Along with his fellow Jews, Mark Zuckerberg introspected over Yom Kippur and asked for forgiveness via Facebook from “those I hurt this year … for the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together”. He promised to “work to do better”.
Presumably, Zuckerberg was referring to the two types of harm that Facebook has recently acknowledged causing: allowing Russian nationals to purchase Facebook ads to aid Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and allowing ad buys on hateful search terms.
It took congressional investigations, a special counsel investigation, and great reporting by Politico to get Facebook to fess up to these sins. It took President Obama pulling Mark Zuckerberg aside shortly after the election and schooling him in Facebook’s responsibility for distributing electioneering lies.
But even so, Zuckerberg could have met these revelations with a shrug. After all, Facebook has long contended that it is “merely a platform” for good and for ill. Taking at least rhetorical responsibility for the serious ill that Facebook has done is a good step.
Facebook has committed other sins that are more entrenched and far-reaching, though. First, its algorithm encloses users in filter-bubbles and demotes cross-cutting content, thereby increasing political polarization.
As Zeynep Tufekci has observed: “You are seeing fewer news items that you’d disagree with which are shared by your friends because the algorithm is not showing them to you.” Far from admitting this sin, Facebook continues to insist that blame belongs to the user, not the algorithm. In fact, they are mutually dependent.
Second, Facebook structures its dealings with news providers so as to starve journalism of advertising revenue and user data, while at the same time steering news to the forms and formats Facebook’s algorithm likes best.
The Tow Center for Digital Media chronicles how Facebook has eviscerated the news media’s economic foundation and editorial autonomy, all the while insisting that the platform abets civic virtue. One hopes that when Zuckerberg beat his breast, he was naming these practices too.
If we take Zuckerberg’s invocation of Jewish tradition seriously, what would it mean to really repent for Facebook’s sins?
In Hebrew, repentance is “teshuvah”. It has the sense of returning, making whole, not just asking for forgiveness. Real teshuvah requires one to name the sin, repair the damage, and engage in “tzedakah”, meaning doing justice, including giving to charity.
Real repentance requires change. There is reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg, as a person, wants to be good. In his 2017 Harvard commencement speech, he tells his young daughter she should make her life a blessing. Yet so far, when faced with criticism that Facebook is betraying its asserted values, the company has responded tepidly.
In early 2016, when it was already clear that the viral transmission of lies was a problem, the company took modest action. It contracted with a few dozen freelance editorial reviewers to demote fake content in Facebook’s “trending topics” in favor of more reliable media sources.
cREDITS: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/02/mark-zuckerberg-repent-facebooks-sins