Facebook: Zuckerberg's Theorem

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As far as understatement is concerned, this is roughly on a par with "the safety precautions on the Titanic were not entirely optimal" or "Beethoven is currently in poor health". But Mark Zuckerberg really wrote it this week: "We do not have a very good reputation at the moment for building services that protect privacy." There are people who put it differently.

"Zuckerberg seems to have descended from the mountain his company has built from fake news, harassment, genocide, and data scandals to proclaim that he has discovered religion in privacy," states the US branch service, for example. venture Beat ".

The question is where the enlightenment came from, but later.

"Lack of integrity"

Here are two sentences that Mark Zuckerberg said in 2010 to book author David Kirkpatrick ("The Facebook Effect"): "The era of cultivating friends or colleagues a different image than that of other people is likely to be pretty ending soon, having two identities is an example of a lack of integrity. "

Zuckerberg was in his mid-twenties, and his own idea of ​​the world and his fellow human beings may not be fully developed yet. Even if you've studied psychology at Harvard.

Well, you might have heard of one or the other book. For example, "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" by social psychologist and sociologist Irving Goffman, published in 1956. It is considered one of the most important sociological works of the 20th century.

Slipped rolls = sitcom material

Goffman formulates the thesis that human interactions are basically performances for an audience. The German title of the book is "We all play theater". The roles we take depend on the situation and the audience. If something goes wrong, it will be embarrassing - or funny. American sitcom writers have been filling whole series with role shifts.

The fact that it could be possible and desirable to be as immutable as possible and "real" as a human, believe today at most influencers who are paid for that they consume "authentic" products on Instagram.

Zuckerberg probably just did not get to deal with the literature. He was busy conducting the largest uncontrolled sociotechnical experiment in world history.

Move fast and break things.

It is absolutely fine if mid-twenties are still working on their own identity construction. Not so cheap when their improvised theories about human nature become the basis of design decisions that affect hundreds of millions of people. I once met Mark Zuckerberg in 2008. He seemed nice, cheerful, ambitious, and genuinely convinced of the idea that all the sharing would automatically make things better.

Two years later, IBM employee Matt McKeon released a much cited graphic titled "The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook." It shows which aspects of a Facebook profile-posts, photos, contact information, date of birth, friends list, and so on-were publicly shown by default. From 2005 to 2010. Blue areas are in the graph for public information. In 2010, almost the entire picture is blue.

Misused phone numbers

These design decisions had two immediate consequences today, from Washington to Myanmar: the availability of private information, inclinations, interests, and sorting algorithms all allowed for all the targeting, all the communicative fragmentation and radicalization of recent years. And the illusion of the authentic facilitated propaganda, disinformation, manipulation.

However, Zuckerberg's theorem of 2010 must have been deeply rooted in the corporate culture. There is no other explanation for the continuing monstrosities that Facebook continues to make. For example, the just again violently discussed abuse of actually requested for a security mechanism phone numbers for completely different purposes.

Intimate! Private!

And now Zuckerberg writes, "A great feature of messaging services is that personal conversations and groups stay private, even as your own list of contacts grows. As your circle of friends evolves over time, messaging services are becoming more sophisticated with and stay intimate. "

Intimate! Private! One more sentence: "I believe that the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can trust that what they say to each other is secure and content will not be available forever."

One can also read this: Zuckerberg explains the experiment Facebook, in which two billion people participate at the moment, for failed.

If he were serious, Facebook would have to shut down in its present form. But of course that's not possible, after all, we're dealing with one of the most valuable public companies in the world. But how should Facebook continue to make money if it no longer primarily wants to absorb, portion out and resell the attention of its most transparent users?

Zuckerberg says that now, following the model of the WhatsApp service purchased in 2014, they want to "focus on the most basic and private application scenario", namely private messages. With additional features, "including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payment services, commerce and in the end a platform for many other types of private services."

This company already exists - if you omit the term "private". By the end of 2018, it already had over a billion users and is called WeChat. Through WeChat's smartphone payment service alone, transactions amounting to several trillion - not a typo - are handled annually.

In other words, and this should be the actual background of the Zuckerberg Manifesto: The most successful social media innovations are no longer from Silicon Valley - but from China. And that's another cause for concern.