In Facebook We Trust?
That's the billion dollar question, isn't it? Facebook, the only social network that matters big, is everywhere and is busy finding newer ways to suck you into its ecosystem and get you stay on it. In theory and practice, there's inherently nothing wrong with this sort of ecosystem lock-in (unless antitrust concerns come knocking their door!). That's what Google does. That's what Microsoft does. Amazon. And of course (in)famously, Apple. Without keeping you hooked to their platforms, there's absolutely no incentive for these aforementioned tech giants to boost their profit margins, whether be it through targeted advertising based on the information you share (like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft to some extent), or by selling shiny new gadgets that come consciously pre-loaded with an ecosystem of apps that lock you into them (Apple iPhone, Google Nexus, Microsoft Surface Book and Amazon Kindle).
That's not all. Think about from an end user perspective. Which is me, you and just about everyone who gets entangled in these ecosystem wars. It's also about convenience. If my primary email was Gmail, my cloud service Google Drive, my chat service Hangouts, my music and video streaming service Google Play Music and YouTube, my document editor Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, my calendar Google Calendar, my browser Chrome, my note taking app Google Keep, and my navigation service Google Maps and Waze (I can go on, drawing similar parallels with Apple and Microsoft, but you get the idea), the tight integration not only makes moving between my smartphone (Android or iOS) and the web (or desktop) easier, but would also make moving between platforms a lot more harder, thus persuasively trapping me in the Googleverse.
Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, in someways are doing the same thing, but by slyly adopting a Trojan horse approach to delivering their services via the software platforms maintained by Google (Android) and Apple (iOS). Furthermore Facebook and Microsoft, through their respective newly launched chatbot frameworks, and Amazon, through its Alexa intelligent assistant, are aiming for a whole new world devoid of apps (incidentally popularised by Apple and later Google through the concept of app stores), where we interact, as in chat, with our favourite services to order pizza, buy flowers, pay bills, book tickets, shop clothes and just about anything we can think of. Once again it's super-convenient, and all I need is Facebook Messenger or Microsoft Skype (or Kik Messenger or Telegram) to be installed on my phone or tablet.
Whether this burgeoning bot revolution will rethink the way we interact on the web or not, Facebook has a bigger problem at store. Maintaining objectivity. With the social network becoming the primary source of news for millions of people across the world, today's report from Gizmodo about how contract workers actively censor news stories from conservative publications despite organically (aka algorithmically) trending amongst the site's users should serve as a note of caution. "Several former Facebook "news curators," as they were known internally, also told ... that they were instructed to artificially "inject" selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren't popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren't trending at all," the report goes on to add.
Even more interestingly, these new allegations come weeks after a similar Gizmodo report which shared a screenshot of an internal poll (see above) on what questions they would like to ask CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an upcoming Q&A session. One of the questions polled was "What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?" Which effectively raises troubling questions about how Facebook can objectively handle news. As individuals we all have our biases and prejudices, but is letting those tendencies dictate, skew and override a company's algorithm (and by extension its editorial and moral values) the right way? Has Facebook, with its unprecedented power to influence what millions of users can see, grown too powerful that it can use that influence to sway public opinion?
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| Facebook Q&A (Gizmodo) |
Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, in someways are doing the same thing, but by slyly adopting a Trojan horse approach to delivering their services via the software platforms maintained by Google (Android) and Apple (iOS). Furthermore Facebook and Microsoft, through their respective newly launched chatbot frameworks, and Amazon, through its Alexa intelligent assistant, are aiming for a whole new world devoid of apps (incidentally popularised by Apple and later Google through the concept of app stores), where we interact, as in chat, with our favourite services to order pizza, buy flowers, pay bills, book tickets, shop clothes and just about anything we can think of. Once again it's super-convenient, and all I need is Facebook Messenger or Microsoft Skype (or Kik Messenger or Telegram) to be installed on my phone or tablet.
Whether this burgeoning bot revolution will rethink the way we interact on the web or not, Facebook has a bigger problem at store. Maintaining objectivity. With the social network becoming the primary source of news for millions of people across the world, today's report from Gizmodo about how contract workers actively censor news stories from conservative publications despite organically (aka algorithmically) trending amongst the site's users should serve as a note of caution. "Several former Facebook "news curators," as they were known internally, also told ... that they were instructed to artificially "inject" selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren't popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren't trending at all," the report goes on to add.
Even more interestingly, these new allegations come weeks after a similar Gizmodo report which shared a screenshot of an internal poll (see above) on what questions they would like to ask CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an upcoming Q&A session. One of the questions polled was "What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?" Which effectively raises troubling questions about how Facebook can objectively handle news. As individuals we all have our biases and prejudices, but is letting those tendencies dictate, skew and override a company's algorithm (and by extension its editorial and moral values) the right way? Has Facebook, with its unprecedented power to influence what millions of users can see, grown too powerful that it can use that influence to sway public opinion?
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