In a tumultuous week in US politics, seven hours of testimony in Congressional committees about the data and privacy practices of a social platform nevertheless held the interest of the press and public almost to the exclusion of all else.
Mark Zuckerberg – 106.9 million Facebook followers – is a person of intense interest not only to the US legislative process, but to a wider population whose lives he touches in some way every day through Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Over two days and through more than 600 questions, the Facebook founder ran the gamut of politicians’ outrage and curiosity. If the hearing proved one thing, it was that the activities tech firms are now involved in puts them out of the reach of legislative comprehension, and immediate action.
The hearings were down to Facebook’s apparent lack of due diligence with the private data of tens of millions of people being used without authorisation by the marketing company Cambridge Analytica. The micro-targeting firm – partly owned by the rightwing billionaire Robert Mercer and used by the Trump campaign in the 2016 election – uses psychometric data to persuade people to vote or buy things in certain ways (though the company says the unauthorised Facebook data was not used in its work for Trump). The covert nature of persuasion on the social web means that effective marketing is no longer something you can see or even perceive, but rather something which through a thousand “touch points” might subtly change your behaviour without you noticing.
The data protection of tens of millions of Americans is at the heart of the issue, but how it was used drew only fleeting attention. The politicians questioning Zuckerberg were in an unusual position. Never before had Congress had to call to account a business on which so many of their own communications strategies and campaigns rely. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who asked Zuckerberg the tougher questions about its monopolistic behaviour, was very clear that he thinks the days of self-regulation are over for Facebook.
“I expect the regulatory regime for a company like Facebook will be challenging and difficult. The regulatory tools available to us today may or may not work with Facebook. It could possibly take the creation of new laws and regulations to deal with this platform. But I do believe this. Continued self-regulation is not the right answer when it comes to dealing with the abuses we have seen on Facebook,” the Senator - 167,000 followers - wrote on his own Facebook page.
“I am concerned about how much Facebook values transparency,” the Californian senator Kamala Harris - 972,262 followers - wrote on her Facebook page after her more effective questioning. Billy Long, the Republican from Missouri - 5,923 followers - was so pleased with his question about “Facemash”, Zuckerberg’s embarrassing “hot or not” site he first created in his dorm room at Harvard, that he posted a news item about it to his very modest band of followers.
The $11m (£7.7m) in lobbying that Facebook spent on Capitol Hill last year went almost entirely into targeting legislation rather than paying lawmakers directly, but its influence in US domestic politics goes far beyond issues of psychometric targeting. One of the most dramatic moments of the two-day hearing was a line of questioning opened by the Democrat congressman John Sarbanes about the “embeds” from Facebook who worked with political campaigns.
“The Trump campaign had sales support,” said Zuckerberg. “I am going to call them embeds,” shot back Sarbanes - 19,769 followers - who went on to suggest that “sales support” might translate into an unauthorised “in-kind” donation toward campaigns. Donald Trump’s campaign had 5.9m ads approved while Hillary Clinton’s had 66,000, pointed out Sarbanes, who suggested “a lot of Americans are waking up to the fact that [Facebook] is becoming a self-regulated super structure for political discourse”, before being cut off by the chairman. The video of the exchange is available on Sarbanes’ Facebook page.
The advertising purchased on and through Facebook is often protected by contractual clauses with advertisers, putting the public in the bizarre position of not being able to actually see what publicity is being targeted at them. When last week Facebook removed related accounts and posted a few samples of the advertising that the Internet Research Agency puts on the network, they showed that “ads” often mean what we might think of as posts that have been paid to reach a wider audience. And the advertising expenditure only tells part of the story.
A tactic deployed by partisan groups involves setting up apparently innocuous or independent “news media property” – in other words a Facebook page that publishes news – ahead of key campaigns or election issues, which gather likes and follows from constituents who thereby expose their interest in, or thinking on certain subjects. These are the kind of shell news operations which substitute for the local news organisations that are rapidly closing down in rural and urban America. For these tactics to be effective, Facebook data doesn’t have to be misused, but the public is nevertheless being misled.
Outside the US the kind of social media asymmetry that congressman Sarbanes was scratching at has far more dramatic consequences. The most serious and well-covered of these has been the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar, and the repression of Rohingya Muslims. Facebook has a disproportionate share of attention across all media, official pages have huge followings and independent journalists can struggle to be verified. Ahead of his grilling on Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg wrote to human activist groups in the country who are outraged by the company’s negligence. It was mentioned by only a small number of politicians in the hearings, but the dynamics of Facebook in small unstable markets around the world is of overwhelming significance.
If the threads of regulation that Congress started to very gently pull on lead anywhere, it must be to more than just the protection of US user data, important though that is, and it must go beyond the concept of political persuasion and advertising into the broader areas of influence, power and money. This would mean perhaps as much self-examination as it does questioning Zuckerberg. For that to happen we might be waiting for quite some time.