mental health of young audiences, Facebook claims that the information was taken “completely out of context.” Following the publication of the WSJ article, Facebook proceeded to release their own version of the internal documents, complete with annotations, arguing that the information had only shown that users say they feel that way- and that it’s not indicative, necessarily, of the correlation between Instagram and the mental health of teen girls as a whole.
The Facebook representative went on to say the studies were designed to help the company understand more thoroughly how their users felt about the platform, and was not supposed to provide statistical estimates for the correlation between Instagram and mental health.
This report comes out at a time where a multitude of research has been done on the negative effects of social media and the ways in which its detrimental consequences have manifested through things like mental illnesses, eating disorders, etc. Even though Facebook claims that the research has been taken out of context, the reports only support what psychologists and researchers have known to be true about these social media platforms.
Similarly, the reports also mentioned Facebook’s role in causing increased polarization within the American political climate, manifesting itself through conspiracy groups, anti-vaxxers, and other dangerous movements founded on misinformation. The reports claimed that the company knew about the likelihood that its algorithm and recommendation systems would push users to extremism. One of the crucial aspects shown within the internal documents is the experience of fictitious test users and how fast the accounts were pushed into echo chambers where conspiracy theories are cultivated and thrive, despite only following the accounts of Fox News and former president Donald Trump. This has allowed for the flourishing of various politically dangerous and misinformative groups on Facebook, garnering followers through this constant push of false information through the echochamber. And the scariest part is that, according to Haugen, “Research, reports and internal posts that suggest that Facebook has long known its algorithms and recommendation systems push some users to extremes.” So it’s not a question of why Facebook hasn’t known about this and more a question of why they haven’t done anything about it since they’ve known about the awful effects of their company. More recently during the pandemic, we saw Facebook play a crucial role in facilitating the Anti-Vaxx movement and spreading disinformation about the vaccine and its effectiveness and legitimacy. According to researchers within Facebook who were studying the platform’s specific “rabbit-hole” communities, they found that conspiracy groups were often associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Similarly, when former President Donald Trump claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from him, conspiracists formed a coalition that was largely organized on Facebook and infamously stormed the capital.
Beyond the platform itself, Facebook also has a huge monopoly on crucial applications, like WhatsApp, Messenger, and various other market transaction-based processes. So when Facebook is facing difficulties or crashes, this shuts down the main forms of communication for a lot of communities, preventing them from completing crucial functions like talking to each other, completing market transaction, or even controlling appliances. More than 3.5 billion people around the world use Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and Facebook to communicate with friends and family. More importantly, within countries like India and Myanmar, Facebook and its agent applications are some of the only ways in which people can communicate and conduct transactions online. So, on October 4th at 11:40 AM EST, when Facebook and all of its connected applications crashed and stopped working, people across the globe felt its detrimental effects. Not only did the crash put a halt to crucial forms of communication within various countries, but it also stopped many individuals from conducting business transactions and prevented others from logging in to various accounts, streaming services, and smart devices through Facebook. In a New York Times article, those dependent on Facebook for their livelihoods recounted their experience with the outage: “With Facebook being down we’re losing thousands in sales,” said Mark Donnelly, a start-up founder in Ireland who runs HUH Clothing, a fashion brand focused on mental health that uses Facebook and Instagram to reach customers. “It may not sound like a lot to others, but missing out on four or five hours of sales could be the difference between paying the electricity bill or rent for the month.” Because Facebook has monopolized the role of being middle-man for various societal functions, complications on their end could result in a drastic and dangerous outcome for hundreds of thousands of people that rely on their services for their livelihood. There needs to be some sort of preventative measure in place that isolates Facebook from various crucial elements of society- like communication or the functioning of the economy.
Facebook is a growing menace- its platforms are creating a dangerous space for young minds and cultivating a community built on false information and conspiracy theories. Moreover, its growing monopolistic reach on various communication platforms is starting to have widespread impacts across the world. The government needs to step in to, first, regulate Facebook’s algorithms and keep individuals from being sucked into various conspiracy groups. There needs to be an implementation of policies that start holding companies accountable for facilitating political unrest and misinformation. Facebook played a huge role within the last couple of years in the creation of a huge ideological rift in the United States by their refusal to properly fact check information and their relaxed policies that allegedly protected ideological freedoms. Secondly, there need to be policies preventing a single company from acquiring control over too many media platforms, as it gives them unregulated access to all forms of communication within an area, which can have huge consequences ranging from the outage of entire swaths of social media to censorship/propaganda. As we enter into this increasingly technological world, the government needs to start regulating these huge tech companies that are creating detrimental impacts globally.
