Where Did Democracy Go Wrong with Facebook?

The democratic society's lack of technological understanding hinders it when dealing with the social network. Seemingly, Facebook is immune to any intervention: What, should we dismantle it as a company? Split the social network into several competing networks? After all, the whole point of such a network is that everyone can be friends with everyone. All this stems from a deep misunderstanding that Facebook is actually two connected platforms, which should never have been connected: one is the social network protocol, which is a natural and necessary monopoly - and the other side is the feed, where the monopoly is destructive. This is the secret of its power - and the secret of its destructiveness

The Feed as a Troll Creator: Don't Eat Facebook  (Source)

The social network is increasingly proving to be a regulatory mistake, and as such, it's very difficult to escape from it. The regulator should have ensured that the social network would become a protocol - like the Internet - and not a company - like Facebook. And then different companies, including Facebook, compete on the feed, who makes it better, but the protocol of connections is uniform, and anyone can be friends with anyone else, regardless of a specific site. Just like anyone can visit any site, or any site can link to any site, or anyone can email anyone, through the email protocol.

It is certainly possible even today to transfer the user infrastructure of social networks - and of all Internet users - to open source, while maintaining privacy and security, just as the Internet protocol itself does. And then everyone will be able to connect to feeds produced by different companies, competitively, including their personal feed produced by Facebook, as one of these companies (and perhaps the leading and largest of them all). This in itself will create competition for building a feed where the user is most satisfied, and will certainly lead to an improved feed, and much higher control over the feed. Those who want a reliable feed will get a reliable feed, those who want an entertaining feed will get one, those who want to see the most popular posts in Israel today will be able to see them, and those who want a high intellectual - or professional academic - feed will get one.

Currently, people don't understand how bad their feed is, because they have no alternative, and therefore there's no understanding of how much the feed causes the problematic nature of the social network, and the cultural disturbance, and even the public - and even governmental - disruption it creates. A stupid feed creates stupid people who create a stupid feed, and opening the feed to competition will allow breaking this vicious cycle. Facebook's paternalistic thinking, that it knows better than us what will reach our feed - is the root of all evil. Therefore, the state needs to liberate the feed - before the feed eliminates it.

The feed is where Facebook can manipulate users, and where our freedom is most limited. On TV there's a remote control and on Google there's a search bar, on smartphones there are multiple apps and in newspapers there are different sections and articles and on radio there's a button to choose stations - in the feed there's none of these. There's zero free choice. And this is not just the freedom of who to listen to, but freedom of speech itself, because there's no meaning to freedom of speech if someone decides who hears what you say, if at all. Even your friends can't decide to hear you.

The disappearance of freedom of speech - and fairness of hearing and feed - turns us all into feed manipulators, and those whose expression is shaped by the feed, and by the feedbacks it creates for us. These are not free feedbacks from our friends, who decide whether to give us likes or not, but feedbacks mediated by the feed, which determines whether our friends will see what we wrote at all. Therefore, the feed crucially affects the content of the network, and it is not just a "neutral" form without content. And Facebook has chosen to promote content according to criteria that are both unknown and low (who creates more controversy, for example).

The feed creates a distorted incentive system that destroys social discourse, turning it into flattering, divisive, gossipy, confrontational, and rude all at once. The problem is not with the children, but with the kindergarten teacher. And not with the specific teacher, but with the very existence of a teacher, who keeps them in a state of children. It's time to open up the possibility for everyone to choose whether their feed is a kindergarten, a vocational school, a youth movement or a university. Many more than we imagine will choose university, and this will raise the level of the entire social network.

Currently, the social network is stuck in a local minimum and an inferior solution, from which everyone suffers, but which is very difficult to escape from, just like in game theory dilemmas - and in fact impossible. Anyone who writes quality content simply won't reach others. The feed creates an incentive structure that results in the current inferior network. Everything we know from economic theory teaches us that it's not us who are bad - but the incentives that are bad. This is how large systems operate that have not received any reasonable design for the benefit of the user and out of respect for their autonomy, or any transparency, and in which there is no competition or customer control.

There is no free marketplace of ideas on Facebook - there is manipulative planning from above, and of course - monopolistic. The lack of transparency adds insult to injury - unlike Google's algorithms, which received initial exposure and some mathematical credibility - the secret of the feed is Facebook's big secret. And from everything we see - it's a very bad algorithm, which has no minimal respect for user preferences, but only for creating discourse that inflames emotions, in all kinds of Facebook storms of no importance in teacups, but full of emoticons, profanities and ad hominem attacks. The feed is what creates the phenomenon of Facebook lynching - not the crowd. In a differently built feed - there would be no lynchings. The behavior of the crowd is determined and navigated according to the algorithm. Just so. But as usual, our democrats prefer ineffective moralizing-preaching discourse, but full of a sense of moral superiority, against the masses (oh oh oh) - as opposed to effective technological action. Because "protocol" is so technical, and it doesn't solve the "real" problem in society, namely the moral, invented one (which didn't really exist in this way before the feed - meaning the technological change).

The collision between the logic of deliberative discussion and healthy democratic public discourse with the pathological discourse of the feed requires rare regulatory intervention, according to the doctrine of defensive democracy. The new times require updating this doctrine also against substantial technological disruptions in the infrastructure of democracy, like the deep disruption created by the feed. Facebook's current feed is not a neutral medium but a divisive one, not a market but a regulator, and not free and fair but distorted, biased and controlled. Its algorithm is a mechanism of darkness that is inherently anti-democratic, so it's no wonder that it creates a democratic crisis. Unlike the Internet network, whose protocol was designed by idealists and academics for the benefit of freedom and decentralization, and only then came Google, the situation with Facebook is identical to a situation where the Internet network was part of Google. The social network is too important a basic platform to leave it within a private company, because in the network era - the social network is the infrastructure of our society.