#Zuckerberg due to appear before the Senate Committee in a couple of hours - so here’s a short thread about what (I think) matters.
Obviously there will be the usual bluster & politicking - with committee members desperate to show they’re representing public concern about data etc. You can count a lot of that as background music.
My view is that this isn’t about evil capitalists, rapacious businesses etc., but a rather a much wider tension between our ad-based social media & democracy. (See my forthcoming book:
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I.e. democracy needs a shared reality, attentive citizens, an impulse toward comprise - ad-based social media runs against that. I don’t actually blame Zuck for that.
There are however important questions to answer. I’d like Zuck to explain exactly how many people they think has had their public Facebook data scooped up by ‘malicious actors’. (Potentially all of them, according to a company blog!)
And whether they have designed their services to be as addictive as possible - and if so, what exactly they plan to do to change that (he says he wants ‘meaningful interactions’) given their business model thrives on planted eyeballs.
And whether they will continue to second staff into political campaigns, as I showed in my @bbctwo documentary that they did with Trump.
And finally, the bigger question: how can they stop this happening again, when the business model is about data. Would they for example, consider charging for services if users could opt out of data collection? Anyway: get the 🍿. Should be fascinating.
