Facebook Wants to Fix Itself Here's a Better Solution
0Facebook Wants to Fix Itself. Here's a Better Solution..
Chalk it up to a New Year’s Resolution or maybe just the ongoing fallout from Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is looking to do things a little differently this year. At the beginning of January he posted that his goal for 2018 is to “focus on fixing… important issues” facing his company, referring to election interference as well as the issues of abusive content and addictive design.
Sandy Parakilas (@mixblendr) is an entrepreneur and worked at Facebook in 2011 and 2012.
Unfortunately, it will be very difficult for Facebook or other technology platforms to fix these problems themselves. Their business models push them to focus on user and engagement growth at the expense of user protection. I’ve seen this firsthand: I led the team in charge of policy and privacy issues on Facebook’s developer platform in 2011 and 2012. And in mid-2012, I drew up a map of data vulnerabilities facing the company and its users. I included a list of bad actors who could abuse Facebook’s data for nefarious ends, and included foreign governments as one possible category.
I shared the document with senior executives, but the company didn’t prioritize building features to solve the problem. As someone working on user protection, it was difficult to get any engineering resources assigned to build or even maintain critical features, while the growth and ads teams were showered with engineers. Those teams were working on the things the company cared about: getting more users and making more money.