News from Nowhere: The Antisocial Network

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This month didn’t start well for Facebook.

On Sunday 3 October, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen – a data scientist and product manager in the company’s civic integrity department – appeared on the American CBS network’s 60 Minutes news programme to debunk her erstwhile organisation’s strategies to counter hate speech and disinformation. “There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” she said. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimise for its own interests, like making more money.”

The following day, the Facebook empire suffered further embarrassment when its main platform, along with Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, went offline for a period of almost six hours, meaning that their 3.5 billion users – nearly half the entire population of the planet – were temporarily unable to socialize or conduct their online professional or business activities through those channels.

The day after that – 5 October – Ms. Haugen was back in the news again, testifying at a hearing in the United States Senate that Facebook’s products damaged children’s mental health, divided society and undermined democracy itself.

The next day I myself was invited to appear in a discussion of Facebook’s woes on Al Mayadeen TV. This was not perhaps the greatest of Facebook’s humiliations that week, but it was a fascinating discussion nonetheless.

As if things weren’t bad enough for Facebook, the very next day saw the news that the platform had been used to conduct the illegal sale of vast tracts of land in the Amazon rainforest – a commodity which, despite its name, appeared to be one of the few things one couldn’t buy from Jeff Bezos’s online store. By this point in the week, Mr. Zuckerberg must surely have been feeling nostalgic for the halcyon days of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

And, adding further embarrassment to its terrible week, that same day – Friday 8 October – saw a recurrence of technical problems hit Facebook, Messenger and Instagram for a couple of hours, a set of issues described by the company as “a configuration change that affected people globally” apparently unrelated to the troubles experienced earlier that week.

There has been a lot of talk about the Facebook outage being the result not (as the company says) of an internal technical glitch, but of a cyber-attack from a rival organisation or from a hostile foreign power. Some have suggested that supporters of Donald Trump may have been responsible for a digital assault in retaliation against his ban from the site. Indeed, on 7 October it was reported that Mr. Trump had initiated legal action in a bid to force the company to reinstate his account. The timing was no coincidence; Trump’s lead counsel had announced that “this preliminary injunction against Facebook seems appropriate to file this week since they’ve been big in the news lately for all the issues they’re facing.”

However, while it is of course both tempting and strangely comforting to seek patterns and designs that might make some sense of this absurdly meaningless world, we may sometimes have to admit that incompetence and unhappy accidents tend to be more common causes of such catastrophes than cunningly engineered conspiracies.

There are nevertheless those who have even gone so far as to suggest that Facebook may have staged its own outage, in a bid to show the world how much it has become reliant on the company’s platforms. This clearly seems ludicrous. If, however, that had been the intention, it would surely be most likely to have ended up backfiring. The company’s biggest problem may now lie in the fact that its users – from individuals reliant on Messenger or WhatsApp to talk to each other, all the way through to SMEs and even transnationals which have come to rely so heavily on Facebook and Instagram for their sales promotions – may have suddenly realized that they might now need to find more reliable channels of contact (at least as emergency back-ups) in order to ensure they are able to maintain future continuity of communications and operations. That is perhaps why the value of Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg’s personal shares in the business fell by $6 billion dollars in immediate response to the news.

A decade ago, at the height of what became known as the Arab Spring, the Egyptian authorities attempted to block the internet in the hope that this action would stop the so-called social media revolution in its tracks. It didn’t work: protesters continued to be mobilized as taxi drivers in Cairo spread their messages by word of mouth; memory sticks containing footage of demonstrations were delivered by hand to foreign journalists in order that they might spread the news across the region and beyond. Although social media companies were keen to claim the credit for inspiring these political movements, these regional protests were in fact able to continue to grow even when the internet was switched off. Yet, ten years on from those heady days, it seems difficult to imagine the possibility of the mobilization of such forces without recourse to the logistical and communications resources of social media. It’s hard to imagine running a business or arranging a birthday party without these platforms, let alone a national revolution. Many of us wouldn’t know how to order a pizza without our mobile apps.

Over the last decade, Facebook’s almost global market dominance has gradually transformed its corporate monopoly into a mode of cultural hegemony. As such, it still seems unlikely that rival organisations will soon send Mark Zuckerberg’s company the way of Myspace, that virtually forgotten platform which thirteen years ago was the world’s most popular social networking site. The fine folks from Menlo Park California should not however rest on their laurels. These well-publicized outages have represented a major wake-up call for an organisation which may yet come to rue the rise of TikTok and other emergent competitors from Beijing.

Last year, the revenue of Facebook was about the same as the gross domestic product of Sri Lanka. An article earlier this month in Bloomberg News reiterated a growing idea that such digital superpowers as Facebook have achieved so overwhelming a degree of global dominance and political, social and economic influence that they could one day even be given seats at the United Nations.

The dependency of its citizen-users upon its monopolistic services might make Facebook look like something of a mirror of a nation-state; and yet, despite its claims to connectivity and transparency, to fundamentally progressive credentials, it offers an essentially autocratic form of administration, a mode of control which subverts and fragments social and democratic institutions and which is ultimately answerable only to itself. If Facebook represents a kind of transnational tyranny, then it encompasses a form of near-absolute power which other online giants (and other nations) clearly covet, and which they may indeed already be working, through means both overt and covert, to make their own.

We might, however, be making a bit too much of this. A little downtime for these platforms is hardly the end of the world. They’re for the most part only, after all, tools for keeping up with friends you never see, for promoting your company’s latest luxury products or your political party’s latest slogans and memes, and for showcasing your own narcissistic selfies or photos of your lunch. 

At the end of Facebook’s famously bad week, international news services took a brief break from baiting Mark Zuckerberg and filled instead with reports of some rather more serious blackouts, when people across the entire nation of Lebanon suffered a set of major power cuts. This critical situation might of course put the gripes of social media users, outraged by their minor digital outages, into a somewhat more sensible perspective. These petty gripes in this context quickly start to look like so-called ‘first world problems’ which the miracles of modern technologies happen to have spread to much of the rest of the world. But, dear Instagrammers and Facebook friends, please try surviving 24 hours without lighting or heating or the means to cook your dinner, and then see how very much you really care about your fundamental human right to share with a few dozen acquaintances an amusing picture of your pet cat wearing a paisley bow tie and a funny woollen hat.