The Facebook Fake-Out

There’s a pattern that Facebook (well, Meta — you know, those folks behind Instagram and WhatsApp and the direct enabling of the Rohingya genocide) has been following for decades now that everyone in the worlds of policy and regulation and journalism seems to be constitutionally incapable of understanding. So I wanted to take a moment to explain it, clearly and simply, in hopes that this will at least make it obvious when everyone is being tricked again. Feel free to use this as a reference to send to your favorite legislator or journalist the next time they’re getting fooled by Mark Zuckerberg.

1. Launch a new product or feature that very obviously violates people’s privacy or consent. (This one, you’re probably familiar with; they do this constantly, and sometimes it even makes headlines.)
2. Get caught, either by users or by tech experts or researchers who find out Meta has been doing this nefarious thing.
3. Put out a press release announcing that Meta will be pausing this practice, while explaining how it wasn’t really that bad.
4. Wait a little while until everybody is paying attention to something else, or the next scandal has popped up.
5. Launch the product or feature again, and steal everybody’s data or surveil everybody’s behavior without their consent or respect for their privacy.

Of course, by the time the transgressive technology comes back around, everyone has moved on to the next terrible thing, and the company gets away with the thing that had everyone up in arms in the first place. Within the company, this is taken as proof that it wasn’t a bad idea to begin with: “See? They were complaining about nothing!” It’s a part of the “inevitability” strategy that so much of Silicon Valley has been using for years, where treating new technologies as if they were inexorable parts of nature is a tactic for getting every part of society to go along with their most extreme plans.

Much of this relies on people having short attention spans, on institutions that don’t hold these big companies accountable, and on the coercive power that big platforms like Meta’s have over people’s lives (they effectively make it impossible for most people to opt out without facing dire social consequences).

It’s especially important to identify these patterns because the alumni of these companies bring these toxic behaviors with them when they go on to their subsequent roles. It’s no coincidence, for example, that so many former Facebook product managers work at OpenAI and that ChatGPT has run the same playbook in terms of abusing people’s privacy and trust.

While we don’t have an immediate solution for this broken behavior, at least for the foreseeable future, what we can do is identify these patterns and name them, and call them out when we see them repeat. See if you can’t identify some examples yourself, both from the past and perhaps some that are happening right now.

Throwbacks:

• Facebook makes it official: You have no say (2012)
• My Wired column capturing the moment their Terms of Service became abusive (2012)
• The Facebook Reckoning (2010)