Zucked summary

Now you know a little bit about Facebook. But how well does Facebook know you?

Facebook holds up to 29,000 data points on each of its users. That’s 29,000 little things it knows about your life, from the fact that you like cat videos to whom you’ve been socializing with recently.

For social media platforms, time is money. Specifically, your time is their money. Because the longer you spend on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, and the more attention you give them, the more advertising they can sell.

As a result, capturing and keeping your attention is at the heart of Facebook’s commercial success. The business has gotten better than anyone else at getting inside your brain.

Every second you browse Facebook, you are feeding data into its filtering algorithm. And the result is a filter bubble, as Facebook filters out content that it thinks you won’t like, and filters in content that you are more likely to read, like and share.

Eli Pariser, president of the campaigning organization MoveOn, was one of the first to publicize the effect of filter bubbles, in a 2011 Ted Talk. Pariser noticed that, although his Facebook friends list was pretty evenly balanced between conservatives and liberals, there was nothing neutral about his newsfeed. His tendency to like, share or click on liberal content was leading Facebook to give him more of what it thought he wanted, until he never saw any conservative content at all.

Do you really know where the content you read on Facebook comes from? If you were in the United States in 2016, it’s very likely that you read, and maybe even shared, Facebook content that originated with Russian trolls.

Despite mounting evidence, Facebook denied that Russia had used the platform until, in September 2017, it admitted that it had discovered advertising spending of around $100,000 by Russian-hosted fake accounts. Facebook would later reveal that Russian interference had reached 126 million users on the platform, and another 20 million on Instagram. Given that 137 million people voted in the election, it’s hard not to believe that Russian interference had some impact.

In 2011, Facebook entered into an agreement with the American consumer protection body and regulator, the Federal Trade Commission, that barred Facebook from deceptive data privacy practices. Under the decree, Facebook needed to get explicit, informed consent from users before it could share their data. But the sad reality is that Facebook did nothing of the kind.

In March 2018, a story broke that tied Facebook’s political impact to its disregard for user privacy. Cambridge Analytica, a company providing data analytics to Donald Trump’s election campaign, had harvested and misappropriated almost fifty million Facebook user profiles.

As the Russian interference and Cambridge Analytica scandals have shown, Facebook has not taken the need to regulate its own behavior seriously enough. Perhaps, then, the time has come to think about external regulation.

One aspect of this should be economic regulation designed to weaken the overall market power held by Facebook and other tech giants, just like the kind of regulation applied in the past to giants like Microsoft and IBM. One reason Facebook is so powerful is because it has used its financial weight simply to buy up competitors, like Instagram and WhatsApp.