When it comes to Facebook, I lean more towards the “burn it all down” camp. Based on reactions to the Facebook Papers, I’m not alone. Several scandals have broken out in the past year regarding Facebook and every time, I shake my head thinking that maybe we would be better off without it.
However, I’m coming to realize that perspective reflects my Western privilege. I live in a country where Facebook is optional. When it shut down on October 4th, I laughed about it on Twitter while people in Tanzania were worried that government services wouldn’t be able to function. I’ve realized solving the Facebook problem is more complex than just shutting it down.
Facebook has often been compared to big tobacco, and the comparison is apt. It hid its harmful effects and prioritized profits over the common good. But the tobacco solution was much simpler, and the stakes were much lower. If tobacco was outlawed outright, the economy would suffer for a time, but if social media was shut down, many businesses who rely on their services would be shuttered permanently and people would find it difficult to communicate with loved ones.
Facebook’s problems can’t be solved by simply shutting it down. They can be solved by a commitment to the principle of subsidiarity.
In Catholic Social Teaching subsidiarity is the recognition of autonomy at different levels of society: families, communities, churches, cities, states, etc. Each level of society has certain rights and responsibilities within the larger community. Solidarity is a complementary principle that is held in tension with subsidiarity. Solidarity sees all of mankind as a united human family while subsidiarity recognizes the real and important boundaries and hierarchies that exist.
Facebook has a good grasp of solidarity. Their mission is to “connect the world,” and they have largely done that. Connecting the world definitely helps promote the unity of the human family. Unfortunately, Facebook seems to have sought solidarity at the expense of subsidiarity, affecting both communities and individual users.
Many small businesses, government agencies, and community organizations rely on Facebook to reach their customers, citizens, and audience. Facebook is a “walled garden,” meaning all interactions take place and all information is stored on its own servers. This becomes a problem when the garden becomes as big as Facebook has. The larger the garden is, the more someone “has” to take part in it. Through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, Facebook has achieved such a size that it is basically a necessity to do business or communicate with a group. Much like roads and telephone lines, it has become a public utility but one owned and operated completely for private interest.
Facebook, in effect, owns your audience and your method of reaching them which means if you lose access to your account, you lose access to your audience. However, there is no reason why this has to be the case. Facebook could allow you to migrate your audience’s data to a different service in the same way Mailchimp or Constant Contact allows you to download and transfer an email list. If Facebook allowed its users to migrate their audiences, it would be more like a service and not a public utility we treat as a service. It would give local communities more autonomy.
Facebook also violates subsidiarity when it comes to its individual users. Frances Haugen’s testimony to Congress confirmed Facebook’s algorithm is not designed to show you what you want to see, it shows you what will keep you on the website longer. This subtly robs the individual of their autonomy. This, too, robs lower-order communities of their agency. Users believe they are staying on Facebook freely but are actually being coerced to do so by machine learning. In this way, Facebook’s algorithm is similar to the nicotine in cigarettes. The company relies on compulsory behavior to increase its bottom line.
It seems like a solution to the Facebook problem is a combination of the legislation against the tobacco industry combined with the trust-breaking of the telecommunications industry. Trade regulation on social media can give autonomy back to communities. Consumer regulation can help individuals and families make better decisions about how they use social media.
Sheera Frankel of the New York Times reported many are against Facebook being broken up because that, “might make 10 little problems instead of one big one.” I don’t see why that is a bad thing. Anti-trust legislation can open the way to regulate each of Facebook’s properties (and their problems) independently. For example, Instagram’s targeting of younger users needs to be handled differently than Facebook’s tendency to lead people to extremist groups.
Regardless of whether anti-trust legislation is enacted, Facebook can mend its own structure in small ways that give agency to states, small communities, and individual users. Facebook can work towards both solidarity and subsidiarity. It may suffer profit losses in the near term, but in the long term, these changes will benefit the common good of our communities, country, and world.