Op-ed: Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto is a political trainwreck

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has just published a 5,700 word "letter" on his profile, where he asserts that Facebook represents one of history's "great leaps." Though he covers a number of topics, what's most interesting is how he positions Facebook as a force for political change in the coming years. His goals are lofty, sometimes even grandiose. That's not the problem.

The problem is a fundamental contradiction built into the way he hopes to create what he calls a "global community" by essentially gerrymandering the Internet.

Facebook for politicians

Zuckerberg begins by claiming we're in an historic moment similar to "our great leaps from tribes to cities to nations." Then he adds that we need social media to "reach the next level." That next level is some kind of ill-defined global community which will come into being by using Facebook as a platform. In recent years, he says, the ideal of global community has become controversial. Though he never uses the word "nationalism," that's clearly what's on his mind.

So how would the "global community" of Facebook combat nationalism?

One possibility is that Facebook will become a political campaigning tool. "In recent campaigns around the world—from India and Indonesia across Europe to the United States—we've seen the candidate with the largest and most engaged following on Facebook usually wins," Zuckerberg boasts. The implication is that Facebook is key to political success, so use it or get left behind.

Zuckerberg adds that he's thinking of creating "worldwide voting system" for Facebook users which could then be used as a template for how "collective decision-making may work in other aspects of the global community." That's a vague formulation. But coming on the heels of his comments about politicians with Facebook engagement, he sounds like he's floating the idea of turning Facebook into the infrastructure for managing elections.

For anyone who watched the way Facebook fragmented U.S. citizens during the most recent election, this is a chilling thought. But it also makes sense as a way forward for the social media giant.

The new "meaningful groups" feature

Facebook is also politicizing its offerings with a new feature that Zuckerberg calls "meaningful groups." This new category of community is defined as "the core of your social network experience and physical support structure." The main way these groups will be different from a regular community is that they are explicitly designed to bring people together offline, IRL, in the physical world, or whatever you want to call it.

One example of a meaningful group is a page that helps connect refugees with people who are willing to provide them with housing. Another example is a parenting community that connects parents with each other in their local communities. Essentially, what distinguishes a meaningful group is that it's embedded in our offline lives. They are, in other words, connected to local geographical areas.

So even though Facebook is committed to this idea of global community, which by definition exists mainly online (since you can't live next door to everyone in the world), the company's next big push is for communities with local, real-world impact. "Going forward, we will measure Facebook's progress with groups based on meaningful groups, not groups overall," Zuckerberg writes. "This will require not only helping people connect with existing meaningful groups, but also enabling community leaders to create more meaningful groups for people to connect with." What he's suggesting here is that Facebook is going to start surfacing these groups to users a lot, in an effort to get more people to join them.

Unlike other groups on Facebook, meaningful groups will be centered around leaders. Zuckerberg emphasized this point strongly when Kara Swisher interviewed him for Re/code. He asserted, "The best communities in the world have leaders."

Meaningful groups sound like they would be ideal for politicians trying to garner a local following. Let's say you're a politician who wants to create a meaningful group around keeping your national borders safe. You want to connect locals with each other to organize protests against immigration and to support each other in an effort to locate suspicious characters who might have crossed into the country illegally. Because of its new emphasis, Facebook will surface your "meaningful group" to more people. As a leader, you'll have access to tools that will grow your group. And why wouldn't you do that? After all, Zuckerberg has said that politicians with the biggest Facebook engagement always win elections.

Getting out of the filter bubble

Of course, many in the U.S. would argue that Facebook has had a detrimental effect on elections by propagating fake news and creating filter bubbles where people only see information that confirms their biases. In his letter, Zuckerberg is still not willing to admit that Facebook did that. But he does say that he's concerned with offering users "a complete range of perspectives." Of course, he won't offer perspectives that are too different.

Zuckerberg told Wired's Cade Metz, "The research suggests that showing one opposite opinion entrenches your belief even further... The goal is to show a more complete picture of the whole. There are things we can do that can serve different viewpoints, help you see an issue on a spectrum and then decide for yourself where you want to be."

And how will Facebook do this magical thing? In his letter, Zuckerberg says, "Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item's accuracy." He told Metz that Facebook will accomplish this with "a blend of automation and human intelligence."

But Zuckerberg apparently has no plans to hire any human beings to deal with these fundamentally human questions of what constitutes a community, how to maintain its norms, and what offering a range of opinions about the news means.

I'm not objecting to the idea that AI could be helpful in dealing with abuse and fake news. But until we understand better how humans make these decisions and define their communities, handing this problem over to bots is basically a way of deferring dealing with it. The fake news disaster will be fixed when we reach the Singularity.

Gerrymandering the Internet

Zuckerberg does grapple with one of Facebook's most interesting problems, which is how to maintain norms and standards of behavior when you are serving diverse communities with different ideas of what's objectionable. The answer, apparently, is "a system of personal controls" that allow each user to determine what they want to see.

Unfortunately, this sounds like Facebook is just recreating the filter bubble problem. Zuckerberg's entire section on this is worth reading because it so fully embodies the central contradiction of what he's arguing in this letter:

Each person should be able to share what they want while being told they cannot share something as little as possible. The approach is to combine creating a large-scale democratic process to determine standards with AI to help enforce them.

The idea is to give everyone in the community options for how they would like to set the content policy for themselves. Where is your line on nudity? On violence? On graphic content? On profanity? What you decide will be your personal settings. We will periodically ask you these questions to increase participation and so you don't need to dig around to find them. For those who don't make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum. Of course you will always be free to update your personal settings anytime.

Despite Facebook's commitment to globalism, here we learn that the default norms for what you view will be set not by your global interests but by "whatever the majority of people in your region selected." Yes, you can update your settings, but if you've ever tried to mess with your privacy settings on Facebook you know that won't be easy. The vast majority of people will never escape the filter bubbles of their local regions.

Perhaps the lesson here is that for Facebook to become a political tool, it can't truly maintain a commitment to global community.