Thread by @doctorow

Facebook has just entered antitrust hell, as nearly every US state and the federal government have taken the giant company to court, asserting that the company used predatory acquisitions to achieve its monopoly.

pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/bor…

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But while we definitely need to pay close attention to the company's acquisitions, it's also worthwhile to look at the parts of its business it outsources - parts of the business that are key the safety of its users and its compliance with the law.

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A new, engrossing, lengthy @BuzzFeed article by @CraigSilverman lays out a detailed case that Facebook systematically profits from disinformation: financial fraud, identity theft, dangerous scam products, and political disinformation.

buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…

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Now, Facebook is HUGE, which means that it can't possibly perfectly police its sprawling self-serve ad platform, but what Silverman documents isn't cases that slip through the cracks: it's a deliberately constructed system designed to maximize profits from scam ads.

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(And of course, no one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets reading THOU SHALT OPERATE A SELF-SERVE AD MARKET AT A SCALE THAT PRECLUDES POLICING THOSE ADS)

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Silverman's reporting reveals the role that outsourcing plays in Facebook's ad negligence: the company hires third parties like Accenture, who, in turn, hire low-waged subcontractors to monitor its ads for ripoffs and disinformation.

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This means that FB's moderation all takes place through multiple layers of indirection, so when an Accenture manager tells their subs to leave up ads bought by hacked accounts and FB can proclaim its innocence.

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We don't get to look at the terms of the Accenture-FB deal to see whether FB provides incentives to tolerate fraud. We don't get to know whether moderators are being told to tolerate scams from China and Russia because FB wants the business or because Accenture went rogue.

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So, back to antitrust. Facebook says that there's nothing wrong with buying up all the businesses that are adjacent to its core business - that acquiring everything from Whatsapp and Instagram to Oculus and Giphy produces "efficiencies" that benefit FB users.

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But when you look at the parts of its business that it DOESN'T try to own, a different story emerges: FB's in-house divisions are the ones that generate lock-in and prevent competition; it outsources the parts that create negative externalities - that harm the rest of us.

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In so doing, the company maintains two completely contradictory (and nakedly self-serving) positions: first, that it is a fantastic administrator that efficiently manages multiple, disparate businesses under a single roof, to the benefit of its customers and shareholders.

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But ALSO, Facebook's position is that essential business functions - like preventing repeat-offender predators from destroying the lives of its users - are literally impossible for it to integrate into its core business and has to be outsourced to specialists like Accenture.

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This isn't a new phenomenon. Facebook has sustained global legal and reputational risks for the rampant paid fraud and disinformation its ad-targeting system enables. With every scandal, Facebook's crisis communications consisted of solemn promises to do better.

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Inevitably, these promises are broken, and when they are, FB insists that it's just as shocked and disappointed as we are and swears it will launch a full investigation to prevent any more such lapses. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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But it's actually worse than that. FB's paid disinformation scandals are just the problems that are so widespread they come to public attention - the tip of the paid disinfo iceberg. There's so much more that we don't ever learn about.

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That's because FB doesn't want us to learn about it. #AdObserver is a project at NYU's Engineering school: it recruits FB users to run a plugin that makes copies of the ads FB shows them and then uploads them to a repository called #AdObservatory.

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This, in turn, gets mined by academics, researchers and accountability journalists to discover and document FB's failures to live up to its own standards for fighting paid disinformation.

Naturally, FB threatened to sue them.

pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sov…

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FB says it has to sue Ad Observer to protect its users' privacy (no, really), but FB's highly selective concern for its users' safety has an obvious pattern: the company protects users only when it is protecting its own ass; the rest of the time, it literally sells them out.

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There've been reports that FB is dropping its legal threats against Ad Observer, but that's not quite true:

vice.com/en/article/n7v…

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This morning, I heard from someone at the Mozilla Foundation who's working with the Ad Observer group who told me that FB has not even scheduled a meeting with the team, let alone informed them that it is rescinding its legal threat.

eof/