Friday, March 23, 2018 ~ EDITORIAL ~ by Mary P Brooke:
Facebook meets its maker, itself
Facebook came face to face with its own destiny this week. Based from the beginning on profiteering under minimal government regulation by the volunteered private data of its users, Facebook now feels the pain of having its own information lifted for the benefit of someone else. For their breach of trust to protect the data of millions of users, the social media giant is now being called on the carpet by national governments and is losing support from major advertisers. And they’ve lost billions in stock market value.
All in a matter of days. It was a train wreck waiting to happen. What’s most astonishing is how long it took everyday users to wake up to having been lambs to the slaughter. Even Facebook’s selfmade-billionare founder Mark Zuckerberg said this week during an interview on CNN that regulation of the social media industry is overdue.
In this editorial space we have never pulled punches about the open secret that Facebook has been selling away our digital souls. It’s been a headshaker that grandma, your weekend fun buddy, your work pal, or your neighbour will spill out photos and details of personal moments online for all forever to see. Not just details of their own, but (knowingly or otherwise) also those of their family and others who rely on them for trust and security. Even a play-by-play record of digital phone call specs is apparently just one of many types of data mines that has been going on behind the scenes, it was revealed this week. And not just your own, but those of anyone you are friends with on Facebook.
You may not have anything to hide, but what is left for you yourself to cherish? Or to protect? An understanding that seems to have been rapidly lost to most users in this digital cloud era is that without privacy there is a loss of opportunity to recreate one’s self or one’s space. [Star Trek fans may reference the pros and cons of the Borg collective vs human individuality.]
Any user of social media is contributing a thumbprint of themselves to the cloud forever, for who knows who to see, manipulate, sell, or use for purposes by which they can win and you may lose. Even with those personal preference surveys in email or on websites that you can fill out to get points or coupons, it’s only a thin ruse to micro-manage your shopping habits. In some ways it’s kind of silly of the ‘clever’ marketers: are you a robot that always buys the very same products?
And here’s a similar but even more significant thread… all this loss of data privacy pales by comparison to the loss of DNA rights when people gleely volunteer their chromosomes to mail-away DNA tests. Your very essence is then lost to the corporate gene pool forever. Read the fine print… are you one day ready to meet your clone?
Being in business to make a profit for shareholders is not a crime. In fact, success with that is the pinnacle of achievement in our capitalistic economic system. The saddest part in this data-nabbing scenario is how people hold so little value for their own personal data that they freely give it away, never to be regained. If it has such little value, why are major corporations making a fortune using it?
And the flip side of this is corporations (including municipalities) that are increasingly creating information silos, thinking their perceived markets (customers or citizens) are only interested in (or need to hear) the singular or crafted messages that they wish to present through websites or their own social media feeds. Marketing, public relations and journalism are cousins, but they are not the same thing — the variation lies in the goal and the means used to get there.
Audiences are multi-faceted and can think in more than one channel at a time. Which brings this essay space to its usual return point, that journalism and the delivery of information to the public by independent media is a failsafe in a democratic system. Without a public conversation on broader matters, we as citizens are simply having information dumped out to us in a pre-fab, managed fashion. Journalism keeps it real and opens up the discourse to other voices.
Facebook has always claimed to have never been tied to the same responsibilities as news publishers. In fact, under US law they are seen simply as a technical platform that delivers digital information. Businesses by nature will seek to profit by their activities. So, bottom line in all this mess of privacy breach is essentially the lack of regulation to hold public delivery of information to account. It’s like having a highway for vehicles but no rules of the road to keep people safe.
The very definition of publishing is that a message of any kind is released to more than one other person, and/or released beyond a private exchange. The time is long past due for holding all digital social media platforms to the same publishing standards as those who deliver professional journalism, i.e. newspapers (print/online), TV/radio and their digital versions.
At last, recognition of the need for professional journalism will again arise, acknowledging that content not only should be — but deserves to be — curated and put into context for the benefit of responsible delivery to readers, viewers and information consumers. Free speech is essential, but would you dress it in rags or at the very least in a respectable fashion, let alone good taste or great style? ~ MPB
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