It seems like all of us (in this context meaning you, my Facebook friends) have been using Facebook for about the same amount of time - since 2008 or so - but the degree to which we’ve adopted it into our lives varies tremendously, and I’ve always found this fascinating. Those of my Facebook friends who actually use the service seem to use it a lot, and - despite the continuing rise of mature users’ percentage - the vast majority are my peers. Like some of you, I’m sure, I’ve sporadically used Facebook in more or less concentrated bursts, usually in response to its respective relevance in the lives of those who happen to be around me at any given time, but I’ve consistently maintained for years that this website is really bad for both society as a whole and the general wellbeing of us individuals. I know this is far from a unique argument, that you’ve heard it many times before, and that you have no reason to believe I’m an authority on anything, but I would like to reiterate one specific thought from a rant I wrote two years ago:
More than one-sixth of all living eyes see Fuckbook every single day [as of 2015,] placing its consumption behind only eating and drinking as the most universally human activity.
For something like an entire year, I inserted this statistic in angst into far too many personal, family, and professional conversations, which I realize in retrospect was just an attempt to spread my alarm. That’s pretty lame, so I do apologize if you were a victim. It’s one of those inconceivable abstractions which I seem to get hung up on, but it’s also actually profound in the context of our species’ history. Nothing before had ever affected 1/6th of the world population in a single given day - not The Black Death, nor the World Wars (and it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s more than doubled since the last one of those) - until Facebook and now, COVID-19. In too many places across the planet, "Facebook" has become synonymous with "The Internet:"
When the subset of online reality many people inhabit is designed by a single entity, its every design tweak, cultural blind spot, business imperative, and strategic error is amplified in a way that has outsized real-world consequences.
That said, I would argue in my defense that one can never overanalyze nor overcriticize what’s by far the most influential product in the history of the world.
Relative to the much more established voices in tech journalism who've labored to cover the company over the years, my commentary is more or less irrelevant. Perhaps the most diligent of these is Casey Newton, who writes an incredible daily-ish newsletter about Social Media and recently spoke to the Columbia Journalism Review for an excellent report on the history of tech media's Facebook coverage which includes a whole host of pertinent hyperlinks for your reference. There's also a stuffed Wikipedia page specifically dedicated to criticism of Facebook. On the occasions I have tried to write about Facebook myself, I've always become quickly overwhelmed by the gist of everything surrounding the company and its service: Facebook is fucking crazy. Everything I read in research culminates in this exclamation, compounding in an urge to simply scream it over and over again in the face of each spectacle. From its now fairly popularized origin story to its "world plan" (including 737-sized solar-powered internet drones,) to Cambridge Analytica and Zuckerberg's subsequent congressional inquisition (which I personally watched live in its vast entirety,) I have witnessed with the world - mouth agape - as the entity has become perhaps the most intellectually influential one in all of human history.
Rightfully overshadowed by such economic and political stories have long been the more technical failings in the user experience designs of Facebook, Inc.'s various properties. Acquisitions Instagram and WhatsApp have become unique in their respective segments in nuanced ways, but the user interface of the "Big Blue App" (yes, the reference to IBM's tyrannical history is intentional) has functioned unlike any other piece of software from its conception. In this case, "different" has meant "heap of shit" from my perspective, and that of a few others. In my search of The Web for arguments confirming this opinion (ahem,) I found surprisingly little from the tech media establishment. The most comprehensive by far was from a Medium-based publication called UX Collective entitled "What we never talk about: Facebook has a product problem." There's also "Facebook Is Terrible Not Because It's Evil, But Because It's Terrible" from Forbes, which cites accounts of the author's specific user experiences in its argument against Facebook's usability as a whole:
Facebook should be held to account for its role in weakening democracy and threatening privacy, but these huge scale issues miss the smaller point that Facebook is just...terrible, all on its own when you strip all that other stuff away. The entire site needs a massive overhaul, but if it hasn’t happened by now, I’m not sure it ever will.
It's important to note that both pieces predate this year's redesign, FB5, into which I opted as soon as it was offered to me (I cannot remember exactly when, but it's been several months at least.) See Engadget for specifics if you'd like, but any of you still using the desktop site were jarred into the thing itself this past May. As Nick Summers notes, the incentives motivating the move should have been pure, in theory:
Facebook's redesign isn't some wild swing for hyper growth. Instead, it's meant for the people who still enjoy loading up the website every day or who don't have a mobile device capable of using the company's apps. It's recognition that the legacy portal -- the one that started Facebook's colossal empire -- deserves more than the bare minimum.
Admittedly, the update - the most comprehensive single overhaul Facebook.com has undergone yet - addressed my most aesthetically-oriented complaints with an entirely revamped design language for the first time in its history, but all of the fundamental issues with its core functionality remain.
Over and over again throughout the entirety of my 12+ years on Facebook, I have found myself unable to just get where I want to go on both the desktop interface and iOS app. I can't think of anything I'd rather do less than present to you a step-by-step example in much detail, but let's just use the draft of this Note for specificity's sake. When I first began writing this, the "Notes" section did not appear on my profile menu as it does now (presumably because I recently published another Note for the first time in years.) Entering "notes" into the search field on the Home page yielded a result called "Notes" with the original Facebook Notes icon that was, in fact, a user-created, "like"-able Page (which had ~800 Likes, if I recall, though I cannot find it now.) Now, the same query's top result is separated from the rest in a module clearly entitled "Facebook Shortcuts," presumably also because I've actually begun using Notes again. On the iOS app, the Notes section itself appears to be entirely inaccessible.
I consider myself quite adept at figuring out how to use software very quickly - not necessarily because I understand how it works on the backend any better than the average user, but because I've simply used a lot. My trouble navigating Facebook's interface - on desktop, iOS, and Android - has remained entirely unique from that of any other service, social or otherwise, for its twelve-year duration. Without boring you to death with more links from design-centric Medium publications, I'd argue that this difficulty reflects violations of several (undefined, I promise) Core Design Principles for which I never would've expected to advocate. In general, I believe "good web design" is a horrendous ideal against the potential creative diversity of The Web which the majority of designers should endeavor to cast off, going forward, but in the case of this - the most widely-used piece of software to ever exist - I have felt singularly compelled to cite basic UX discipline.
Navigating Facebook has always been a nightmare, largely because of what I'll call elemental shift. In general, top-level elements should always be found where the user last left them, but Facebook has long chosen to instead arrange menus by algorithm in anticipation (I assume) of what users want. The result is a platform that - for me, at least - has always felt unsteady, like a condemned building. Moving about naturally ends up feeling aimless - there are always several different, disparate methods to accomplish a single task, it seems, and zero cohesion between them or with Home. There are remnants of "classic" Facebook strewn throughout spaces encountered in even the most casual use. This would be excusable from say, the beta version of a social network developed largely by a single German twenty-something, but it is absolutely absurd from the core product of The Web's most populated service.
In the past few years, I have discovered a sort of manual method of navigating Facebook, providing my own stability: URL pagination. Instead of searching through my Profile for the link to the Notes section, I simply type facebook.com/notes in my address bar. The same goes for /photos, /videos, /pages, etc. Another, somewhat less tedious strategy to simplify (in a way) one's desktop Facebook experience is to Ctrl-Click any navigation away from the Home screen, opening a new tab and leaving the original where you started.
The single most sensibly designed page I've ever seen on Facebook's top-level domain is the homepage of the fairly-new Creator Studio (business.facebook.com/creatorstudio,) which makes sense, financially: Facebook's primary revenue stream comes from advertisements authored in the Business Tools platform (though Ads are actually managed on facebook.com/adsmanager,) where clients (and/or clients' hired creative agency professionals) toil in a much prettier and more sensical environment than the users they target. Luckily, the design extends to other "business" content creation tools, too, which have now been integrated with Instagram, allowing anyone willing to declare themselves a brand to finally post Insta content from their desktop and actually schedule posts. I know for a fact that many of you (my Facebook friends,) have at least created a Page or two. (Though I fully intended to cite the percentage of all Facebook users who've created a Page or Group here, what's left of my soul grew weary with the burden of ten-thousand lifetimes digging through the endless, Business Major-smelling search results, so I'll leave you with an uneducated guess.)
I would suppose that 20% of all Facebook users have created at least one Page or Group at some point in their account's history and that 5-10% are regularly active in one/both of these in some administrative capacity (Editor, Moderator, Admin, etc.) I would also suppose that younger users are much more likely to be doing so - especially among those who still use Facebook regularly, for whom the non-linear News Feed and violently-dumbing Watch cannot be enough reason to keep logging on, surely. Let's say that 40% of you, my 300 (substantially mid-twenties-skewed) Facebook friends, currently have a published Page or active Group and/or are involved in the administration of another's, meaning 120 of you have the ability and incentive to use these tools yourself. If you're genuinely invested in Facebook, socially, and you have yet to try them out, I would encourage you to do so, if only to experience what the company is really capable of creating for its Fat Cats and to see what I'm on about.
I, myself have filled a portfolio of work thanks to a bad, longstanding habit of Just Fucking Around, so I'm sure I created my first Facebook Page shortly after they were launched in May 2009. (I've found one remaining from as early as December.) You'll note in the image above that I have spawned a total of at least 25 Pages, but I'm almost positive I have completely deleted a couple entirely from the list in the past decade. Some of those which remain public are Extratone's page (of course,) Re-elect Bush, 2012, Gas Station Memes, Sandsluts, Mackleman, Mortician Memes, and the page for my defunct film project, Children of the Corn 30. Obviously, all but the first of these were inconsequential joke pages made on whims - some predating the now-popular practice of Joke Page stewardship significantly, I might add - but their creation spans the largely-indistinct gestational eras of what would become Facebook's Page Manager.
When I launched Extratone in May 2016, I ended perhaps my most extensive personal Facebook drought in order to promote something more-or-less unironically for the first time and ensure that the project had a presence in every possible social space. The process of Page creation had remained virtually untouched since its launch and I found it utterly despicable in contrast to account setup for all the other services to which I brought Extratone. Images compressed down to nothing, vague categorization with sparse explanation, and utterly useless Templates highlighted a plethora of shortcomings that made it impossible to create a decent-looking landing page on the platform. Granted, a lot of software looked pretty awful in 2016 (though I think Twitter looked legitimately better than it does today,) but Facebook lagged behind literally everybody in both function and aesthetics.
Truthfully, I soon concluded that I didn't want to touch any of it - I decided management of the Facebook Page would be the one technically administrative task I'd delegate to another Editor or three. "I want to forget it even exists," I said. However, those few who accepted the role of Admin immediately found the most basic operation of the Page more difficult than they'd remembered, as had I. Facebook had tightened its grip on third-party app/API access tremendously so that free mass sharing social tools (like Tweetdeck, in its heyday as a standalone desktop application) could no longer support posting offsite. Social Cards didn't behave in the Facebook compose UI as they did in that of any other service: in order to format a shared link properly, it had to be pasted in the text field and then immediately deleted after its preview appeared below, else it would rest - raw and sloppily redundant - between the social card and the above caption in final form. (In case you hadn't noticed, this remains the case.) While we could've hooked up an IFTTT recipe to simply duplicate Extratone's Tweets in seconds, it was impossible to train it to format the posts correctly.
I'm sure this was a design decision with clear intention to keep publishers logging back into Facebook for every single post, but Social Cards integration on Facebook has remained by far the buggiest of any major service I've used. We did everything we were advised to do by Facebook Documentation: we implemented Open Graph tags to point the Facebook Crawler toward the correct elements for each post, yet it seemed to ignore the designated feature image every sixth post or so and either determine its own or simply return to the site emptyhanded. A Social Card without an image just looks unacceptably broken, as does one with an incorrect image, usually (think a portrait-oriented smartphone screenshot appearing in place of a landscape photograph, perhaps.) The single part of the Facebook publishing process which could actually be more inconvenient: at least each Card is instantly scraped and reliably previewed as soon as its hyperlink is pasted into the compose UI's text field before it's actually published. However, if any element (featured image, title, description, or canonical URL) is missing from the preview or otherwise incorrect, one cannot simply delete the draft, refresh the page, and try again - once a URL has been scraped for the first time, the Crawler retires, considering its job done. The elements scraped at origin remain static until the URL is inputted into a dedicated Debugger tool and another scrape is so manually requested, presumably after the publisher/webmaster/user has doublechecked their Open Graph tag configuration, site-side. It's very possible that ours was incorrectly done, as anticipation of the Crawler's possible results became a microcosm of mysticism throughout year 1 - its product was often unpredictable by any variables we understood. We eventually took to immediately re-queueing a scrape in the face of any issues without doing anything further on our end. Usually, the desired results were produced in the first or second try.
I realize I've just dragged you through an excruciatingly tedious account, but this process remains the sole avenue through which one publishes on Facebook at scale, and its systems have gone completely unchanged (as far as I can tell) in the years since I last cared. I'm much too old now to worry myself over Social Cards - it turns out, the Crawler works fairly intelligently without any expended effort on site-side integration, anyway. I'm sure Big Time digital publishers have continued to stay on top of whatever changes have been made, and I can think of few human beings alive which I'd envy less than those whom they employ to do so. Image handling remains so relentlessly fucked across Facebook, Inc.'s properties that even the Boomer clickers have fled from Facebook Photo Albums, and not to Instagram, either (at least not before The Big Virus.) When's the last time you saw someone share a Photo Album on your Facebook feed?
More likely than not, the vast majority of your time on Facebook is spent on either the Android or iOS apps. As of this writing, these were 329MB and 448MB, respectively. I'm not a regular Android user, but I have long complained about how huge the weekly updates to the iOS app are. The one I'm looking at right now - Version 278.0 - is 246.7MB, and its release notes essentially amount to the single introductory sentence they've used for as long as I can remember: "We update the app regularly so we can make it better for you." Surely, an update that amounts to half the size of the whole application should be worthy of an outline of major changes, at least, no? I thought that perhaps I might find more details on Facebook's Developer Portal, but all I was able to uncover is a reply to a thread on the MacRumors forum dating back to October 2014 from a user who claims to be a "Facebook employee on the Release Engineering team:"
Release notes are useful for small applications with a few changes each release but are useless for large, complex applications with hundreds of developers. We're not trying to keep secrets from you. There are just simply better ways of telling you what's interesting when those features are ready for you.
According to mattlqx, describing "every one of the thousands of changes that go into our mobile applications... is just impossible." As I've disclaimed many times before, I'm no software developer, but I highly suspect that a distributor as large and successful as Facebook keeps very thorough documentation, internally. There's simply no way they could operate without doing so. As a public company, I'm surprised it doesn't face pressure from shareholders to disclose abridged versions of such documentation, at least, but I suppose I'd have to become one to really find out, and that's not going to happen. If anything, perhaps the Big Blue app is so fat and mysterious simply because it can be - nobody seems to care except myself and a handful of tech journalists.
For Android, at least, there is an alternative made by Facebook, itself. Facebook Lite is a fraction of the size of Big Blue on Android at just 36MB. It's a derivative of lite.facebook.com (which now redirects to the main site,) originally developed in 2009 for "countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience." It wasn't until 2015 that it was packaged into an app "specifically designed for low-end Android devices in emerging markets," which only became available in the U.S. and other "developed" countries in 2018. I've spent some time playing around with and comparing both apps as they currently stand on an emulated Google Pixel 3 running Android 11 Beta, and - as far as I can tell - there is absolutely zero reason to use the full Big Blue app while Lite is available. The latter looks better in most ways to my eyes and functions much more smoothly. I haven't been able to find anything I can not do.
There is also a Lite equivalent of Facebook Messenger, which has received much more coverage. Both The Verge's Chris Welch and Vlad Savov wrote extensively about it in 2017. "Who wouldn't want this?," asked the former, who described it as "basically" what Messenger was "two or three years ago." Three years later, however, Messenger and Messenger Lite appear to have become virtually identical - both of these on Android as well as Facebook Messenger on iOS weigh in at 42MB. I no longer use Messenger very often, and I've never tried its extraneous features, so I'll cite Vlad:
Facebook Messenger is so horribly unintuitive, everything inside it feels designed to divert me from the simple act of reaching people, everything is meant to keep me busy messaging... Thankfully, before I lost my patience entirely, Messenger Lite was made available in my region and it was like an angel descended from the heavens and fixed everything... In FB Messenger Lite, you get three columns: one for your recent chats, one for your contacts, and a third with all the available settings. Themes? Wallpapers? Any other distractions? Nope.
Facebook has no financial incentive to lighten its website or mobile apps as long as Western, "developed" users continue to put up with the flab. While it's true that the median Android-running device is much less powerful than the median iOS-running one, the four-year-old iPhone 7 is still the most widely-used Apple handset, globally, and - if the performance of the app on my significantly more powerful 8 Plus is any indication - I suspect older phone users are beginning to suffer.
During an appearance by representatives from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter before a House Judiciary Committee in 2018, Iowan Republican Representative Steve King asked “What about converting the large behemoth organizations that we’re talking about here into public utilities?” The question spurred on an already existing conversation in the media surrounding legal treatment of Facebook, specifically, into a flurry of differing opinions (see Further Reading at the bottom of this post for a lengthy list of links.) Wired's Susan Crawford argued that because "people can [delete Facebook] and still live respectably," and that "[Facebook] is not a physical, tangible network and is not on the same level of necessity as a 'real' utility, it isn't one," while Dr. Dipayan Ghosh contended "if we agree that firms like Facebook are natural monopolies, we should then begin to consider utility regulations that can effectively hold them accountable to the public" in an essay for the Harvard Business Review. From my perspective, there's a notable absence of mention of nationalizing Facebook, which would be hilarious, but I'd like to remain as neutral as possible on the subject and instead ask: how would the design of Facebook's services change if it was regarded as a public utility, broadly speaking? Would it become more like Lite, with less animation, advertising, and bloat? I think we users should start demanding much more from Facebook's services. They can and should do much much better.
I would argue that Facebook has at least largely replaced the function of public directories like white pages for both the "developed" and "undeveloped" world. If reality television and This American Life are any indication, even police detectives and private eyes often begin their investigations into individuals with a Facebook search, which is a process that could use significant improvement. That said, content privacy (not necessarily "privacy" as a whole issue) is an area I've always found Facebook to excel at compared to other social services. Though they're not always as simple to use as they could be, the options the service allows the user regarding profile and post visibility are about as powerful as they possibly could be: the fact that I can hide a post, photo, video, etc, or single entries in my profile's About section from individual users is unprecedented.
Another especially surprising victory recently has been the relaunch of Facebook News. The history of the company's relationship with news businesses has been remarkably shitty, but so far, it looks like a new emphasis on local publishers and an "independent" human team of editorial curators might just create an environment positive enough to at least partially assuage the "platform vs. publisher" crowd. Though it's only available on the mobile app thus far, I can say that the new News tab has served at least one personally relevant article every single time I've opened it, which is almost worth a single pat on Mark Fuck's back.
Since meeting my girlfriend Sierra in Winter 2019, my personal day-to-day engagement with Facebook reached its probable peak last summer. Sierra is Master and Creator of The Shitpost Office - a hugely successful private Facebook Group that she managed to grow to ~650 members faster than any like project I’ve ever seen. About half of these are local, and they regularly identify and stop her in public to meet for the first time. Her’s is by far the most generally positive Facebook usage I’ve ever had any significant exposure to, and it's encouraged me to revisit its value in my own social media life.
As per her example, I decided to give Facebook communities a chance again. I began engaging with The Aviator's Lounge years after I was first accepted there and have continued to find bizarre and entertaining aviation jokes throughout. When I bought a diesel Jetta, I discovered a prolific TDI-oriented side of online car culture in groups like TDI Scumbags and Shitbox Nation that is genuinely hilarious on the daily. I've been seeking out and joining like-minded communities around any interests that've come to me: endurance racing, old Jaguar ownership, antique tractors, Houston rap, Star Trek, and vintage computing. So far, my News Feed has been refreshed in a profound way. When the organizers of The Information's News Summer School program sought to create a place for students to network, they created a private Facebook Group, which has proven to be a positive and enlightening place so far (the second of four weeks had only just concluded as of this writing.)
In a desire to fuck around with Facebook's more administrative features, I revived an old joke page of mine - Boiler Explosion Memes - and thought I’d play around with Pages and Groups to see what had changed since the last time. Truthfully, the answer is far too little. It's still too obfuscated how exactly one is interacting with posts on their own Page - as the Page itself or as the individual user - and the Page-specific notification system appears to be entirely broken. Integration with Instagram is clumsy and confusing in a way I could see leading to utterly disastrous mistakes from popular accounts - I managed to accidentally post a stupid joke video meant for my memes page on Extratone's Instagram account last week, not that anyone noticed. Pages remain a pitifully poor substitute for standalone landing web pages for businesses, which I personally find to be a poor market decision on Facebook's part, oversight or not.
Despite its many design headaches, my return to Facebook has led to a significant revelation: there really are uses for which Facebook is the only service that makes sense. It is not just completely unique in its failings, but also in its function (though I don't believe that excuses them.) There's really no other viable way for me to check in what my Aunt is up to on the East Coast, or for my 7th grade best friend to invite me to his wedding. For better or worse, there's really nothing else I can count on to host Events like my annual 24 Hours of Le Mans watch party or allow me to respond to an ex-coworker's request for car buying advice. All of this I will acknowledge, but not accept. Facebook is not actually some grand, miraculous gift from a dweebish God - it is a monopoly which demonstrates perfectly all the unique issues with allowing monopolies in the tech industry, specifically, to go on unimpeded. As long as it goes on, undisrupted, Facebook will continue serving a shitty product to far too many people, which leads to perhaps the most important function of this post.
<iframe width="auto" height="auto" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rvfyzxPydi0?controls=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>I have been writing about technology for a long time, but I've been reading about and following it for as long as I can remember, yet I somehow had never been exposed to the existence of VKontakte (meaning "in contact" in Russian,) the "Russian Facebook," until August of last year. I only discovered it because of a footnote in some article or interview about Pavel Durov - the founder of Telegram, my favorite chat service of all time - mentioning that he had previously launched a whole social network in 2006. VK's Wikipedia entry is full of broken links to articles on foreign news sites, mostly about Durov's departure from the company in 2014 - a not-all-that-interesting story which you can explore more from Further Reading below. Just as I was about to conclude my argument for this section, I discovered a likely explanation: search engines can still be ignorant as heck these days and Wikipedians could not find an incentive to mention the truly relevant controversies surrounding Russia's Facebook. I'd been unable to find much coverage using the terms "VK" and "VKontakte," but I had more or less accepted that tech media had simply determined it wasn't worth their attention, for whatever reason. I was pretty happy with my advocacy for this obscure, foreign take on the Facebook model and minutes away from finally calling it quits when it occurred to me that I hadn't tried entering the original, Russian expression of the word: “ВКонта́кте.” Of course, an entirely different story regarding VK was immediately revealed that left a much different aftertaste.
Before I go any further, I must acknowledge that the conversation in tech media surrounding VK has singularly been about its place as a haven for Nazis banned from Facebook. The Daily Beast cites an article in The Atlantic in declaring 2016 as the origin of their pilgrimage and observes that - like Facebook's - VK's features designed to gather groups together by interest appear to be functioning just fine for its worst users:
The white nationalists on VK are often united through interest pages centered around politics or memes. Others are stand-ins for organizations, like the National Socialist Movement news page, or a homepage for the League of the South, a white-supremacist organization that wants Southern independence.
Earlier this year, bellingcat published a detailed investigation into this dynamic, where neo-Nazis maintain profiles on both sites, but are much more explicit about their ideology on VK: (Content Warning: the link includes a ton of Nazi imagery.)
On Facebook, the Burnsides post wholesome family photos of their children which appear to be professionally taken. On VK, their profiles contain images of their children posing with Nazi regalia.
There's one more issue to consider: if you're the type of person to be worried about Russian/Putinist invasion of your privacy (my take: privacy in 2020 is a futile waste of your time,) you may want to read "How Putin's cronies seized control of Russia's Facebook" by the since-disappeared Amar Toor for The Verge before you continue to hear out my praise for the site.
Now that we've got the idiot stuff out of the way: one of the other working links leads to an article from Russia Beyond which makes a bold claim about VK's bounce rate:
VKontakte is currently the global leader in terms of average time a spent per user. The network’s 60 million users spend an average of 40 minutes per session on the network, compared with a global social network use average of three minutes.
Though that metric is six years old and unsourced, it's quite significant if there's any truth at all to it - time spent on site is like water for engagement-fueled digital properties. What was verifiable on the Wiki: SimilarWeb still lists VK.com as the 14th most visited website in the world and the 2nd in Russia just behind the search engine Yandex, though Alexa lists it as 22nd and claims a Daily Time on Site figure of eight minutes and one second. In the Ukraine, it's 4th, ahead of Instagram and behind Facebook.
As much as I'd hesitate to attach myself to someone like Pavel Durov, the exploration of VK I've undertaken suggests we have very similar taste: VKontakte looks and works exactly how I think Facebook should, just as Telegram looks and works exactly how I think the ideal chat app should. Granted, the former underwent a redesign two years after he departed in 2016, through which apparently "every section on VK [was] modified without exception." In many ways, it's what I imagined Facebook would look like in 2020 if you'd asked me 10 years ago. The navigative menus you see on the home page can be customized, but after you save, UI elements always remain where you last saw them, which immediately makes it exponentially more intuitive. Underneath the main right-column navigation menu is a simple toggle switch for the order of content in the timeline - by most "interesting," or by linear chronology. Personal posts can be scheduled (Facebook only allows posts on Pages to be scheduled, for whatever reason,) can contain multiple elements (!) including documents, "articles," polls, geotags, audio tracks, photos, videos, and "graffiti," which are drawings created using an especially clever tool that even allows one to export its product to an .svg file! The composition tool is smart enough to live-save drafts: if you accidentally close your browser window in the midst of typing, you'll find all your text still in the entry field when you return to the home page. Both Facebook.com and VK.com are still split into distinct mobile and desktop versions, but the latter's desktop-class experience is far more optimized for browsing with a mouse and keyboard on a wide screen. (FB5's elements are far too huge.)
VK's privacy controls for user profiles are on-par with Facebook's, though visibility per post is limited to either public or friends-only. Again: in almost every way, the user experience is just like Facebook's... but competent. Last month, VK Connect was released - an apparent attempt to duplicate "Log In With Facebook" (within Mail.ru's properties, at least,) which has undergone its fair share of controversy. The Mail.ru group also owns and operates Однокла́ссники (which means "classmates" in English,) or "OK," which appears to be built atop the same platform as VK, albeit with a much prettier color palette. Without native English support, it's hard to discern the intended difference between the two, though there's definitely something to OK's photo contests, which I can’t be bothered to understand, but found to be relentlessly promoted throughout general use of the site. I was at least able to determine that - like Facebook – both VK and OK originally began as university-exclusive social spaces.
Unlike Facebook, VK's API support appears to remain extensive enough for third-party clients/apps to be viable. In theory, the preservation of a diverse, competitive showing of alternatives to VK’s own apps like Kontakt, Kate Mobile, Amberfrog, and others should maintain at least an abstract atmosphere of pressure to continue improving product experience, though none appear to be any real threat to the original anymore (at least on iOS and Android.) On the desktop site, I particularly like that one can always post with Ctrl-Enter across all text entry fields on the domain. I found the site’s music streaming library features quite ingenious, though I wish it handled album art differently. Embedding any VK content elsewhere is smooth and pleasing to the eye thanks to the brevity of its documentation (even after automated translation from Russian.) This excellence is multiplied still in the case of its “[developer] Widgets for Sites,” which demonstrate how cross-permeation of a social network throughout the rest of the web does not have to be limited to credential recognition, and – dare I suggest – that it can even be well-designed, smart to use, and actually additive to users’ experience. Just look at how beautifully made the Community Messages widget is! Even VK’s brand guidelines page is a lesson on how much better-looking and efficient Facebook’s design of identical product elements could be.
From the looks of it, VK’s document sharing capabilities have been oddly doted on over the years. Though I can upload a PDF of my gargantuan old Bandcamp essay from 2018 to my Negligent Operators Facebook Group in a post – one can’t just upload it directly to the “Files” repository without actually attaching it to a timestamped post to the feed, for some reason. While the Group post does have a permalink and is set to “Public” visibility, I noticed that it simply redirected me to log in when I tested it in a private browser window, so I attempted to probe a potential loophole by sharing it back to its parent Boiler Explosion Memes Page, which I knew for sure had a publicly-visible timeline. The result: “This content isn’t available right now.” Frankly, I can’t imagine why on Earth Facebook ever implemented the “Files” section in the first place. There is not a preview tool – even for simple PDFs – so clicking on any of the entries immediately prompts one’s browser to download them, leaving a single circuitous reason for the tab to exist: an index of half-assed documentation for the single member of your Group who’s been struggling with a “Print-to-PDF” addiction. Facebook supports file sharing… barely. VK’s Document section was obviously designed to be actually used, for whatever reason. As a whole – minus the Nazism – VK represents a proven model of what I think Facebook should be.
For my American Facebook Friends, at least, it's more likely than not that you have spent some time "reframing" your relationship with the service since the year 2018 began. Irrespective of the provocation, disciplining or eliminating one's Facebook use has been on our minds lately. A lot of the declarations of departure from Facebook written by tech journalists and bloggers alike advocate for actually deleting one’s profile and very user account right this minute, but I think it’s completely valid to refuse that option, and that simply deleting the app for a while may be a much more comfortable risk. Navneet Alang for The Globe and Mail:
There are social-media platforms aimed at providing users more control – Ello, Vero, and Mastodon, for instance – but because our networks aren’t all there, they hardly feel like an option at all. And so boycotts are effectively asking people to quit Facebook with no other real alternative, which is akin to asking people to stop using electricity to combat climate change: It substitutes regression for a solution.
"I don't miss the app at all and my Facebook behavior has changed radically. Making the social network more difficult to use has made me use it far less," reported CNET's Kent German. I've taken a handful of similar sabbaticals from the app of varying lengths throughout the years and still functioned socially. As of this moment, it would be unreasonable to deny that it’s taken the place of whitepages, Event invitations, club meetings, and so on - functions which Facebook can perform for users without them logging on every day. The alternatives I'm about to discuss are not necessarily ones I would demand that my 70-year-old mother switch to, for instance, or that I would ever bother a stranger with in conversation at a bar, but for those of you genuinely interested in reducing your dependence on Big Blue. It's very easy to complain and opine about what a social network should be, but it's become apparent - in the past two years, especially - that they're much more complicated to manifest in reality, largely because of the dynamics of alternative-seeking users as they stand. The Web has seen some incredible social media projects borned of late like Mastodon, Minds, and WikiTribune Social, but the foulest possible plague has managed to find many of these in the form of Nazis and alt-right extremism. Instead of shunning the platforms, though, I think it's become more urgent than ever that we pulverize this trend and make it abundantly clear that open social networking is not theirs to take. I know these smell highbrowed, but they're worth a shot.
Since I had the opportunity to interview Mastodon's creator the morning of its biggest press day of all time, I have advocated for the service religiously. All parts of its experience are diverse, gorgeous, and spectacular - from its community selection to its privacy and user-protection tools to the available third-party clients, the platform's slice of the wider "Fediverse" is the only place on the internet I can think of that's only continued to get better and better lately. Eugen Rochko didn't invent decentralized social networks, but after That Fateful Day in April 2017 - when that elephant mascot sat on the homepages of Motherboard and The Verge - his would certainly carry them into the broader tech media conversation for the first time. The software is most succinctly described by Casey Newton as "a distributed, open-source version of Twitter," but the network it interconnects with is utterly marvelous in both theoretical possibilities and reality as it exists today. However, the changes made to the two services in the time since prompts one to reevaluate who exactly is imitating who considering Twitter's decentralization project (announced last December,) threaded replies on its mobile app (announced in February - similar to how replies have long been displayed in Mastodon app Toot!,) and voice Tweets (announced last month - Mastodon has allowed audio files in posts with customizable album art for at least a year.)
As far as I can tell, the implementation pattern of these copycat features - or any hint to the simple fact that Mastodon did it first - has received exactly zero coverage from tech media. For the course of its history, I've over and over again wondered why, to which Erik Moeller provided an intriguing answer on his blog last week:
In a capitalist media ecosystem, the primary frame of reference for understanding the world of technology is profit. If something doesn't generate profit, has no obvious pathway to profit, and isn't backed by people who are viewed as experts on making profit, it is assumed to be a failure by default. From that point forward, any success is accepted reluctantly, slowly, or not at all.
Moeller's argument is very insightful, but it's of a certain bent shared among the open source, "alternative," decentralized, Linux-ey crowd which can be understandably off-putting to those without strongly passionate political/socioeconomic/philosophical opinions embedded in our use of technology. I'd like to add my own commentary and emphasize that one does not necessarily have to believe in the ideologies of software alternatives to benefit significantly from them. You don't have to be an activist to see that Mastodon is gorgeous, powerful, innovative, and full of hilarious, intelligent, wonderful people. You don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses - you need only to want a better and/or different experience. I believe it's very important the community make all haste in figuring out how to "sell" to way more mainstream, less-activated users because reasonable people are completely losing the battle for the conversation on these networks. Though most Mastodon instances have explicitly banned Nazis from the very beginning, the far-right hellsite Gab took advantage of the platform's open source license and migrated to it on America Day, last year, which - because of its disturbingly-large userbase - technically made Gab's server the most populous Mastodon instance in existence. Even though the Mastodon team published a statement condemning and disavowing Gab and encouraging other instance admins to follow mastodon.social's example by blocking it from federating the very same day, notice that Vice's headline still describes the whole of Mastodon as "Home to the Biggest Far Right Social Network," when "The Biggest Far-Right Social Network Migrates to Nazi-Free Twitter Alternative's Platform" would have perhaps been a lot less misinformative. Editorial decisions like this are powerful considering how confusing the interworkings of Federated Networks already are to a casual audience.
When I say that it reminds me of early Twitter, I ask that you be not afraid, Facebook friends - I simply mean that I've been able to "connect" with strangers and "discover" conversations in a way that actually feels like an intended use for Mastodon and now an afterthought at best for its predecessor. I realize that many of you have found Twitter intimidating, overwhelming, absurd, petty, or otherwise unworthy of your attention since it was first conceived, but the overwhelming consensus of those of us who've grown up there is that it was once a pro-social space. If I had to determine the primary reason I and many like me have continued to find ourselves so much more predisposed to Twitter over Facebook, I'd suggest it's an abstract objective to meet new people through their content (what they say) instead of by who they are (location, academic institution, or even social proximity.) Through the addition of mutuality-identification features to both over time, these two traits have become less distinct between them, but I will maintain that Facebook is better for rolodexing locals as Twitter is better for dropping in on politically activated strangers. I genuinely cannot recall the last time I discovered an enriching something/someone from within Twitter, itself, but the possibility of losing touch with any of the ~140 longtime friends I've kept up with there because of a primary shift to Mastodon is not an option. Truthfully, if I could forcibly move every one of my Twitter friends and their posts - exactly as they are - to Mastodon, I would never look at Twitter again.
My favorite part about not being employed as a tech journalist is that I do not have to understand cryptocurrency. If you're like me, you find the subject exhausting and relentlessly uninteresting. If you're not, you may be interested in the open source, Anonymous-endorsed social network Minds. As I understand it, its primary goal is to "invert" the ad-powered internet revenue model by redirecting the financial benefits from engagement back to the users who generate it through a system of "tokens." Louise Matsakis reported for Wired:
The tokens users receive for contributing to Minds don't yet translate to real money, but they can be used within the platform to buy two kinds of Boosts. News Feed Boosts largely work in the same way as traditional digital ads, injecting a post into other people's feeds. Peer-to-Peer Boosts, meanwhile, formalize a part of the digital economy that has always existed, letting you pay another Minds user to share your post to their followers.
Though it launched in 2015, its adoption of cryptocurrency three years later appears to be what made Minds worthy of the big feature in Wired:
Using Wire, the platform's built-in Patreon-like feature, users can tip creators, or pay for exclusive content, if someone chooses to place a post behind a paywall. You can also earn tokens by contributing to Minds' code, or discovering software bugs; the entire site is open source. Last month, Minds began testing converting its token system—which were previously called points—into a new cryptocurrency, the Minds token, which runs on the Ethereum blockchain network.
The theory is profound: Minds has found a one-of-a-kind method of readdressing the fundamental misincentives behind what's become of the whole internet economy which necessitates greater conversation. However, its current experience reeks of yet another rather severe infection of alt-rightism. When I signed up this week, I immediately noticed both "blacklivesmatter" and "blm" in "Trending Tags," but all I found when I explored them were posts from Infowars (of fucking course,) and accounts with names like "Censorship Sucks," and "Liberty-Gal" sharing racist, anti-Semitic, and violently alt-right content and commentary. As a matter of fact, I was actually unable to find any content whatsoever that wasn't explicitly extremist conservative, except posts from the CEO and co-founder Bill Ottman, who's latest comment - "The ugliness of ignorant ideas is BEAUTIFUL compared to the horror of everyone's mouth sewn shut" - is... open to interpretation. Engadget Senior Editor Daniel Cooper wrote a similar account in 2018:
It's not until you survey the most popular channels on the platform that you start wondering what sort of free speech and debate Minds is interested in protecting. The site's stars are largely the intellectual bantamweights of the far-right movement, and the debate seems very one-sided. If you're wondering where people with Pepe the Frog avatars have migrated to, it's here. In fact, the general tenor of Minds is a combination of race hate, gun porn, "pro-white erotica" and lots and lots of weed.
Since then, the company introduced the "Minds Jury System" in an effort to address the problem, which Vice's Ben Makuch and Jordan Pearson explored in-depth, last year:
Far-right accounts on Minds have already benefited from its contribution-based token economy. In most cases, there isn’t a whole lot of money changing hands, but tokens on Minds can be used to spread far-right messages much further than they would organically.
From my perspective, Minds sounds dangerously vulnerable to domination by a "pay-to-win" crowd of cash-laden assholes. Mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Twitter allow one to pay directly for advertising content (you'd be surprised how many eyes can gloss over your shit for just $10,) but it's at least more or less clearly labeled in their interfaces as such. Allowing a rich user to boost any of their posts in direct proportion to the amount they spend seems like a comically-exploitable recipe. More provincially, the longform component of Minds post composition makes it yet another blogging platform, but it's so poorly, clunky, and unsupportive that neo-Nazi users will have to meticulously retype any bullshit they hope to publish in its entirety.
For better or worse, by far the most in-depth window into the Mind of Mind's CEO is his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast last year (out of which I have trimmed 35 minutes of silence.) "Taking down disinfo from social networks because it's wrong doesn't make sense," he says early in the episode. "Of Facebook, he remarks "they're calling us insecure... but they compromise everybody's data. You wanna talk about unsecure - there's no more unsecure site that exists... They're _in_secure. Mark Zuckerberg is very insecure." Ottman also makes it clear that he believes "transparency" is key and that open source is its answer:
A lot of apps try to say that they're alternatives and that they support privacy or free speech or whatnot, but I don't think it's any new paradigm if they're not showing their source code... Licensing is really what this all coalesces into.
Somehow, the two also end up discussing hentai.
Those of you freaks who adore the way Wikipedia looks and/or particularly love discussing the content you share may be interested in the least-covered of these alternatives, WT.Social. If you recall, Wiki's co-founder Jimmy Page launched a crowdsourced and crowdfunded digital publication called Wikitribune in Spring 2017 with what I thought at the time to be an intriguing vision:
This will be the first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side-by-side as equals writing stories as they happen, editing them live as they develop, and at all times backed by a community checking and rechecking all facts.
Eighteen months later, its original editorial staff of 12 professional journalists was laid off; after two years, the general consensus around the project was that it had failed, but Page sought to zoom in a bit on its function as a fact-checking tool with MediaWiki - "a repository where one can search and find all the fact-checks." As someone who was also trying to start a media company at the time, I find one quote of his especially poignant. Of the "back-and-forth" collaboration process between the community members and hired journalists to write a story, he described the culture as one of "what [he] would call 'permission-asking.'" For whatever reason, people seem to be paralyzed and intimidated when asked to participate in "journalism," but what about a "social network?" In November of last year, Wikitribune was relaunched entirely as WT.Social (wikitribune.com now redirects there and branding of official accounts on other social remains "Wikitribune.") My immediate impression of the site was its remarkable resemblance to Diaspora - one of the only O.G., pre-Mastodon decentralized social networks still standing. I'm actually rather ashamed to say that it seemed awfully complicated, and it certainly is moreso than all of the networks I've so far discussed aside from Facebook, itself.
For reference, "A Beginner's Guide to WT.Social" is the community's own fairly comprehensive companion. Like Facebook, selecting "Follow" or "Add Friend" on another user's profile have distinct functions. SubWikis could be compared to subreddits and Upvotes to upvotes... on Reddit. Like Twitter, there are Hashtags and Lists. Formatting in the compose box supports Markdown natively comparably to Tumblr's and Diaspora's and is virtually identical in every way to the latter's. Unlike any other social networks, one can choose whether to post content "Collaboratively" - open to revision by other users - or "Individually," which makes it static. "Every post has a detailed history showing who made what changes when... and every post can be rolled back to an earlier version," reads a community document. The combination of all these features, alone, doubtlessly makes WT.Social a singular entity.
I would love to give WT.Social the old college try for the sake of writing more about it, but I'm afraid its outlook nine months after launch is not good at all. In July 2020, the "What's Hot" section is still mostly full of posts discussing WT.Social, itself, and what users are searching for from alternatives to The Big Boys of social media. Unfortunately, even some of the site's top all-time users have been inactive for months. Ironically, the official WT.Social Twitter account and its Discord server appear to be active daily, though the most recent external coverage of the project I could find dates back to December of last year and is rather grimly entitled "All Alone on Cocoon and WT Social." For Slate, Jane C. Hu describes it as "basically like if Facebook was made up entirely of groups and focused on outside links instead of user-generated photos and posts:"
I delighted in how WT Social has no clue what I’m interested in, and how it randomly generated suggestions for extremely niche SubWikis to join: Graveyard photography, Death Guild Thunderdome, Japanese Supernatural Creatures.
Author Jonathan Edward James Bacon engaged the furthest with WT.Social's challenges a month prior for Forbes, making some especially interesting points:
It is one thing to post a picture of your salad on Facebook, but sharing insightful, nuanced news stories is very different. If WT.Social can crack simple publication of content in a way that is focused on quality, this will be a huge hurdle they will have overcome.
In concept, exploring the "quality" end of the social media spectrum is a fascinating idea. I'm assuming Bacon's standard for quality social is the opposite of "blasting enormous amounts of content into people’s eyeballs at high speed," but I'm not sure precisely how I would if I was put up to the task. Original Content might be the populist metric of quality measure, but I've found myself more and more interested in sharing others' work from around The Web as I've grown older. In another post in the Beginner's Guide SubWiki entitled "What should be our selling point?," user Giorgio Barilla remarks that "on the technical side, wt.social doesn't bring any new content to the table," and "[WT.Social] seems waaaay [too] similar to Reddit." In terms of design philosophy, replicating as many features from all services across the social sphere is technically a first, and I think it's a valid approach for a newcomer. The result as it stands is going to be initially difficult to digest for anyone with an attention span thoroughly minimized by years engaged at the modern Web's pace - it's comparatively quite perplexing to use and doesn't perform very well (I experienced page load times that would be considered protracted by today's standards) - but I don't think there's any reason it should hope to attract users who aren't interested enough in pushing themselves to continue, anyway. One very refreshing positive: I have yet to see a single piece of violent/alt-right/neo-Nazi content on WT.Social.
For those who have absolutely no use for Discovery as a function of social networks, private "micro-networks" like Life360 and Cocoon may feel much more tailored for their personal use than the Babylon that has become of the big players. I should confess that nobody on Gourd's Green Earth gives a shit about where I may be/have been/am going nor what I may be doing/have done/am going to do, so I'm afraid I've been unable to test Cocoon myself. (If you'd be interested in joining Extratone's Cocoon for whatever reason, do shoot me an email.) I also gave up my personal privacy long ago and exclusively post publicly, so I'm going to depend entirely on others' commentary, here. On my birthday this year, the MIT Technology Review published a profile on Cocoon and other micro-networking options:
These new platforms don’t encourage you to accumulate likes or followers, or require that you diligently craft an online persona. Instead they want you to connect with a small, curated group of people, and that’s it.
For TechCrunch, Lucas Matney sums the essence of Cocoon's function with true brevity:
While Life360 is the app for concerned parents, Cocoon wants to be the app for curious long-distance families who want to check on their family and closest friends more easily. The app is structured around a Slack channel-like feed where photo, text and location updates can be pushed alongside threaded replies. Like Life360, you can can also access a dashboard of a group’s users and see where they are located in the world and whether they’re at home or work based on group-designated locations... There are some clean parallels to other consumer apps, but the biggest competitor to Cocoon is what goes down in the small groups you have in iMessage or any of your other chat apps. Cocoon wants to be a properly-interfaced social network inside a group chat where everything is for the group’s benefit only.
Both of Cocoon's co-founders are Facebook defectors: Sachin Monga spent seven years there, throughout which he "worked on early platform partnerships, led the advertiser growth team to 3M active advertisers, and launched a few big sharing-related features inside the Facebook app;" Alex Cornell was Facebook's Live's lead designer, but is most famous for recording the UberConference "I'm on hold" track. The startup reportedly accrued $3 million for its seed round from Lerer Hippeau, Y Combinator, Susa, Norwest, Advancit, Foundation Capital, iNovia, Shrug, and SV Angel by the time its iOS app was launched on November 25th of last year. Considering the first cases of The Big Virus in the United States were discovered less than two months later, their timing was either eerily fortunate or mercilessly unfortunate: I was unable to unearth any user statistics, so we can presume that the app has boomed with families who've been separated, flopped with those who've been stuck together the whole time, or both.
I may not have any firsthand experience with family apps, but - as far as I can tell - the de facto incumbent, Life360 has been the gold standard of parental surveillance on smartphones since Google Latitude folded in 2013, sending many users looking for a location-sharing alternative. It's also been a platform to behavior from parents described by some as "emotional abuse:"
One viral Reddit post, which appeared on r/advice, was from a 19-year-old man who said his conservative, religious parents forced him to download Life360 after he came out to them as gay. In another anonymous post, someone claiming to be a college sophomore lamented the fact that his parents called him whenever they saw something on the app that made them suspect he was doing something they wouldn’t like. “I feel that this is really unhealthy for both my parents and me,” that person wrote.
Apparently, Cocoon was intended from the beginning to be a much warmer place. "I think those teenagers who are forced to use Life360 may be more interested in using Cocoon just because it looks cooler... Life360 looks like it was designed by helicopter parents," said a host of TechCrunch's Equity podcast.
<iframe width="auto" height="auto" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PD3sb3TFJzE?controls=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>With its elegant animations, subtle use of haptic feedback, and ultra-rounded elements, even my completely empty Cocoon feels like a safe space. It's impressive that so few developers were able to extend iOS' Find My iPhone capabilities to such a sophisticated degree, especially considering how inert the team looks in the press photos captured inside their sky-high-ceilinged, fauna-stuffed office.
Now we arrive at the most fundamental practical dilemma with network adoption: "pioneering" an alternative service is a process that involves potentially alienating your existing friend group - by both the redirection of your time/attention and attempts to convince them to join you (for which writing 10,000+ word essays criticizing Facebook may or may not be advisable.) From my perspective, your use of Facebook indicates that you probably care more about tending to your existing network than building a new one, but the fact that you're still reading perhaps suggests a palpable discontentment with your experience and/or a curiosity about the grander spectrum of the digital world outside the relentlessly and maddeningly blue confines of facebook.com Hell. There are many alternatives to Facebook, but truthfully, there are zero replacements - an outcome of the company's foresight and meticulous maneuvering throughout the digital renaissance. "Facebook has managed to squash its competitors, either by cloning or acquiring them—a tactic it’s used to remain relevant and irreplaceable," writes Sarah Emerson for Vice, who concludes by asking "Is Facebook bringing communities together, or is it making it impossible to build them elsewhere?"
The only two alarms I've taken the time to sound over the years have been in response to actions taken by both Google and Facebook and the implications of their power, but of the two, the latter is the more definite monopoly in the most moderately neo-liberal sense of the term. While it has practically become boilerplate to metaphorize Facebook as a drug or abusive relationship, the melodrama should no longer be necessary to articulate the pervasiveness of the problem - it's more like a privatized public utility. In Free Basics-saturated countries like Nigeria, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines, deleting Facebook is the equivalent of Bugging Out and going Off The Grid, and its hold on the world is once again being amplified by current events.
Until 2020's Big Virus, Facebook's overall growth had halted after the scandals of 2017-2018 - even declining a bit in the United States. However, in a Zoom call last Thursday, Alexander Mann - Director of the EMEA Small Business Group at Facebook - confirmed to me that both Facebook and Instagram have seen a noticeable increase in brand new, first-time user signups throughout the pandemic, but would not provide any specific numbers. (The call was about "SMB" - small and medium businesses - so I made sure to have him clarify that he was, indeed, talking about whole user growth, not just business growth.) Throughout the five weeks I've spent writing this, even the Capitalist Hall of Fame (including fucking Ben & Jerry's) have one-by-one begun to boycott Facebook's platform by removing all of their advertising business at least through the end of July. (For a full list of companies involved, see Sleeping Giants' ongoing spreadsheet.) Two overlapping crusades have become the primary face of the boycott: first, there's Stop Hate For Profit - "a diverse and growing coalition" organized by ADL, Color of Change, Common Sense, Free Press, LULAC, Mozilla, NAACP, the National Hispanic Media Center, and Sleeping Giants. Their 10 primary "Recommended Next Steps" are organized under the subheads Accountability, Decency, and Support, and call repeatedly for more third-party involvement in Facebook's changes, going forward: "We simply can no longer trust Facebook’s own claims on what they are or are not doing. A 'transparency report' is only as good as its author is independent."
Change The Terms is the other coalition, also backed by Color of Change, Free Press, and the National Hispanic Media Center, along with the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Center for American Progress, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and others. "The demands of the campaign extend to structural reforms inside Facebook, including the appointment of a human rights expert to advise the company, regular external audits of the platform for identity-based discrimination and bias, and the adoption of a number of other policies," reports Emily Bell for the Columbia Journalism Review:
Conspiracy theories and divisive speech continue to circulate on the platform; political advertising, which increasingly takes place on Facebook, advances blatant lies without fear of fact-checking; and damaging and misleading ideas about critical issues such as the coronavirus pandemic and climate change are frequently posted without tangible consequences.
A week ago, Facebook published an update in its new "Sharing Our Actions on Stopping Hate" vertical (introduced on the 1st,) regarding its meetings with Stop Hate For Profit civil rights leaders which linked a two-column PDF explicitly addressing each of the campaign's recommendations/demands side-by-side with pledges and explanations of previous and ongoing action. It also referenced an interview The Verge published with Color of Change's Deputy Senior Campaign Director Jade Magnus Ogunnaike and the recently-completed 2020 Civil Rights Audit of the company by Laura Murphy, "a civil rights and civil liberties leader, along with a team from civil rights law firm Relman Colfax." On Wednesday, the page was updated again in accordance with the publication of Facebook's own 2020 Diversity Report, though the news was a bit overshadowed by the most devastating attack on Twitter in the network's history, by far.
I have a tremendous amount of respect for the sentiment of the movement and I find its scale and persistence to be encouraging and deeply impressive. Observing Mark Zuckerberg as much as I have, though, I must say that I feel especially sorry for the team attempting to maintain a dialogue with him. In an interview with Free Press co-CEO Jessica González on CJR's Gallery platform, she recounted frustrations of their recent communication:
Facebook had those demands three weeks before our meeting, and in fact, many of them are long-standing years-old demands that Facebook has failed repeatedly to meet. We expected Facebook to come ready to respond to our demands, to commit to timelines for implementation. Instead, Facebook wanted us to walk through the demands and have yet another conversation. They seemed to think that having Mark on a call for an hour without making any commitments would be enough to placate us.
Obviously, the largest global surveillance machine in history mishandling (or refusing to handle) hate speech is probably much more activating for you than my complaints about Social Cards, but as far as I'm concerned, any and all pressure on Facebook to reflect and/or sincerely invite examination upon itself is a positive thing. The most alarming fact about the boycott right now is that the withdrawal of one thousand of the world's largest businesses has only represented about 10% of monthly expected advertising spending on the platform from Facebook's "more than 7 million" clients, coincidentally bringing to light an especially irredeemable fact about the way it operates: all this time, Facebook has been harvesting most of its cash from small-to-medium-sized businesses.
Ultimately, I am not asking you to care about my feelings toward Facebook, but about your own. In its titanically unprecedented position, Facebook, Inc. cannot be exempt from any criticism from its users or otherwise. To date, the company has designed its services virtually irrespective of what users have actually asked for - substituting psychoanalysis for human volition - and gotten away with it, unlike any other company in their space. At the financial scale it's operating at, we should expect absolute perfection from its services. Not just perfect from a single perspective, but malleably perfect from all possible perspectives. Instead of blaming themselves for difficulties using Facebook, older and less tech-literate users should blame the product vocally. No, this is not too much to ask from a company who's clientele includes a third of all humanity.