News hunger
On the face of things, the hullaballoo over the documents leaked by the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has the makings of a pseudo-event — "arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media," as Daniel Boorstin defined it in The Image. That there are competing hashtags for the event — Facebook Papers, Facebook Files, etc. — speaks to how media companies have deliberately been put into a position of competing over how to present their analysis of the documents, as if that competition would assure greater and more thorough exposure of Facebook's wrongs rather than underscoring how media companies are generally guilty of something very similar to Facebook: developing sensationalistic framings to better monetize consumers' attention.
No one who has been paying even a little attention over the years should be surprised by revelations that Facebook prioritizes profit over people's well-being and that it cares more about selling ads than sustaining "meaningful social connection." (That the company uses that phrase to mean its opposite — measurable engagement — is not incidental.) Facebook wants more people to use its services for more time, an aim with very little overlap with "human thriving." Behavioristically incentivized communication under manifold layers of third-party surveillance and extraction is not strictly equivalent with "staying in touch with family and friends" or "connecting with people over shared interests." Rather it is plugging oneself into a reward system mercilessly administered by an executive team who views users alternately as resources to be squeezed and rats to be experimented on.
There is a hubristic mad-scientist quality to Facebook's experimenting with "boosting some people more frequently into the feeds of some of their randomly chosen friends" in order to see if it could make them become closer (presumably in terms of Facebook's metrics), as the Washington Post reported. Why carry that out unless you had no respect for the integrity of people's social lives and were determined to figure out the limits of what you could use your apparatus to make people do? But even that aspect of Facebook's mode of operation was obvious from its own 2014 "emotional manipulation" study, which didn't need leaking at all.
To a certain extent, any media feed that runs on algorithmic selection and content sorting is running an ongoing manipulation experiment; people consume these feeds to the degree to which they enjoy being experimented on, whether they know it or not. That's what a "For You page" is: an experiment in reconstituting your subjectivity.
So the whistleblower documents don't change our overall understanding of how Facebook works and they may distract us from how Facebook's approach to "engagement" is not categorically worse than that of other tech companies. Facebook's malfeasance is unique mainly in the scale at which it can carry out its business of dividing and antagonizing people ("anger is really five likes"), feeding them an endless supply of scapegoats and inducements to envy or inadequacy.
The "Facebook Files" succeed primarily at giving mainstream media outlets a new franchise and a new example to point to when they make their case for how they serve the public interest and not their shareholders. It's not absurd for Facebook to characterize it as a smear operation being conducted by its outmoded competitors in the media entertainment space. Indeed, you can sense the sympathy the journalists have for their structural equivalent, Facebook's engineers: They want to do the right thing by the audiences they should be serving (the readers, not the bosses), but their diligent efforts to articulate problems are inevitably subordinated to the business interests at stake, sometimes overtly, sometimes opaquely.
If the Facebook Files pit "old media" against "new media" over who should control the manufacture of pseudo-events, it also pits Web 2.0 against the emergence of Web3. At least that is one way to read the fact that Haugen is a successful crypto investor who told New York Times reporter Ben Smith that “for the foreseeable future, I’m fine, because I did buy crypto at the right time.” One might read that as suggesting that crypto's rise enabled her to try to orchestrate Facebook's downfall, and more broadly, that as crypto-powered innovations like DAOs catch on, the legacy social media incumbents will be exposed for what they are and left behind. In the time-honored custom of access journalism, Smith dutifully reports his source's preferred account of her situation:
She noted that she had moved to Puerto Rico to cope with a health condition — but also to join her “crypto friends” on the island, whose capital gains tax exemptions have made it a hub for that novel financial system.
Facebook is of course terrible for society, but it's astounding that the most prominent whistleblower from the company so far is a proponent for one of the few things that's worse.