Is Omicron panic the beginning of the way we live now?
Perhaps this is what endemic COVID looks like: Occasional weeks or months of relative normalcy punctuated by sudden bursts of fear and panic, continuing on and on into the foreseeable future.
I don't want to be a doomsayer, but a little bit of pessimism feels warranted after the emergence of Omicron as a COVID "variant of concern" over the [post-Thanksgiving] weekend. The development shut down a chunk of international travel, sent markets tumbling, and generally threatened a widespread-but-fragile sense that maybe this time the worst of the pandemic was over, or almost so, for many of us. It was difficult to know whether to be terrified because of Omicron's many mutations that could render the virus impervious to our defenses, or hopeful that existing vaccines might prove effective against the new threat.
As always, separating good information from the bad proved to be a Herculean task--the flurry of online speculation quickly outraced the few facts we do have. There's so much that isn't known yet.
The thing we do know? Omicron is coming to the United States, if it hasn't already arrived.
"Inevitably, it will be here," infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said Nov. 28 on ABC's “This Week.” "The question is will we be prepared for it? If and when--and it's going to be when--it comes here, hopefully we will be ready for it."
Hopefully that's true, and Omicron won't turn out to be a Delta-style disaster. But even if the United States and the world somehow duck this particular bullet, the new variant makes a few things clear:
The federal government must, must, must become more nimbleThe announcement of Omicron's arrival came just a week after the Centers for Disease Control finally approved vaccine booster shots for all adults. Plenty of observers believe it should have happened sooner. "I think the confusing message around the boosters may end up being one of the biggest missed opportunities in this pandemic," Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner, said earlier [in November]. Indeed, Democratic governors like Jared Polis in Colorado and Laura Kelly in Kansas stopped waiting and approved boosters in their states even before the CDC action.
Vaccine makers Pfizer and BioNTech now say they could ship variant-specific vaccines within 100 days, if necessary. It might be necessary--but it's difficult to have faith that the CDC and FDA will move with all due speed. The pandemic is nearly two years old, but Americans still don't have access to the kind of quick-and-easy COVID tests available to Europeans, largely because of U.S. agencies' laborious approval process. That obviously needs to change.
Anti-vax Republicans should shut up and get out of the way.
Theoretically, lean-government conservatives ought to be great at streamlining cumbersome and outdated bureaucracies in order to keep Americans safe. That's not happening. Instead, Republican governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas have tried to block vaccine and mask mandates, while Fox News stars (and some Trumpist members of Congress) have spread conspiracy theories. That's why it was particularly galling last week when The Wall Street Journal--owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News--blamed President Biden for the rising COVID death toll.
Delete joke about man who killed father and mother asking for mercy on grounds he is an orphan. Insert joke about newspaper editorial that blames Joe Biden for not doing a better job countering the anti-vaccine propaganda spread by the newspaper's owners.--David Frum
It has always been the case that unvaccinated people risk not only their own health but also the well-being of their neighbors--in part because they serve as potential breeding grounds for COVID variants. It's probably not a coincidence that Omicron was first detected in South Africa, where barely more than a third of the population has received the jab. Every Tucker Carlson rant that encourages vaccine hesitancy makes the next deadly variant a bit more likely.
Worldwide vaccination efforts must be redoubled.
My colleague Ryan Cooper has been an insistent voice urging rich nations like the U.S. to ensure COVID vaccines reach poorer nations. "Obviously it's immoral to let people die by the millions because they live in places too impoverished or dysfunctional to obtain or distribute vaccines," he wrote in September. "But it's also bad for everyone because allowing the virus to circulate in the Global South risks new variants cropping up that could get around the vaccines and harm rich countries." It should now be clear that he is right.
President Biden said [on Nov. 26] that "the United States has already donated more vaccines to other countries than every other country combined." Clearly, that's not enough. Biden has also called on the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property rights on vaccines and other supplies so that poorer nations can scale up their efforts, but wealthy countries like the United Kingdom and European Union nations are opposed. Omicron should force a rethinking of those priorities.
Even if all those things happen, though, Omicron is yet another reminder that the new normal might not look like the old one. We're all eager to move on. "When can the COVID masks finally come off?" the New York Times asked earlier this month. Right now--and perhaps for a very long time to come--the answer is: "Not quite yet."
--Joel Mathis, The Week
Overloaded: Is there simply too much culture?
It's extremely difficult to keep up with a dizzying array of choices
There
was a moment, back in, oh, 2012, when I thought I’d be able to keep up with it
all. And by “it all," I meant all the good TV shows, all the good movies, all
the good music. From my tiny studio apartment in Austin, Tex., I would read
the Twitter feeds of the critics I loved, then consume what they told me to. I
caught obscure documentaries at one of the local theatres. I BitTorrented the
shows that fell under the ever-widening banner of “quality” television. Spotify meant that, for the
first time, I really could listen to the Top 100 albums of the year, as advised
by Pitchfork. I saw blockbusters on Friday nights in movie houses packed with
teenagers. I listened to Top 40 radio. I read the latest Pulitzer winners and
all four Twilight books. I was feasting, but not yet overfull.
Or, to
use a different metaphor: I was treading water in what I saw as a glorious and
expanding sea of media, such a contrast to the options of my rural youth, when
my choices were severely limited by the options at the video rental store,
extended cable and the one CD a month I could afford on babysitting money. Of
course, elements of my access were either illegal (BitTorrent) or paid the artist very little (Spotify).
But I also felt, very much like the 27-year-old I was, that I had finally
achieved a sort of comfortable fluency, the kind that allowed me to always
answer “Yes” when someone inevitably asked: “Have you seen/read/heard this?"
Soon,
the definition and number of television shows that felt essential--or
“quality” or part of the larger conversation--began to grow. It wasn’t enough
to have watched "The Wire" and "The Sopranos" and be caught up with "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad." There was "The Americans" and "The Good Wife," "Outlander" and "The Knick," "Game of Thrones" and "Homeland," "Broadchurch" and "Happy Valley," plus all the ongoing seasons of shows that
previously felt very important (see: "House of Cards") but increasingly felt like
a slog.
Maintaining
my fluency was getting harder and harder: I was a media studies professor who was
able to devote hours of my ostensible working day to the task of consuming
media. I was still falling far behind, and more so every day. In discussing my
struggle to metabolize what felt like a never-ending meal, I’m focusing on
television. But television was just part of the larger, overwhelming feast.
Around the time television options began to expand, so too did the supply
(and our access) to so many other forms of culture, from YouTube to digital
mixtapes.
In
2009, for example, 7 million people worldwide
were using Spotify, with its seemingly infinite musical access; by 2014, that
number had ballooned to
60 million. Also in 2009, the teen YouTuber known as “Fred” became the first to
have his channel hit one million subscribers. By 2014, a new YouTube channel
was reaching that milestone every day. By
2012, 10 hours of music and audio were being uploaded every minute to SoundCloud,
leapfrogging traditional production and distribution methods. In 2010, about 1,500 podcasts launched on
iTunes every month. By 2015, it was nearly 6,000. But something about the way
television consumption standards expanded made it seem more overwhelming.
Maybe
it had something to do with how hard it became to have a shared conversation
about a show: with my friends, who all seemed to be embarking down different
pathways; or with my students, who didn’t seem to be watching anything at all;
or even online, where the cherished art of the episode recap seemed less and
less useful. Part of this phenomenon could be blamed on Netflix, which in 2013
began its now standard practice of releasing the whole of a season at one
time. Another factor was the continued, slow-motion decline of media
monoculture, first set in motion with the spread of cable in the 1980s. Technology
made it easier to make more television and, through on-demand, for people to
watch more of it. Cue: 389 scripted television shows airing
in the US alone in 2014--compared with just 182 in 2002.
It was
around this time that critics started asking if we’d reached “peak TV”. From the Guardian, in
2015: “Four hundred shows and no time to watch them: is there too much TV on
television?” From the New York Times: “Is
there too much TV to choose from?” And from NPR: “Is
there really too much TV?” A survey commissioned
by Hub Entertainment Research found that 42% of viewers who watched at least
five hours a week thought there was too much television in 2014.
I’d watch two episodes of a show and bail, simply because I
didn’t want to be responsible for the entire season
But
that survey also found something fascinating: 81% of viewers reported that the
time they did spend watching television, they spent watching shows they really
liked. To anyone who grew up sharing a television with their family and
choosing from anywhere between three to 15 good options, this is a real change.
Instead of spending your Thursday night watching a rerun of a sitcom you never
really liked in the first place just to have something on before Friends
starts, you’re watching something you chose and, at least theoretically,
continue to choose.
There
are limits, however, to the pleasures of choice. When Hub Entertainment
Research asked the question again in 2017, only 73% responded that they were
spending their time watching shows they really liked--while the percentage of
people who felt that there was “too much television” went from 42% to 49%. The
survey didn’t ask respondents to dig into their reasoning, but maybe they were
feeling something similar to what I felt at that point: like half the things I
was watching, I was watching out of some odd completist tendency; and the other
half I was watching because it felt as if I “should”, particularly if I wanted
to continue to be part of some imagined online cultural conversation.
The
result was a mix of resentment and paralysis. I would watch two episodes of a
show and bail, simply because I didn’t want to commit to the entire season.
Wading through the streaming menus felt akin to babysitting hundreds of small
children, all of them clawing at me, desperate for my attention. Whenever I saw
a poster in the subway for yet another new show that I’d somehow never heard
of, I wanted to graffiti it. How dare these networks produce so many things, in
so many forms, with so many seasons! How dare they produce so much content!
Of
course, that sentiment was wholly irrational and entirely wrong. “Peak TV”
meant more television shows, but it also meant more shows directed at people
who weren’t me, also known as people who weren’t middle-class, straight white ladies. The
history of television is, in some ways, the history of executives figuring out
that people other than white people can spend. Black people spend money, for
example, and would you believe that gay people spend money, too?
I delight in music that comes to me the old -fashioned way:
by people I know telling me about it
But the
thing about Netflix is
that--unlike, say, a network--it wasn’t trying to attract a type of viewer
that it could then sell to an advertiser, because there were no advertisers.
Instead, Netflix was just trying to have enough content, catering to enough
interests, that it could convince as many people as possible that they should
continue to pay for its services every month. To make itself ever more valuable
to ever more people, Netflix began employing their massive datasets, gleaned
from the watch histories of millions of customers, to give flailing consumers a
way to stay afloat. When you logged on, instead of feeling overwhelmed, you
were supposed to feel comforted by the fact that the screen showed you what was
popular, and what other viewers like you were watching, and what you had been
watching. It was supposed to feel organized yet abundant; contained but
appealingly infinite.
Maybe
that’s how it felt to you. It’s certainly not how it felt to me. At the time, I
was burning out hard at my job, working myself into the ground in an attempt to
find the sort of stability I hadn’t really felt since that studio apartment in
Austin. Back then, I would finish my day of writing with a movie, or a couple
of hours of the latest show I’d torrented, or even live music. It felt like a
bookend, like an exhale, like an actual break. By 2017, all that media felt
like another item on my endless to-do list, as obligatory and joyless as
picking up the dry-cleaning.
So I
did what I’ve done when it comes to so many of the causes fueling a wider
sense of burnout: I lowered the bar, then I lowered it again. I have stopped
listening to most podcasts, save the ones that I really, really like. When I
watch TV, it’s a mix of things I actually enjoy and give me comfort, regardless
of coolness or quality ("Law & Order: Special Victims Unit"), shows that
reactivate the anticipation and glory of the weekly appointment watch
("Succession"), and shows I arrive at a week, a month or a year late. I detest
the Spotify algorithm, but delight in music that comes to me the old-fashioned
way: by people I know telling me about it. I crave the escape of a movie
theatre, and will come back to it soon--but I’ve also stopped feeling guilty
about a pandemic aversion to movies. That love and hunger will return. Feeling
bad about it won’t make it happen faster.
If
someone were to give me that survey, today, asking whether or not there’s too
much television, or even just too much media, I’d say no. I’m glad there’s so much
out there to press other people’s buttons, to prompt them to watch and rewatch,
to make them feel seen and celebrated. I hope there’s more weird and esoteric
and experimental stuff that challenges our understanding of what art can do,
and I hope there are more shows like "Ted Lasso" that remind us of our steady
craving for tenderness. I hope, in other words, that there’s more, even if that
more isn’t always for me.
--Anne
Helen Petersen, The Guardian
There are no more dog whistles
GOP now shouting its underhanded messages from the
rooftops
With Republican Glenn Youngkin successfully
turning the Virginia gubernatorial campaign into a referendum on whether White
students are being cruelly forced to think about racism, Democrat Terry
McAuliffe is charging that Youngkin is deploying that most underhanded of
rhetorical techniques, the “dog whistle.”
“He’s ending his campaign on a racist dog
whistle,” McAuliffe said on “Meet the Press,, just one of many times he
and his surrogates have made that allegation.
But here’s the reality: There are no
more dog whistles in American politics. And this race shows why.
Youngkin has no secret agenda here. He isn’t
using subtle hints to appeal to a subset of the electorate while everyone else
remains blissfully ignorant. We all know what he’s doing.
Let’s remind ourselves of the origins of the
term: Just as an actual dog whistle is heard by canines but imperceptible to
the human ear, political dog whistles are understood by one group of voters but
missed by everyone else. In the past, politicians used them when there was a
position they were taking, a promise they were making or an appeal they were
using that they wanted to keep hidden.
For instance, when George W. Bush was asked
in 2004 what kind of justices he would appoint to the Supreme Court and
he answered the kind who wouldn’t issue decisions like Dred
Scott, the 1857 case that ratified slavery, to most listeners it seemed like
just a weird non sequitur. Unless, that is, you were deeply immersed in
the world of antiabortion activists, who believe that Roe vs.
Wade was the moral equivalent of Dred Scott. By just mentioning the
latter, Bush was sending them a signal: I’ll give you the justices you want. I
just can’t say it out loud.
That was a dog whistle because the whole
point was that most people wouldn’t understand it. And it’s why Republicans use
dog whistles most often: Their positions on policy, such as
overturning Roe, tend to be less popular than those of Democrats, so they
find dog whistles more useful.
But dog whistles are a thing of the past, and
there are three reasons for that.
The first is that polarization has made base
mobilization a more appealing strategy than persuading voters in the middle--and
if you’re less concerned with persuading anyone, you’re also less worried about
alienating them. Mobilizing the base requires generating excitement. You don’t
generate excitement with subtlety; in fact, that’s the last thing the
Republican base wants.
The second reason is the Internet and the
explosion of political news and commentary, which make it nearly impossible to
send a hidden message to anyone that will not be immediately noticed, dissected
and decoded.
The third and most important reason is that
Republicans have transformed themselves, adopting Donald Trump’s political and
rhetorical style as their own.
This was one of Trump’s key insights about
Republican voters: They wanted to be loud and
unapologetic, especially when saying things that are unpopular or simply
offensive. And they want their politicians to be the same way.
In a previous era, a potentially suspect
candidate such as Mitt Romney, who had been a moderate governor of
Massachusetts before running for president in 2008 and 2012, would have to
demonstrate their ideological bona fides to the party base by hewing
emphatically to conservative policy positions. But the party no longer concerns
itself much with policy. Now you demonstrate your reliability as a conservative
by showing that you don’t care what liberals think of you.
Or more precisely, you
care deeply about what liberals think of you; it’s just that you want
them to loathe you, and the more they hate you, the more you’ve proved you’re a
real conservative.
Here’s another example, which some mistakenly
understand as a dog whistle when in fact it’s the opposite: The colorful
political/cultural artifact that is “Let’s go Brandon.” It began a month ago
when NASCAR driver Brandon Brown was being interviewed in front of a crowd that
began chanting “F--- Joe Biden!”; the interviewer, either mishearing or
sanitizing for TV, suggested they were chanting “Let’s go Brandon.”
It quickly became a
meme on the right, slapped on bumper stickers and T-shirts and repeated
endlessly by Republicans, even on the House floor. But while reporters
sometimes say the expression is “code for a vulgar insult at the president,” it
isn’t “code” at all.
The people saying it
aren’t trying to hide what they mean. They want everyone to know.
They think it’s clever and funny, but they aren’t trying to fool anyone.
Because of the speed of social media, the meaning of the phrase was hidden from
the broader audience for just a brief moment; the fact that it’s now widely
understood is precisely why it thrills the right-wing trolls who shout it.
That’s how Republicans
operate now, and they aren’t going back.
--Paul Waldman, Washington Post
Is our true-crime obsession doing more harm
than good?
Stories about real-life murders are
everywhere—and some think they’re rotting our brains
Take a look at the most popular podcasts or
the most-watched documentaries on Netflix, and you might notice a
pattern: A lot are about murder. Over the past few years, true crime--that once
niche genre of storytelling that spins real-life crimes into entertainment--has
become a national obsession.
But is all this true-crime content, and its
tendency to romanticize the art of the scam and to sensationalize grisly
murder, bad for us? Or does the genre shine a light on the horrors visited on
society’s vulnerable and the flaws of America’s criminal justice system?
These are some of the questions I asked when
I set out to find experts, enthusiasts and critics to debate with our
self-professed true-crime fanatic, Jane Coaston, on our latest episode of “The
Argument.” Here’s what they had to say.
The rise of true crime
In the American context, many point to Truman
Capote’s journalistically questionable “nonfiction novel” “In Cold Blood,”
as the origin of the modern true-crime era, and the hit 2014 podcast “Serial”
as the most proximate cause for the genre’s current boom. But historian Joy
Wiltenburg says the public has been fascinated by crime stories for
centuries.
Before the Enlightenment, many thought human
nature was inherently depraved and the most sinister threat was the devil
inside you, not an assailant around the corner. But there has long been a
thrill to witness morally transgressive behavior and a desire to protect
oneself from harm.
What distinguishes contemporary true crime is
its sheer ubiquity: Entire cable channels and an endless churn of
documentaries and podcasts tackle every angle and flavor of crime and criminal,
while social media offers fans a way to participate.
Consider the case of Gabrielle Petito, the
22-year-old who disappeared while on a road trip with her fiancé, prompting a
torrent of media coverage that rarely happens for the hundreds of
thousands of other people reported missing each year in the United States.
It became the latest social media whodunit as online armchair detectives tried
to solve the case themselves--and one may have ended up helping to locate
her remains.
Is all this attention to true crime rotting
our brains?
Writer and stabbing survivor Emma Berquist
thinks so. In a recent Gawker essay, Berquist argued that the genre makes
women--who research suggests account for the bulk of true crime’s audience--inappropriately
paranoid, comparing the way true crime primes aficionados for danger to how Fox
News raises “our grandparents’ blood pressure, keeping them in a perpetual
state of fear about roving gangs of MS-13.”
She points out that, with the exception of
the rise in murders since the Covid pandemic, major crime has been
steadily decreasing for decades. “Being in that state of sort of
hyper-awareness, especially right now when we’re already so divided and
distrustful of one another, I don’t think it’s healthy,” Berquist told me.
Berquist also fears that true crime’s
entertainment value obscures the harm it can do to real people by inspiring vigilantism,
citing Petito’s case: “I don’t think it’s a normal thing to comb through a
murder victim’s Instagram. That’s such a violation.”
And when fans feel deputized to solve crimes,
due process can become a secondary concern. With Petito, for example, the
court of public opinion started to convict her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, long
before the “true” story could be told by anyone who knew what happened.
“We’re a nation of crime experts now,” Jean
Murley, a true-crime scholar at Queensborough Community College, told The
New Yorker this month. After social media users rallied behind hashtags
inculpating Laundrie, he disappeared, and has since been found dead--the cause
inconclusive.
Critics of the genre also say it entrenches
the flaws of America’s criminal justice system. Even though men of color
are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, true crime retains an
outsize focus on violence against white women. Lindsey Webb, a criminal
defense lawyer and law professor, drew a line to that focus from older “danger narratives”
that used white female victimhood to cast people of color as inherently
criminal.
Today’s true-crime narratives have mostly
white male perpetrators, but Webb still sees them as buttressing the prison
system that expanded in the 1970s, and has since made the United States
the world leader in incarcerating its own population, with Black Americans
imprisoned at nearly five times the rates of whites.
“We can both see the power of the narrative
and get why this is compelling to listen to, and also say, ‘Wait a second, what
are we perpetuating here?’” Webb told me.
In defense of true crime
Like all genres of storytelling, there is
good and bad true crime. Culture critic Emily VanDerWerff held up Netflix’s
“Tiger King” as an example of the latter: “It’s very much like, ‘Oh hello,
here’s some people who live outside the socio-economic standard that we think
of in coastal America. Let’s gawk at the yokels,’” she told me. “I don’t know
how useful that is, how artistically satisfying or journalistically satisfying
that is.”
But the genre to which “Tiger King” belongs
also includes the “In the Dark” podcast, which investigates the failures of law
enforcement and miscarriages of justice. Nearly everyone I talked to praised it
as a paragon of the genre, both aesthetically and journalistically; VanDerWerff
called it “one of the best acts of journalism in the last 10 years.”
By shining a light on the criminal justice
system in this way, some argue true crime has powerful reformative
potential. “I think true crime has been a net positive for future
defendants or existing defendants because the system is getting a lot of
pressure because of what is being exposed,” Rabia Chaudry, an attorney and the
host of the true-crime podcast “Undisclosed,” said on “The Argument.” “What are
the laws that protect officers from accountability that basically make the
entire system opaque?”
That true crime appeals primarily to women is
one reason Chaudry says it’s unfairly tarred. “I always wonder is that the
reason we get the most criticism of this genre, like romance,” Chaudry said.
“Is it about the consumer and not about the content that’s really the target of
the criticism?”
Just as some true-crime stories could be
criticized for stoking paranoia, others could be praised for helping women to
live in a society that is still violently misogynistic. “Some people learn
how to protect themselves, situations to avoid,” Dawn Cecil, a professor of
criminology, told me. “For other people, it helps them deal with their trauma.”
Where does true crime go from here?
After the social unrest that followed George
Floyd’s murder, podcasts tried--sometimes clumsily--to confront the blind spots
of their brands and audiences “after years of telling stories largely about white
victims, based on uncritical accounts of police and prosecutors,” P.E.
Moskowitz, a writer and self-professed true-crime addict, wrote in Mother
Jones last year.
Moskowitz told me about the top charting
podcast “Crime Junkie”: “The two hosts who started much more, ‘Rah rah, the
cops always solve everything,’ now do entire episodes about how queer people
are completely overlooked by the justice system, or how people of color are
unfairly targeted by police, who let the real suspects get away.”
The sensationalism around Petito’s case also
spurred a conversation about “missing white women syndrome,” a term coined by
the journalist Gwen Ifill to describe the outsize media attention given in
particular to mainly younger, able-bodied White American women who disappear.
Elon Green, a writer who has explored “The
Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime,” sees “small shifts on the
margins” of the genre. “The fact that people are even asking these questions
and talking about Missing White Woman Syndrome is new,” Green said. “I think
it’s actually refreshing that people are questioning the nature of the racial
aspects of crime coverage.”
--Phoebe Lett, New York Times
The evils of Facebook
The social media giant is under intense
scrutiny. But can it be reined in?
Facebook--or Meta, as it has rebranded itself--is
an enormously wealthy and powerful company, with nearly 3 billion monthly
active users on its social media platforms and a market valuation of nearly $1
trillion. But these days it has few friends.
Over the past few weeks, the world has gotten
a glimpse inside Facebook and its all-powerful algorithm through a trove
of confidential internal documents spirited out of the company by a former
employee, Frances Haugen. Haugen gave the documents to the Securities and
Exchange Commission, then the Wall Street Journal, and now more than
a dozen major media companies around the world are sifting
through the Facebook Papers. Haugen has publicly aired Facebook's dirty
laundry on “60 Minutes” and in testimony before lawmakers in the
U.S. and Britain.
The gist of the revelations is that Facebook
is doing tremendous social and political harm around the world, has known this
in granular detail for years, has the tools to fix at least some of these
societal ills, and yet time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own
pledges, and numerous media exposés, the company didn't fix them, choosing
growth and profit over safety, the Journal reports.
Facebook strongly disputes this
characterization, arguing it has spent billions of dollars and hired 40,000
people to cull misinformation and harmful content off its platform. But
the continuing stream of documents from Haugen and other whistleblowers shows
that Facebook and its decisions are linked to body image problems
among girls, the viral spread of vaccine misinformation, human
trafficking, teen suicide, and increased rage, as well as brutal atrocities in
Myanmar, festering extremism in Afghanistan, political violence in India,
widespread abuse of domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates, and election
manipulation around the world.
Some of the problems at Facebook are shared
by other social media companies. But Facebook is the giant, and this time it
appears the public relations mess is so big, change is coming. But just how do
you solve a problem like Facebook?
1. Regulation
Governments may be the only entities large
and powerful enough to force Facebook to change, and since Facebook is an
American company, the U.S. government arguably has a unique responsibility to
act. Facebook now says it welcomes regulation--well, it wants Congress
"to begin to create standard rules for the internet"--and there is
bipartisan legislation that would require Facebook and other social media
platforms to warn users about the algorithms that control what
information they see, and allow them to opt out. Other proposals
would strip Facebook of some of the legal protections it has for
content hosted on its platforms.
Before Congress takes any meaningful action,
the European Union is expected to enact its Digital Services Act, which
would require social media companies to regularly assess risks on its
platforms, with outside monitoring, and fine them heavily if they don't comply.
Britain's Parliament is set to vote on an Online Safety Bill that would hang on
social media companies a duty of care to protect users from harmful content--not
just illegal content, as in the EU--though political ads, politicians, and
publishers are exempt.
2. Facebook, heal thyself
One of the biggest problems exposed in the
Facebook Papers is how its central algorithms feed users rage-inducing junk
content. The company has been reluctant to change this byway to fury and
radicalization, Haugen testified, because content that elicits an
emotional response keeps users more "engaged," meaning they spend
more time on Facebook and Instagram, and "they make more money." But
the leaked documents "are also full of thoughtful suggestions for how to
correct those flaws," Wired reports.
Most of those suggestions involve scrapping
Facebook's fixation on engagement and instead feeding users their
friends' posts in reverse chronological order, or ranking content based on
quality--like Google's PageRank search algorithm--or, as one Facebook
engineer suggested in late 2019, "optimize more precisely for good
experiences."
These suggestions have not been adopted,
but Facebook has some of the world's best experts on its payroll, Samidh
Chakrabarti, the former leader of Facebook's Civic Integrity team, argued
on Twitter, and it should restructure its chain of command so the data
scientists have more power to enact change, with their research made public
"on all matters of societal import."
3. Dismantle Facebook, depose Zuckerberg
Ultimately, "the problem with Facebook
is Facebook," says media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan. Dan Brahmy, an
Israeli social media and disinformation expert, argues that it's
unrealistic to expect a trillion-dollar company like Facebook to voluntarily
change such a lucrative engagement-driven business model.
And Politico chief technology correspondent Mark Scott
says "no likely law in the U.S. would deal with this underlying
issue" of Facebook prioritizing negative, viral content.
The Federal Trade Commission is pursuing
an antitrust case against Facebook that could potentially break up the
company, though at most it would likely split off Instagram and WhatsApp,
leaving the main social network intact. If banning Facebook is off the table,
"it's time for new leadership," former Facebook political advertising
monitor Yael Eisenstat told Time. Zuckerberg is "a king,
he's not a CEO," Eisenstat added. "He can't be fired. Normally
in a publicly traded company, the board can fire the CEO, or shareholders can
pressure the CEO to leave. But at Facebook, there's no pressure
mechanism."
4. Laissez le Facebook faire
Maybe the free market will solve the Facebook
problem. For all of Zuckerberg's power, he hasn't been able to reverse
Facebook's waning engagement and stagnating growth in the key U.S. and European
markets. "Worse, the company is losing the attention of its most important
demographic--teenagers and young people--with no clear path to gaining it
back," AP reports. "Unless Facebook can find a way to turn
this around, its population will continue to get older, and young people will
find even fewer reasons to sign on, threatening the monthly user figures that
are essential to selling ads," its financial lifeblood.
"Good luck with that," The
Week's Joel Mathis writes. "Whistleblower revelations may lead Congress to
regulate Facebook or even break up the company," he says. "But the
real threat to Facebook's power and influence in our lives might be all those
teens who think Snapchat is cooler."
5. Cut Facebook down to human scale
A tiny number of "super-inviters"
make up a disproportionate amount of Facebook's spammy
underbelly, Wired reports. Capping the number of invites and friend
requests users can send out would help Facebook tamp down on dangerous
movements before they go viral. Or maybe we need to think even bigger
about making Facebook smaller, Ian Bogost argues at The Atlantic.
After all, limiting social media is something we already accept--Twitter's 280
characters, or YouTube time limits--so "what if, for example, you could
post to Facebook only once a day, or week, or month?" Bogost
suggests. "Or what if, after an hour or a day, the post expired, Snapchat
style? Or, after a certain number of views, or when it reached a certain
geographic distance from its origins, it self-destructed? That wouldn't stop
bad actors from being bad, but it would reduce their ability to exude that
badness into the public sphere."
Facebook may resist the hit to its engagement
cash cow, but "such a constraint would be technically trivial to
implement" and it would be universal and politics-neutral, Bogost
writes. "Wouldn't it just be better if fewer people posted less stuff,
less frequently, and if smaller audiences saw it?"
Probably not for Facebook. But if the
Facebook Papers are accurate, humanity might well be better off.
--Peter Weber, The Week
