The mainstream critique of Facebook is surprisingly compatible with Facebook's own narrative about its products. FB critics say that the company's machine learning and data-gathering slides disinformation past users' critical faculties, poisoning their minds.
Meanwhile, Facebook itself tells advertisers that it can use data and machine learning to slide past users' critical faculties, convincing them to buy stuff.
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In other words, the mainline of Facebook critics start from the presumption that FB is a really *good* product and that advertisers are *definitely* getting their money's worth when they shower billions on the company.
Which is weird, because these same critics (rightfully) point out that Facebook lies all the time, about everything. It would be bizarre if the only time FB was telling the truth was when it was boasting about how valuable its ad-tech is.
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Facebook has a conflicted relationship with this critique. I'm sure they'd rather not be characterized as a brainwashing system that turns good people into monsters, but not when the choice is between "brainwashers" and "con-artists selling garbage to credulous ad execs."
As FB investor and board member Peter Thiel puts it: "I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent." In other words, the important word in "evil genius" is "genius," not "evil."
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1440312271511568393
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The accord of tech critics and techbros gives rise to a curious hybrid, aptly named by Maria Farrell: the Prodigal Techbro.
A prodigal techbro is a self-styled wizard of machine-learning/surveillance mind control who has see the error of his ways.
https://crookedtimber.org/2020/09/23/story-ate-the-world-im-biting-back/
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This high-tech sorcerer doesn't disclaim his magical powers - rather, he pledges to use them for good, to fight the evil sorcerers who invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew a fidget-spinner, then let Robert Mercer hijack it to turn your uncle into a Qanon racist.
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There's a great name for this critique, criticism that takes its subjects' claims to genius at face value: criti-hype, coined by Lee Vinsel, describing a discourse that turns critics into "the professional concern trolls of technoculture."
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
The thing is, Facebook really *is* terrible - but not because it uses machine learning to brainwash boomers into iodine-guzzling Qnuts.
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And likewise, there really *is* a problem with conspiratorial, racist, science-denying, epistemologically chaotic conspiratorialism.
Addressing that problem requires that we understand the direction of the causal arrow - that we understand whether Facebook is the cause or the effect of the crisis, and what role it plays.
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Education is the key, we need to ensure that children know how to write a piece of text, that needs research to complete but also to cite their sources from early on.
Teach using examples of what is good / bad let them contemplate which is good / bad / somewhere in the middle. So they are empowered to decide.
Even if someone has the title Dr or Professor, can they still be trusted? how did they get that qualification/ title, from whom, where, how, what research have they published, who as peer reviewed it,
All possible steps to decide if a particular piece of information is trustworthy or not.
