Facebook is so cooked that even its new brand, Meta, means — in Hebrew, at least — “dead”. But put aside the florid symbolism and all the noise being made by already outraged politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, and what does all this really mean for us, here in India, its largest market?
We are yet to see any meaningful discussion from our leaders because they are all too deeply involved. The “Facebook papers” are in themselves smuggled screenshots of an immense miscellany of Facebook documents. They are a trove in which journalists have been digging somewhat coordinated tunnels, from which are beginning to see some refinable ore.
But, in reality, the papers have mostly been the launching platform for a sophisticated lobbying operation fronted by the leaker, a former Facebook employee named Frances Haugen.
The papers do, at a minimum, substantiate Haugen’s central point, which is that Facebook studies itself thoroughly enough to know that it cannot under any circumstances be trusted. In particular, it knows that its efforts to limit the social harms resulting from the use of its platform are minuscule compared to the scale of the problems those efforts are supposed to address. It knows, and its employees individually know and often debate internally, that its business model requires it to maximise user engagement, to ensure that users spend hours tied to the screen in the palm of their hands. Facebook is aware that the design and operation of the platform to maximise engagement will inevitably lead it to cause otherwise avoidable social harms.
Harm results because efforts to control the consequences of speech that incites violence are limited to a few markets in a tiny number of languages — the ones that are in the global north. Elsewhere in the world, the involvement of state and non-state actors in using their media to whip up violence has been all too apparent. Harm of a very different kind results when children’s mental health is undermined by the implicit messages they encounter and that are endlessly reinforced in their online lives. Those are but two from a catalogue of harms arising from the effort to maximise human engagement.
It will take more than rebranding to save Facebook from the myriad legal consequences that flow from this evidence about what it knew and when. But if we want to understand the meaning for us, in our lives and in India, the issues that matter are in no way restricted to Facebook. Everyone is responsible, and is choosing to stay quiet.
That’s because all the other players, including our government and political parties, would be only too happy if everyone’s attention were diverted to the supposedly unique awfulness of Facebook.
But the practices that lead Facebook to cause or to amplify avoidable social harms are caused and amplified for the same reasons by all the other “big architectures” of today’s internet and not just one company. Whether it is other platform companies, local and multinational, or telecom operators, online retailers or financial giants, they all want to maximise each individual’s engagement with devices.
As citizens, as individuals, in our families, here is what matters to us: If the government collects all our behaviour and uses it to influence and control us, how is that compatible with democracy? If it is not, does it become so when the intermediaries for that collection are private companies using it to profit from us? No, we can be sure of that.
Either the government forces us to share information or when the private parties collect all our behaviour, it finds means to collect it from them.
We want all the services without somebody watching our every move, whether to control us or to sell us targeted advertisements. The Supreme Court confirmed for us in Puttaswamy that we have a fundamental right to privacy against the state, which we must use our democratic means to protect, lest democracy itself be endangered. But to protect ourselves, we need to make this an electoral issue and not leave it to lawyers and judges.
The people must use their power to make laws to prohibit the business model of “surveillance capitalism”. The provision of services on the internet in return for comprehensive behaviour collection through the individual’s personal devices should be equally prohibited to all parties. Neither Twitter nor Amazon nor Koo nor Reliance should be allowed to play with our data in an unbridled way. This is an environmental regulation, like prohibiting the discharge of particular poisonous chemicals into the water or the air, or like prohibiting a fraudulent business practice. It should apply to all.
Beginning from the people’s right to be protected against predatory data practices allows us to attack many problems at the root, rather than proceeding branch by branch, one company at a time. Requiring all service providers on the internet to minimise behaviour collection will cause a redesign of services.
We need the rich services of the 21st century internet that make our lives better. But we don’t need those services to be paid for by monitoring our every move; in fact, as we have learned, that’s too high a price for society and democracy to pay.
This column first appeared in the print edition on November 18, 2021 under the title ‘Message from Facebook Papers’. Choudhary is a US-based technology lawyer and founder of India-based SFLC.in; Moglen is professor of law and legal history at Columbia Law School and chair of the Software Freedom Law Center, New York
