Bit Tyrants by Rob Larson

Author:Rob Larson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Disgracebook

The trivial network that moves the world

Many of us roll our eyes at the mention of Facebook, probably in response to the trivial nature of our friends’ pointless posts, weird phony links, hyper-partisan bickering, and wonderful cat videos. But Facebook is the fifth-largest company in the world, after the other four tech giants dissected in this book, and it’s a hugely important platform for many people. About 45 percent of Americans get news through it, and in large swaths of the developing world it’s synonymous with the Internet itself. In June 2017 the US Supreme Court ruled that the government can’t entirely ban even sex offenders from using social media like Facebook, since so much of society’s politics and business is conducted there.1

Indeed, Facebook’s colossal 2.1 billion user base is such a perfect example of network effects that it’s literally a textbook case, picked by economics professors to illustrate the increased value of network services as more people use them.2 Like the other tech giants we’ve reviewed, Facebook has its own disgraceful history of network monopoly and aggressive market power–mongering, and it has shown an enduring, cartoonishly casual treatment of two billion people’s data. Some of its botches are finally weighing on the company, but as we’ll see, the smart money is on Facebook’s locked-in users staying put.

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