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Mark Zuckerberg is the most powerful unelected person in the world, and he drives me crazy when he misrepresents what is happening on Facebook.
In an interview that aired Tuesday, Zuckerberg was asked important and thorny questions about his company: Why are people sometimes cruel to each other on Facebook, and why are incendiary and partisan posts getting so much attention?
Zuckerberg told “Axios on HBO” that Americans are angry and divided right now, and that’s why they act that way on Facebook too.
Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives constantly say that Facebook is a mirror of society. An online meeting offering a personal print shop to billions of people will inevitably have all the good and bad in those people. (My colleague Mike Isaac has spoken of this point of view before).
It is true, but also comically incomplete, to say that Facebook reflects reality. Instead, Facebook presents reality filtered through its own prism, and this affects what people think and do.
Facebook regularly rewrites its computer systems to meet company goals; the company might make you more likely to see a friend’s baby photo than a wildfire news article. That doesn’t mean that wildfires aren’t real, but it does mean that Facebook is creating a world where fires aren’t out front.
Facebook’s ability to shape, not simply reflect, people’s preferences and behavior is also how the company makes money. The company might suggest to a video game developer that modifying its social media ads (changing the pitch language or tailoring the ad differently for college students in the Midwest than for those in their 40s on the West Coast) may help you sell more app downloads.
Facebook sells billions of dollars in ads each year because what people see there and how Facebook chooses to prioritize that information can influence what people believe and buy.
Facebook knows that it has the power to shape what we believe and how we act. That is why it has restricted incorrect information about the coronavirus and does not allow people to bully each other online.
More evidence: An internal team of Facebook researchers concluded that the social network polarized people the most, The Wall Street Journal reported in May. American society is deeply divided, but Facebook also contributes to this.
So why does Zuckerberg keep saying that Facebook is a mirror of society? Perhaps it is a useful talking point for the media that is not intentionally complicated.
There are no easy solutions to make Facebook or much of the world less polarized and divided, but it is dishonest for Zuckerberg to say that his company is a bystander rather than a participant in what billions of people on his site believe and how. They behave.
Zuckerberg knows, like everyone else, the power Facebook has to remake reality.
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Put creepy tech to good use
A reader from El Dorado Hills, California, emailed a follow-up question to last week’s newsletter about Utah’s flawed, but still promising virus alert app. Why does any health authority need to persuade us to download another app, when our phones are already tracking our movements and could be redistributed to find out who we might have been exposed to the coronavirus?
Yes, fair question. First, I would say that it is not good that a trillion applications already collect information about where we are going and what we do. But it is true that a failure of many coronavirus tracking apps around the world is that people have to be persuaded to download another app and trust what it does.
Google and Apple are working together on technology that would make it easier for states to notify people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus by detecting phones that are approaching each other. With this technology, states would not necessarily have to create separate healthcare apps.
People still need to trust this virus alert technology and give it permission to track its whereabouts. Trust in both technology companies and public health authorities has been lacking in this pandemic.
Google and Apple’s technology is also still in development, and some elected officials and public health authorities in the United States and other countries decided that they needed to create their own apps to give people more information about the coronavirus or to help track possible exposures. It’s a good bet that some states and countries incorporate Google and Apple’s virus alert system into their own initial versions of the app.
Public health experts have said that this type of virus exposure notification technology will come in handy as we fight the coronavirus. And most of the people who have followed the work of Google and Apple have said that companies (for the most part) are doing the right thing to listen to health authorities and also protect people’s privacy.
This virus alert technology will be flawed, possibly creepy, and not a silver bullet, but we need it.
Before we go …
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Online school sucks. So does the school in person. Website collapses, cyberattacks and a tangle of technology complicated the early days of back to virtual school for many American schoolchildren, my colleagues Dan Levin and Kate Taylor wrote. Online learning disabilities were a symptom of a lack of guidance from state and federal education officials, one expert told them.
And at the colleges that chose to reopen for in-person classes, my colleague Natasha Singer reported that administrators have sometimes been unable to effectively help or isolate students infected or exposed to the coronavirus.
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Don’t buy a new phone expecting it to be magically faster: The next generation of wireless technology promises to make our phones faster and connect our cars and factory equipment to the Internet more easily. But right now, the claims about 5G wireless are a lot of hot air. A Washington Post columnist found that smartphones connected to 5G phone networks were surfing the Internet at roughly the same or even slower speeds than older networks.
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Sorry. There is no point in making your canned beans look beautiful. If you’ve been to Instagram, you’ve seen that hyper-organized, color-coded food pantry, cupboard, and sock drawer aesthetic. Go read this New York Times magazine article about the two people most responsible for this style and how they reflect an online subculture that fetishizes control over some aspects of life, such as fancy trash bins, at the same time delight in being imperfect.
Hugs to this
Gus the hamster is going on a trip.
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