"(T)o say that the individual is culturally constituted has become a truism. . . . We assume, almost without question, that a self belongs to a specific cultural world much as it speaks a native language." James Clifford
Rowan Williams, formerly Archbishop
of Canterbury, spoke out repeatedly on the innate social nature of human
beings. Before we can talk, we are talked to. Social interaction is firmly
rooted in human nature as well as how we are constituted in groups and societies.
Whereas Williams called for more compassion to emerge out of our social nature,
a political realist might point out that we don’t have to look very closely to
find a power-dynamic existing in practically any group. Nietzsche argues in Genealogy
of Morals that exploitation naturally exists in how we as a social species are
constituted because the will for power is the strongest human instinct. This
motive can operate stealthily as compassion and even altruism. The Jansenist
priest, Pierre Nicole, wrote an essay in 1677 to point out that what we moderns
call enlightened self-interest is nonetheless rooted in self-love even when it
is extended in acts of compassion that appear to spring solely from
other-regard. On August 26, 2026, a landmark settlement was announced to end a
trial in which 47 U.S. member states sued Meta, which owns and operates
Facebook. Regardless of whether Meta executives agreed to pay $17 billion just
to get rid of the bad publicity or because the accusations were true, the
dollar figure alone suggests that Facebook’s management had indeed been intending
to manipulate children by addicting them to feeds. In other words, the company had been short on
compassion even under the rubric of social media. Nietzsche would not have
been at all surprised at such power being played to extract value from human
beings under stealth.
Speaking on the settlement,
Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said, “For years, Meta intentionally deceived
the public about the addictive and harmful design features that have wreaked
havoc on youth mental health.”[1]
The design features, such as unlimited “scrolling” and “likes,” were intentionally
put in place to addict kids; that did not come about as an unintended by-product.
Although Meta was not required to admit guilt formally, it is reasonable to
assume that a business would pay such a hefty penalty as $17 billion were there
not something to the case against the company in terms of evidence even of
intent. So besides protecting “children from online harm,”[2]
the settlement has value societally in exposing the intent to addict at the
detriment of even children. The operative perspective at Facebook was likely
one oriented to viewing humans for our use-value alone.
It is no accident that extracting
use-value from human beings was part of a secret seminar at Stanford University.
Also in 2026, Theo Baker, a student at Stanford, publicly exposed the seminar,
which was being taught by Justin Lewis-Weber, a CEO in Silicon Valley. In his
book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University,
Baker reports that the course explicitly taught students how to extract value
from people. Gaining utility from people without regard to how they are
impacted, whether mentally or physically, stems from self-love manifesting
narrowly as selfishness even if under the subterfuge of helping children to be
more social with their peers. In other words, the students were learning manipulation
tactics that could be used under the subterfuge of altruism. Phoebe Gates, founder
of Phia, used the course to recruit employees. In 2026, wire fraud charges were
filed against that company.
The upshot from all this is
that the public (and elected representatives) knew very little of the sordid mentality
underlying Meta’s corporate culture; even just from the $17 billion settlement
we can only infer guilt because why else would a company agree to settle
at such a cost? Many years earlier, Facebook had been found to have sold user-information
to Cambridge Analytic, a political organization, but that was treated as a “one
off” rather than as indicative of the way Facebook executives actually did
business—and Facebook (or Meta) is a business; it is not social even though its
industry is social media.
In terms of business ethics, intentionally
or even unintentionally but continuing to addict young users of Facebook
and Instagram violates Kant’s “kingdom of ends,” wherein rational beings are
(ethically) to be treated not just as means (to one’s own self-interest), but
also as ends in themselves. It is by the use of reason, Kant argues, that we
assign value to things, so reason itself must have absolute value. A being that
has reason thus has absolute value and should not be used merely as a
means. This does not exclude using other people for one’s own ends, but
this should not be the end of the matter, for other people should also be
treated as ends in themselves. Addicting kids does not fall under “ends in
themselves,” and so Meta can be held to have acted unethically. As much as
business ethics focuses on ethical decision-making, ethical theories provide
the real grist for the mill. Furthermore, the continuing negative impact of
corporate culture is very relevant, as the case of Enron illustrates (e.g., “burn
baby burn.”).Even a highly squalid
(ethically speaking) corporate way of doing business can be hidden from the
public and regulators, and managers can dismiss ethical concerns very easily. So
as in the case of Facebook (Meta), an episodic approach is typically assumed by
external stakeholders; connecting the dots would take more effort and insight
into the way corporate decisions are really being made.
Finally, we can pause for a moment
to glance at the sheer pathos of distance that exists between Williams’ claim
that the inherently social human nature can easily afford being more
compassionate and the selfish addicting of kids at Facebook. Religion and
business management seem to be disparate domains, and the easy compartmentalization
by business managers who identify themselves as Christian renders the
separation all too ubiquitous. The distinctively Christian divine command of love
as universal benevolence, especially to outsiders and even enemies as selfless
(or self-in-abeyance) compassion, runs counter to the firm-centric perspective and
profit-centric rubric in business. The contrast is so distinct, even severe,
that it is no surprise that business practitioners who self-identify as Christian
have resorted to compartmentalizing their work from even themselves as human
beings. The statement, “I’m a manager,” supports the construction of a “manager
compartment,” but look at the underlying assumption: that a person’s essence is
solely a matter of one’s functionality. It is easy to extend from this
perspective to viewing social-media users solely in terms of their
functionality, and thus use-value, as if value is a function of use.
According to The New York Times at the end of 2018, internal documents generated at
Facebook in 2017 showed that the company “gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify, and
others far greater access to people’s data” even after having raised a privacy
wall than Facebook had disclosed.[1] That is, Facebook
effectively exempted some of its business partners from the company’s privacy
rules without notifying users. In
many quarters, this would be called lying, which in turn would suggest a sordid
management at Facebook. The more subtle astonishment, I submit, is that 2.2
billion users had stayed with Facebook after the hidden use of personal data
for political purposes. The partnership between Facebook and Cambridge
Analytica had hardly been made in heaven. Why such enduring trust in spite of
external data being clear grounds for losing trust and giving up using
Facebook? How many betrayals would be necessary? In literal marriages, trust
can be lost “like that!” Similarly, when a child even unconsciously loses trust
for her parents, the solid basis of trust in a normal parent-child relationship
is lost most likely forever. Why has Facebook—a distant business punctuated by
lies—get a pass?
The
newspaper’s valuable discovery offered the fullest picture yet of the wide
extent, or scale, to which personal data was traded through at least 2018 “by
some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.”[2] In fact, The New York Times
points in its investigative reporting to the “extraordinary power over the
personal information of its 2.2 billion users—control it has wielded with
little transparency or outside oversight.”[3] The lack of transparency
should be a giant red flag concerning the unethical climate at Facebook’s “upper”
management levels. Betrayal drips off the screen in Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to
allow “Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all
Facebook users’ friends without consent” and give “Netflix and Spotify the
ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”[4] Facebook also “permitted
Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends,
and [Facebook] let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts . . . despite public statements that[Facebook] had stopped that kind of
sharing years earlier.”[5] Specifically, in the wake
of revelations (not from Facebook!) that the company had allowed a political consulting
firm, Cambridge Analytica, to use user data to help Donald Trump’s 2016
presidential campaign, Zuckerberg publicly claimed that his company was
instituting stricter privacy protections for users. Therein lies a lie, for he
said nothing about permitting gaping exemptions.
Even
so, how many of Facebook’s users left because of the Cambridge Analytica
scandal? Astonishing, or maybe not!, because
over two billion users remained, which implies that plenty of users behaved as herd animals, going on as
usual in spite of having reason to delete their accounts. Many of the users must have sensed, even if unconsciously, that their trust in Facebook
no longer had a viable foundation (i.e., a basis in fact). With the subsequent revelations
of the New York Times detailed here, would what was by that point a squalid track record
register in the minds of the 2.2 billion users? If not, a gap would still exist between users including personal information and pictures and trust that Facebook would not betray those users yet again. In a perfect market, viable competitors to Facebook would exist and consumers would--especially given the low barriers to entry--readily switch over. Perhaps Facebook's practice of buying up potential competitors early (and for a lot of money) had rendered the market oligarchical. Yet even this would not explain why the status quo had been favoring Facebook rather than the naive, oblivious, or neutral users. I submit that this case represents a market failure from the standpoint of competitive, free-market Capitalism. Lest it be assumed that the U.S. Government would increase oversight on Facebook (and other social-media companies), would any action really come
from government (including regulatory oversight) even as wealthy
mega-companies like Facebook (and its “partners”!) could doubtlessly make very
substantial political campaign contributions? Given this conflict of interest,
at least in the U.S., relying on the users to protect themselves seems naive. On this problem, I submit that the explanation lies in psychology. Are human beings--or most humans--too prone to act on an instinctual urge to act as herd animals rather than as trend-setting individuals? Nietzsche thought so, and he argues in his books that such people are herdish because they are weak. Can 2.2 billion people be weak, or is the problem external, such as a dearth of information or simply a calculation that what comes free in a Facebook account is worth more than the company's betrayals?
Why did Mark Zuckerberg unload $2.3 billion of his Facebook stock? The complete answer likely involves more than meets the eye, at least relative to what business reporters and editors had to say publicly in 2013. What was not said is itself a story worth publishing. Beyond Zuckerberg’s stratagem, what the media didn't say might be more significant than what made it through the filters. Part of the answer concerning Zuckerberg’s sell-off involves his need for cash at the time to pay taxes that would be due from his exercising an option to purchase 60 million Class B shares in 2013. This move likely implies a belief that Facebook stock would not go much higher. Had Zuckerberg strongly believed at the time that Facebook was yet to cash in on advertising revenue beyond that which the market had already factored into the company’s stock price, the CEO would not have exercised the options in expectation of a wider spread. Even with the taxes coming due, the billionaire could probably have found an alternative way to come up with the cash. Like a deer frozen in an oncoming car’s headlights, the media did not analyze Zuckerberg’s motives beyond his public statements. Instead, the herd animals let themselves be led along, prancing in the tracks of positive correlation, which is does not in itself connote causation. That two things tend to occur together does not necessarily mean that one caused the other to act some way. For instance, we see umbrellas on rainy days. This does not mean that umbrellas cause rain, or that rain rather than manufacturing causes umbrellas. To assume causation from two things tending to occur at the same time is to commit what David Hume calls the naturalistic fallacy. So the media’s report that Zuckerberg’s stock sale and exercise came as the CEO was donating $1 billion worth of shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to “boost his philanthropic efforts in education,” and Facebook was selling 27 million shares to raise an expected $1.46 billion for general purposes all count only as positive correlation; causation cannot be assumed.[1] In other words, we cannot conclude that Zuckerberg decided to sell off a chunk of his stock and exercise an option because he had decided to donate some stock and Facebook was raising more capital. In other words, the additional information conveniently provided does not get us any closer to a full answer. Worse still, Zuckerberg and his PR staff might have been throwing the media a tantalizing, diverting bone. This would have been in keeping with claims that Facebook's management was unethical. One reporter took the bait, writing that with cash and marketable securities of $9.3 billion as of September 30, 2013, Facebook may not have needed another $1.46 billion.[2] Off reporter’s radar screen was the possibility that Zuckerberg had designed his philanthropy and the company’s additional stock offering as luring camouflage that would use even criticism of his company to keep the eye off his own trades and especially what they imply about his view of the company’s future. That shares of Facebook dropped only 1% to $55.05 in trading on the news suggests that investors were swallowing what Zuckerberg and the media were serving as dessert. What of the market insiders? Were they also biting? As John Shinal puts it, “More important, insiders have detailed knowledge of a public company’s near-term prospects and thus are in a better position to know when to sell.”[3] I suspect that “people in the know” may have connected the dots. Two months earlier, a poll revealed that as the most important social media site for teenagers, Facebook fell from 42% in the autumn of 2012 to 23% a year later.[4] Can we suppose this poll somehow missed Zuckerberg’s attention? The media certainly did not connect the dots. The theory behind my analysis is not financial; rather, I consider Mintzberg’s theory of the organizational life-cycle to be more revealing in this particular case. The theory suggests that just as empires rise and fall, so too do companies. Once past their peak, a “hardening of the arteries” sets in.
The organizational lifecycle. When Zuckerberg decided to sell a block of shares and exercise options, he already had a picture of Facebook already on the downward slope without much chance of revitalization. Image Source: www.sourcingideas.blogspot.com
The aging (i.e., a decreasing willingness or ability to adapt to a changing environment, and increasing dead weight internally) can be delayed as the downward slope bides its time; but like entropy as a final destination, the end is inevitable for humans and our organizational artifices. I suspect that Zuckerberg had come to view his company as past its prime, given the leading indicator shown in the poll. If I am right, the game has already changed to keeping the illusion alive long enough for the Facebook insiders to get out under the black shimmering cover of the Styx.
Sources: 1. Scott Martin, “Zuckerberg’s in Mood to Sell,” USA Today, December 20, 2013; John Shinal, “Facebook Shares May Underperform,” USA Today, December 20, 2013.
2. John Shinal, “Facebook Shares May Underperform,” USA Today, December 20, 2013.
3.Ibid.
4. Bianca Bosker, “Facebook’s Rapidly Declining Popularity with Teens in 1 Chart,” The Huffington Post, October 23, 2013.
Cambridge Analytica, political data firm founded by Stephen
Bannon and Robert Mercer, and with ties to U.S. President Trump’s 2016 campaign,
“was able to harvest private information from more than 50 million Facebook
profiles without the social network’s alerting users.”[1]
The firm had purchased the data from a developer (a psychology professor at
Cambridge University in the E.U.) who had developed a personality test that
Facebook users could take, and whose purpose was supposedly academic. The developer
violated Facebook’s policy on how user data could be used by third parties. The
data firm “used the Facebook data to develop methods that [the firm] claimed
could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence
their behavior.”[2]
In other words, Cambridge Analytica used the purchased data to manipulate users
to vote for Donald Trump for U.S. president in 2016 by sending pro-Trump messages.
Although Facebook had not known of the sale of the data to Cambridge Analytica
at the time, the social network, upon learning Cambridge Analytica’s political use
of the data in 2015, failed to notify its users whose data had been
compromised. Although 270,000 Facebook users took the developer’s personality
test, “the data of some 50 million users
. . . was harvested without their explicit consent via their friend networks.”[3]
It bears noting here that those of the 50 million users who had not taken the
personality test should definitely have been informed. At the very least,
Facebook’s management could not be trusted to not only keep users informed, but also protect users in
the first place by adequately enforcing the third-party-use policy. So it is
ironic that Facebook’s untrustworthy management
could be unduly distrustful of
ordinary users.
The psychological-political mixture in Cambridge Analytica’s
use of the data is downright creepy. Tapping into a psychology professor’s
methodology for inferring personality from data on a social network platform so
to be able to send politically manipulative advertising to certain Facebook
users is highly invasive, even for the
users who voluntarily took the professor’s personality test online. Regardless
of party affiliation, a reaction of disapprobation to such an over-reach could
be expected; hence the operation was stealth—which is why Facebook’s management
erred so in failing to inform the 50 million users. Facebook’s stock deserved
to fall when the story finally did break in March, 2018.
It is odd that Facebook’s management even permitted the developer,
the psychology professor who went on to sell the data to Cambridge Analytica,
to obtain the data in the first place to develop personality constructs for
academic purposes. It is also odd that Facebook’s management had been so naïve
concerning a political data firm, and yet so demanding of individual users who
displayed no cause for suspicion. Facebook suspended an account I set up
because I had sent a link to one of my academic articles to some scholars I knew. I deleted the account. A few
years later, I tried again. That time, Facebook demanded that I upload a clear facial picture of myself so I
could be identified. Apparently my phone number and email address were not
sufficient, even though I had not yet even used the account and thus could not
have violated any of the company’s use-policies. I deleted that account rather
than supply a picture of myself because I was concerned how the facial
recognition software would be used, especially when combined with other basic
information I had included in the profile. It turns out I had reason to be
concerned, for even if my personality had not been construed and I had not been subject to political manipulation psychologically, the fact that Facebook
let a political firm in the door means that other harvesting could have been
going on. Furthermore, even if Facebook discovered other extractions, I could
not trust that the company would have informed me.
It is telling, in short, that a company so distrustful demanded that I upload a picture of my
face so I could be identified—as if I were distrustful. I suspect that the
managers and their employees were projecting their own distrustfulness onto
innocent users, while giving firms like Cambridge Analytica a free hand. In
other words, the folks at Facebook were very bad at determining who is trustworthy.
The lesson here is that Facebook was not worthy of its users’ trust, and yet
strangely the users did not bolt en mass.
It could be that people in modern society had become so used to being
distrusted by people working in organizations and to interacting with
distrustful companies that the Facebook revelation was a mere blimp on the
radar screen.
The philosopher Kant reasoned that promise-making is only
valid in a context in which promises tend to be kept; otherwise, promises would
simply be dismissed as worthless dribble. If large companies only keep their
promises when doing so is convenient to them, such a context could recalibrate
just how much worth promise-making justifiably deserves. If so, the business
world itself could contribute to a society in which distrust rather than trust
is the norm. When I lived in Tucson, Arizona, I experienced such a society. I
could feel not only the angst in the air, but also the passive aggression in
the distrust itself. Besides the police-state being “beyond the pale” even
on the local university’s campus, the guarded watchfulness that was (and
surely is still) practiced between strangers on the city streets (as well as
between bus drivers and riders) included an inherent aggressiveness. Likewise,
Facebook’s refusal to notify users of the “harvesting” and Facebook’s demand that I furnish a photo of my face
involved passive aggression—which is inherent in unjustified disrespect. Are companies like Facebook unwittingly
turning modern society into Tucsons? If so, the link between distrust and
aggression should be made transparent so people can at least be aware of the
change.
Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla
Chan, announced in September, 2016, that they would invest more than $3 billion
during the next decade to build tools that can facilitate medical research on
diseases. The first outlay of funds ($600 million) would create a research lab
of engineers and scientists from the area’s major research universities.[1]
“This focus on building on tools suggests a road map for how we might go about
curing, preventing and managing all diseases this century,” Zuckerberg said at
the announcement.[2]
Moreover, the couple had previously announced a year before that they would
give away 99% of their wealth over their lifetimes through the Chan-Zuckerberg
Initiative in the areas of education and healthcare. I would like to point out
a few implications that may not be readily apparent.
Firstly, such funds going to preventing and curing disease
could bring the day nearer when—along with advances in anti-aging and stem-cell
research—death is no longer inevitable for a human being. Even before the
Zuckerberg-Chan announcements, some scientists were openly predicting that that
day might come as early as the 2050s. To be sure, being able to grow
replacement organs, apply an anti-aging treatment to the body’s cells, and
prevent major diseases (I suspect the common cold will still be around, just to
keep us humble) does not guarantee that death will be put off; running into a
train or bus, or jumping off a high building could still mean death.
Nevertheless, the notion that death can be put off indefinitely dwarfs the
combined impact from all the twentieth-century’s technological progress put
together.
Considering the costs involved, access to rendering death no
longer inevitable would doubtlessly raise ethical issues in terms of the
distribution. Moreover, ethical questions would suddenly arise concerning the
species’ increasing population and reproduction-rights. Secondary issues such
as climate change could become even more pressing. It could be, for example,
that a drastically increasing human population outstrips the planet’s
food-capacity as well as the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb the species’
waste, including greenhouse gases. It would be highly ironic were the feat in
removing the threat of death a major contributor to the extinction of the
species. In short, the story could go as follows: we maximize our species’
size—which means success genetically—only for the increased numbers to cause
extinction because the climate is no longer hospitable to human habitation or
the lack of food causes wars ending in nuclear war. The first alternative would
be particularly likely.
Secondly, that the couple could give up 99% of their wealth
over their lifetimes may imply that they will have earned too much money, if
being able to use it is at all relevant. Put another way, being able to give
away almost all of their total earnings may suggest that they (namely
Zuckerberg) earned too much. Does it even make sense for someone to get money
that is beyond the capacity to be spent even through inheritance?
One implication is the question of whether Zuckerberg’s
employees at Facebook should get a significant amount of what Zuckerberg earns,
whether in salary or stock. Why such a huge difference in compensation? To be
sure, ownership does have its privileges, but is there no limit? The fact that
Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet could give vast sums of money to
charity raises the question of whether founders and CEOs shouldn’t face some
limit in terms of wealth, with a progressive tax system kicking in for
multi-billionaires. Were elected representatives to decide how such vast sums
should be spent, the legitimacy of the power behind such a decision would be
greater.
1. Deepa Seetharaman, “Zuckerberg Fund to Invest #3 Billion,” The Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2016.
It is difficult enough diagnosing a dysfunctional culture in
a large corporation—imaging having a large American city as a de facto patient. Not that I had any
idea what treatment could possibly cure a social-psychological disease when I
was in San Francisco. I, like so many other new-comers there, temporary or
permanent, got the sense after only a few weeks that something was very wrong
in the way people were interacting there. As a corporate man in his late
twenties from L.A. remarked after just ten days in the city, “The people here
are very rude.” As he described the
particular behavior pattern, I was stunned; it matched what had taken a month
for me to discern. This began my curiosity as to the dysfunctional culture
undergirding the wholesale lack of manners, and, more particularly, how it is
that a distinct mentality or value-set and behavioral trait can show up in so
many individuals.
What lies beneath the clouds is not necessarily visible from above. (Jeff Chiu of AP)
By 2015, software engineers at internet-based companies such
as Google and Facebook had been moving to San Francisco and commuting to work
in Silicon Valley for years. The “techies” were widening the economic
inequality in the city, which, along with the related hike in rents, was
causing tension—even anger—on the street. This sort of explanation is at root
political in nature. While I do not doubt its validity, it does not do justice
to the social-psychological dimension at the individual and interpersonal
levels. In other words, I would like to provide some finer brush strokes to
finish this picture of a modern American city in the grips of a pathogen.
By 2014, San Francisco had “become the hype- and capital-fueled
epicentre of America's technology industry, which has traditionally centred on
the string of suburban cities known as Silicon Valley 40 miles to the south. In
2011, Mayor Ed Lee [had] introduced tax breaks for Twitter and several other
tech companies to encourage them to settle in and revitalise the downtown San
Francisco neighbourhood South of Market, or Soma.”[1]
Three years later, the city’s unemployment rate was just 4.8 percent, while
California’s was 8.3 percent. In 2013, job growth in San Francisco County was
the highest of any county in the States.
At the same time, “(m)any long-time San Francisco residents”
worried “not only about being forced out of the city they love, but also that
their city [was] being changed for the worse.” Critics were saying that San
Francisco's “communities of alternative culture, ethnic or otherwise” were being
“turned into playgrounds for rich people.”[2]
According to Ted Gullickson, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, the Castro,
the proverbial “gay mecca,” was more homeowner and much straighter, much whiter
and much more conservative."[3]
If the city’s soul was “its social and economic diversity and status as a
refuge for those outside the mainstream,” then the city was indeed losing its
soul.[4]
I concur, though for a reason—one much deeper than the socio-economic shifts
and the resulting tensions. I submit that enough of the city’s people, most
notably those who are under 35 or so, had lost, or more likely never had
manners. More serious than this euphemism implies, people comprising a major
segment in the city’s population were assuming a mentality that could be
labelled, The Zuckerberg Syndrome. The underlying pathology is psychological at
root.
San Francisco was indeed ground-zero in the American trend
of increasing economic inequality, and the social mores were starting to burst
at the seams. The “influx of so many young, rich tech workers [was] causing
significant tensions. Starting in mid-2011, rents and house prices began to
soar. Eviction rates soon followed as property speculators sought to cash in by
flipping rent-controlled apartment buildings into flats to sell.”[5]
No-fault evictions “displaced nearly 1,400 renters in 2013. About a third of
those evictions were under California's Ellis Act, which allows landlords to
evict tenants and sell their apartments.”[6]
Ellis Act evictions increased by 170% from 2010 to 2013, according to a City
study.[7]
The ability to essentially bid up the rents that pushed long-time residents out
was increasing tensions—even turning the city into “an angry city,” according
to one retired man there.
The long-time resident told me that the rising number of
vocal confrontations between strangers, such as the ones I had I had witnessed just
hours earlier between two middle-aged drivers in a parking lot and two young
adults on a sidewalk were a function of the widening gap between the haves and
have nots in the city. That Facebook, Google, Apple and other tech companies
located in the string of “silicon valley” cities in the south area of the bay were
commuting about 35,000 techies each workday between their high-rent residences
in “the City” and the companies in Silicon Valley was undoubtedly stoking the
fire. Just the sight of the sleek white, double-decker buses stirred jealousy
and resentment on the street and most probably a sense of superiority, even
snobbery, inside the luxury vehicles.
According to Nietzsche, resentment pertains to the weak. As
for the strong, self-confidence rather than arrogance is the hallmark
characteristic. The onlookers can thus be reckoned as “herd animals” and the
bussed kids as “new birds of prey,” whose presumed superiority is in fact a
hypertrophic instinctual urge to dominate. In other words, both are weak—which
may explain part of the jealousy. In contrast, the strong are saturated with
the self-confidence that is innate to strength rather than a need to be
superior. Put another way, strength and its overflowing power are content in
themselves, hence the strong do not view the weak as evil (whereas the weak
view the strong as such). The strong seek to win a race, for instance, rather
than focus on the onlookers, whereas the weak a race cannot resist the urge to
be cruel both to the strong up ahead and to the onlookers.
I contend that the aggression being inflicted on a daily
basis in San Francisco during its second wave of techies—the first being during
the “dot.com” heady days of the 1990s—extended beyond the attention-getting vocal
spats and “nudges” between strangers in public places. I do not believe, however, that widening
economic inequality is a strong enough force to trigger specific incidents of
aggression, whether passive or active. The underlying cultural change was
considerably more subtle even as it was stark on the individual and
interpersonal levels.
I further contend that a cultural trait has no “collective”
basis as an entity beyond the minds and behaviors of individual human beings.
Arrogance, for instance, can spread through a number of agreements, whether
tacitly or consciously made, between two or three people at a time, that a
given attitude, value, or specific behavior is good rather than bad; hence it
is permissible rather than to be shamed. One person “tells” another that being
rude in a certain way is cool, and the other person in turn “tells” a few of
his friends. Soon, a high enough percentage of people in that segment of the
population are being rude on a regular basis in a particular waythat is
thus distinctive.
Having been in the social sciences for some time, I was
curious to study how a cultural trait metastasizes—how it is that so many
people could be rude in so precisely the same way—so I informally interviewed a
number of long-time and new residents alike, of various ages and trades.
Detecting a common refrain, I narrowed my focus to young adults between the
ages of 21 and 35—the Millennial Generation. It was not long before a distinct
pattern involving a certain mentality and a distinct behavior-pattern emerged,
which people not infected typically identified as being unique to San Francisco
though at the same time being the leading edge of a broader trend then going on
in American society. I turn now to my data, obtained through observation and a
series of interviews consistent with Clifford Geertz’s method of
participant-observant, or époche.
A significant proportion of the young adults, most of whom
were far away from their parents, appeared to feel free to treat other people
their age and even much older not only with a lack of respect, but also with
blatant rudeness tantamount to brazen passive aggression—and without any sense of shame. Typically on
meeting someone new, for example, the delayed-adolescents would quickly size
him or her up. Is this person on my level? Can I expect to get something out of
him or her? If the answers are negative, the interest, albeit self-centered, in
the other person quickly turns to a dismissiveness and dismissal. Even in the
middle of a sentence, the other person can be hit with a rude turning-away
without warning. Such rudeness is so blatant and severe it can be counted as
passive aggression. The anger manifests not only in the turning-around and
walking away, but also when the person merely turns around and ignores the
other person, even while that person is asking, “Why are you ignoring me?” or
“Why are you being so rude to me?” I witnessed an older woman asking a 25
year-old(ish) man both questions, after she had approached him to ask him about
a noise audible in the patio of the coffee-shop/bar, with the boy continuing to
stare off to the side as if she were not there.
At a coffee shop, I myself asked a similar guy an innocuous
question only to get a curt answer. Strangely, on his way out, he said goodbye
to each of the two guys he had also
met briefly and who were then talking with me. Saying “goodbye” twice made it
especially obvious that he was ignoring me. Why would a stranger make such an
effort on something so trivial as saying goodbye, especially considering that
he knew none of us and the question I had asked had not been offensive? More
than the rudeness, I felt aggression.
The presumption itself that such anger can be unleashed on an innocent stranger
is itself a problem, particularly when it becomes part of a culture (i.e.,
widely understood to be acceptable rather than blameworthy). Put another way,
why did the guy feel such a strong urge to reject a stranger whom he would be unlikely
to encounter again (especially given his curt reply to my question)?
When I had been a student at Yale and a member of the Yale
Political Union, the chairman of the “party” thereof that I had recently joined
asked me to change my plans on the upcoming Friday night so I could attend a
social party in the bell tower where the new members would be “tapped” to enter
the secret society that the party owned. In actuality, he wanted me to attend so
his three friends, who were the only ones tapped, could have the pleasure of
seeing other members turned down, or rejected. In other words, the pleasure of
selecting and being selected was not enough psychologically. The same
phenomenon would be part of the epidemic to hit San Francisco decades later.
At a group for speaking French in
San Francisco, a middle-aged New Yorker described to me (in English) another
manifestation of the angry city.
“People are blunt in New York,” the Lebanese man of around
50 admitted. “That bluntness can be rude, sure, but here there is also passive
aggression.”
“Have others from New York noticed the same thing?” I asked.
“Yes. Several others living here now have told me they had
noticed it. In New York, people will tell you to your face what they think; the
people here say one thing to your face and another to your back.”
In other
words, the passive aggression could manifest as duplicitous betrayal too.
Moreover, the level of such aggression in San Francisco was not the case in
other cities where a person might expect it, on account of overcrowding for
instance.
In terms of dating or just “hooking up” to have sex, the
following scenario—a true story which I verified from both parties—may have
been paradigmatic in San Francisco in the Millennial Generation. A 28 year-old
guy who worked at the time for Sacs Fifth Avenue met a 35 year old woman in a
bar and the two clicked. After kissing, he persuaded her to change her plans
the following evening so she could go out on a date with him. They met after
work at another bar, and sat in the patio in the sunshine. She figured they would
go out for dinner and then perhaps to a bar or to his or her place, so she was
surprised when he informed her he would have to leave in an hour to attend a
departing co-worker’s get-together at another bar. Seeing her mood quickly
sour, he made a not-so-subtle reference to her looking older in the light, and
that he should not have kissed her. He did not even feel any obligation to
carry through with the date, even though he knew she had re-arranged her
schedule to accommodate his desire to go out the next night. Thinking on her
feet, she quickly called the guy she was to go out with later to tell him that
she would be able to make it after all. She told me she had a good time on the
second date—the first time she had had two dates on the same evening—and she
got laid to boot! Neither the man nor women were teckies, so the phenomenon was
not, or at least no longer, techie-specific; rather, it had spread through the
Millennial Generation.
Certainly in San Francisco’s iconic gay “community,” the
guys (generally speaking) were “always on the lookout for the next best thing.”[8]
From that standpoint, dismissiveness toward any guy not in the running for the
next time is a foregone conclusion. Zuckerberg’s innate sense of superiority
could easily translate into a presumed entitlement to not only ignore
interested guys eliminated from being “the next best thing,” but also get
pleasure from inflicting pain so those guys feel
they are being rejected.
“I hit on this guy at the Edge [a bar in the Castro] but he
blew me off,” a gay guy recounted to me.
“Did you say something insulting?” I asked.
“No, I complimented him. So when was leaving the bar and
passed me and two other guys who had talked with him—the three of us were
talking—he went out of his way to say good-bye to each of the other two.”
“He really wanted you to know he was ignoring you,” I observed.
“For some reason, the guy felt the need to put a lot of emotional energy into
making sure you would be hurt. It’s not like he had reason to think he would
run into you again. What I wonder is where all that anger is coming from—seems
sadistic to me.”
A few weeks after I had spoken to guy who was so blatantly
and intentionally ignored, I
submitted the scenario to a San Francisco native—a women in her mid-20s dressed
in “gothic” black. Her explanation uncovered a mentality utterly foreign to me.
“The guy being hit on was probably pissed that the guy he
didn’t want hitting on him ruined his social image so he took it out on him.”
“You mean he was punishing the other guy?”
“Yes,” she replied, “the guy might have decided the other
guy ruined an otherwise perfect day, so he should pay for it.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing!” I exclaimed. “It must be
something going on in your generation.”
“Being able to get stuff instantly with apps has changed
personalities,” she added.
“You mean into spoiled brats?”
“Yes,” she said.
Visibly excited about teaching an older guy so ignorant of
her generation, she told me that to let a friend know that the person seducing
him or her in a bar, for instance, is not good enough for him or her, simply
put a hand on the friend’s lap as if the friends were in a relationship. That gesture
sends the signal not only to the seducee, but also the seducer, that the latter
is not good enough in the opinion of the friend. I was struck by the sheer
brazen disregard for the seducer’s feelings.
The message must have been getting around enough young men
and women in the city that it is fine to insult anyone who is presumably lower, of no future use. Treating other
people as if they were throw-away “objects,” which involves deeming them as unworthy
of even common courtesy, intimates sadism, or at the very least a subterranean
current of pent-up anger. From where, I wondered like a scientist trying to
find mass in space to account for indications of gravity far away, did the
anger behind the passive aggression come?
My theory highlights the cultural role of internet
companies, their respective founders, and employees, with near-proximity
intermingling spreading the dysfunctional attitude through the generation. The
sheer number of “techies” who had moved to the city and worked in “the mostly
white, male-dominated, monied monoculture of the tech industry”[9]
was sufficient to have a major impact on San Francisco’s social mores and
dominant attitude, especially considering the impact of the preexisting
“laid-back” culture sewn by the hippies decades earlier.
A colleague of mine from Detroit Michigan reported to me after
reading this essay that he had begun to see some of the same behaviors since
techies had begun to move there in significant numbers. Although “like some
hippies [the techies had] the same sense of social mission to transform the
world for the better with technology,” this abstract idealism to be practiced
on people at a social and geographic distance was dwarfed closer to home, as in
social gatherings, for example, by what Nietzsche describes as the brain
sickness of the weak who are too weak to resist their urge to dominate others.
In more modern terms, the sordid flu is of malignant narcissism mixed with a
presumptuous entitlement that justifies rudeness, even passive aggression,
without any shame. Rudeness can be so severe that it becomes passive aggression.
As such, it can remain undiagnosed as something real. Hence, my colleague’s feedback is significant.
Speaking with two retired men in San Francisco, I detected
an alternative hypothesis.
“They are threatened by the older generations,” one of the
men said, “so they lash out at us.”
“Why do they feel threatened?” I asked, skeptically.
“Because we’re straight-shooters. They use passive
aggression because they are insecure.”
“But why are they so angry at us?” I asked, straining to
understand something I had no intuitive sense of.
“We have put them in a tight spot. Not enough jobs. A
[federal] debt of over $17 trillion—money we spent on ourselves that they will
have to repay.”
“So it goes well beyond not respecting their elders.”
“Yes, and it is a recent phenomenon.”
The office cultures in Silicon Valley may have served as
incubators. A climate of arrogance would either have come from the top or been
tacitly tolerated. One techie told me that the people at Facebook do not
respect the users.
“Does that come from Zuckerberg himself?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m not surprised,” I replied, “considering how he treated
the two guys at Harvard who were working on a social network there.”
“That’s right,” the teckie confirmed.
“I’ve studied organizational culture,” I said as a sort of
debriefing. “It would not surprise me at all that Zuckerberg’s attitude toward
other people—his manipulations and sense of superiority—as in that
psychological experiment on Facebook’s users—defines the company’s culture,
which in turn forms the values, attitude, and conduct of the employees.”
This raises the thorny question of whether the authorities
at the area’s social-media companies bore any responsibility in having spawned
or at least condoned the mentality of self-centered arrogance, rather than
trying to eradicate it. In other words, did the companies’ respective
managements fail in their corporate social responsibility? Can we hold them
blameworthy if they were blind to the brain sickness, being infected
themselves? Can we hold Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, responsible, given
how he answered a question on CNBC television in June 2015 regarding whether he
would serve as CEO on an interim or permanent basis beginning in July? “I’m not
going to answer that question because it’s not what I’m focused on,” he said.[10]
It would not take much for his employees, and those of other internet companies
in the Bay Area to ignore questions from tourists on the street, or from
strangers in a bar or coffee shop by merely thinking, “it’s not what I’m
focused on.” Indeed, such dismissive arrogance is perfectly in line with
walking away from a conversation unilaterally is a social context without even
bothering with “excuse me.”
It is perhaps no coincidence that HIV was spreading most at
the time in millennial generation. Why bother wearing a condom to protect the
other person if he is not what is being focused on? Why be concerned with the
interests of a person who is not worthy of respect anyway? Rather than simply
being self-centeredness, passive aggression is also involved.
The distinctive pattern of the cultural dysfunction includes
an absence of any sense of responsibility in following through when doing so is
no longer of interest, even if other people are relying on the follow through. The
pattern I discerned goes something like this: Jim does Susan a favor by
rearranging his schedule to buy her a ticket to a rock concert, and Susan fails
to meet as agreed to pick up the ticket because she feels like doing something
else with another friend.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had “put the city on the world’s
counter-cultural map by publishing the work of Beat poets such as Allen
Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, described a “soulless group of people,” a “new
breed” of men and women too busy with iPhones to “be here” in the moment.” The
new breed can indeed be characterized as soulless in the sense that shame does
not touch them. I am not referring here to a mere lack of social skills and
even a selfish desire to use people for a person’s own ends; rather, the sheer
presumptuousness of the arrogant dismissiveness of people deemed lower or
beneath is striking in the pathology. I suspect it may be distinctly American,
with San Francisco being the epicenter of the socio-psychological earthquake.
The pathogen may have been so associated with the Millennial
Generation because it was sealing itself off from the other generations. A
sixty year-old man, for example, would hardly continue to put up with such
blatant disrespect as that which is laced with passive aggression. Abject
humiliation can only result in social distance. In the film, Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is
depicted as treating a distinguished lawyer with blatant, unashamed disdain at
a meeting. Zuckerberg is looking out the window while the elder man is
speaking.
“Mr. Zuckerberg, do I have your full attention?” the lawyer
asks.
“No,” Zuckerberg replies.
“Do you think I deserve it?”
Zuckerberg again says no. Adding insult to injury, he goes
on to ask whether he adequately answered the lawyer's “condescending question.”
It is telling regarding American society that Zuckerberg’s
fortune and social-media technology have been so lionized, and yet the prospect
of his values, attitude, and conduct coming to define an entire generation
somehow escaped attention, at least as of 2015. That a founder of a company can
come to define its organizational culture is nothing new; that similar founders
would be drawn to the sector, such that the organizational cultures have family
resemblances, and gain sufficient traction to spread throughout a generation is
more astonishing.
Can one person's persona infiltrate an entire societal system, viewed here as a network?
(Justin Sullivan/Getty)
As for the sources of the passive-aggression element, I’m
not going to attempt to psychoanalyze Zuckerberg or Dorsey. I can posit,
however, that the internet companies may be one source. “According to
TINYpulse's poll of 5,000 engineers and developers, tech workers are less happy
than workers in other sectors in every key category. For example, only 36% of
tech workers say they see opportunity for professional growth, compared to 50%
of other workers. . . . ‘There's widespread workplace dissatisfaction in the
tech space, and it's undermining the happiness and engagement of these
employees,’ the survey concludes.”[11]
The anger may be from the unhappiness, especially if the ease and convenience
of smart phones create unrealistic expectations of instant gratification.
With its infusions of young techies, San
Francisco came to serve as the incubator enabling the transmission of the social-media
companies’ organizational cultures, including the angst, to the generation through
intermingling. The City on the Hill overlooking the
Pacific Ocean and a chilly bay had begun in the quest for the golden idol as
gold hunters headed west. That the same city would be heir to so many techie
dollars, and emerge as the leading edge of the descent of American civility,
surpassing even the brashness of New York City, is perhaps not much of a
surprise. The stunning development is instead the new strain itself, of a virus
that oozes the putrid brownish arrogance of conceit tinged with subtle, yet
very real anger manifesting as inconsiderateness so severe that it can be
classified as passive aggression. In short, passive aggression as a raging
epidemic in interpersonal relations even among strangers may have taken off in the
not so “laid back” chilly city by the bay.
1 Zoe
Corbyn, “Is
San Francisco Losing Its Soul?” The
Guardian, February 23, 2014. All of the quotes, except those from my interviews,
that are in this essay come from this article.
Morgan Stanley’s underwriting of Facebook’s IPO has been thought by some of the bank’s rivals to be incompetently managed. According to the New York Times, “(r)ival bankers and big investors have complained that Morgan Stanley botched the I.P.O., setting the price too high and selling too many shares to the public.”[1] Interestingly, the incompetence is positively correlated with unethical policy decisions at the bank. Even as the bankers as underwriters were eager to sell lots of shares, they may have given some of their institutional customers—albeit only the most preferred, as per the bank’s other services—some privileged information. If this charge is true, the conflict of interest at the bank should be closely examined by Congress and any relevant regulators.
On the day of its IPO, Facebook issued at $38 and went to a high of $45 before returning to near its issue price (closing at $38.23). On the next trading day, the price fell to about $34 in the early afternoon. This represents about 10% off the issue price. The Huffington Post headlined “Stock Plummets,” which must have been irresistible to anyone who had bought the stock. The Huff was using the $45 high as its benchmark, from which the $34 price represents a 25% drop. As if that were a plummeting, using the 10% off figure would have made the self-aggrandizing headline too obvious. At the very least, the headline detracts from the credibility of the Huffington Post.
The question of the role of social media internet companies as protesters have used social-media platforms to communicate before and during protests exploded on the world stage in "Arab Spring" going in the Middle East in early 2011. Lest it be presumed that the companies' respective policies were relevant only in terms of what content (or users) was allowed and how that content could impact events on the ground, the policies themselves reflect the claim made by the West of what liberty means. In other words, if social media companies were (allowed to be) oppressive or otherwise not respectful of their customers, the overall message to the oppressed in the Middle East could not have been that greater freedom is indeed possible because it exists in the West. Lest our own private sector unwittingly undercut the words and efforts of the protesters, we might want to use this case to ask if we couldn’t be freer too.
According to Ebele Okobi-Harris, the director of the business and human rights program at Yahoo, which owned Flickr at the time, the case of el-Hamalwy, an Egyptian activist whose uploaded pictures of security agents were abruptly taken down by Flickr staff, prompted internal discussions at the company about whether Flickr should reconsider its approach. What if the photos had been his own and he had not yet backed them up? Flickr’s abrupt and unannounced action suddenly seems quite oppressive. Fortunately, managers at Flickr were at least thinking about the issue. “As the uses of these social networks evolve,” Harris said, “we have to start thinking about how to create rules on how to apply rules that also facilitate human rights activists using these tools.”[1]
Harris “pointed to the challenges of balancing the existing rules and terms of service for users with the new ways that activists are using these tools. One challenge is whether a company should maintain its commitment to remain neutral about content, even when politicized content could offend users or even put people in danger. ‘Does a company take responsibility for the content?’”[2] For instance, what, el-Hamalawy asked, would Flickr do if a group that opposes abortion wanted to post photographs of doctors who perform abortions? In his own case, el-Hamalawy “said Flickr’s decision to take down the photos left him not only frustrated and angry but also terrified. ‘Everyone knew that I had released those photos,’ he said. ‘Then the photos were gone. I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking that at any minute, they were going to come for me.’”[3] Would Flickr managers have been responsible for el-Hamalawy’s death had it been occasioned by Flickr’s action?Or was it his own act in uploading the photos in the first place that put his life at risk? To be sure, Flickr should at least have notified him before taking down his pictures; the company was certainly responsible for causing him fear. However, this incident seems more like bad business to me than unethical conduct on Flickr’s part. Whether a customer is a protester oppressed by a dictatorship or simply a novice photographer who has uploaded her own pictures, there does appear to have been reason to withhold one’s trust from Flickr.
Beyond the matter of bad customer relations—which seems to be getting worse in American business--the question of whether social media, which has included Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube among others, has been unwittingly biased toward oppressive governments even if only from a desire to maintain control over its site must be addressed.
In early 2011, it became clear that social-media companies were increasingly being used by activists and pro-democracy forces, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, to the chagrin of the respective governments. As Harris asked of Flickr, does a social media company have responsibility for the content?Furthermore, should such a company be susceptible to the influence of angered governments, whether in identifying users or barring their content?
According to The New York Times at the time, the “new role for social media has put these companies in a difficult position: how to accommodate the growing use for political purposes while appearing neutral and maintaining the practices and policies that made these services popular in the first place."[4] In November 2007, YouTube had removed videos flagged as “inappropriate” by a community member "because they showed a person in Egypt being tortured by the police. They were uploaded by Wael Abbas, another Egyptian blogger involved in opposing torture in Egypt. After a public outcry, YouTube managers reviewed the videos and restored them.”[5] Had the managers been influenced by Egypt in taking down the video, the company would have effectively taken sides in the Egyptian dispute between its government and people.
Prime facie, removing videos or photos of the police torturing one or several of their own citizens is pro-authoritarianism and anti-liberty. In other words, the very act enables aggression by states against their own people, whose liberty is treated as a wanton step-child. YouTube's initial decision to pull the videos back in 2011 was in this sense a political decision. Accordingly, it should not have been labeled as simply a business decision. Seen in this light, YouTube's employees enjoyed power beyond what working on business entails and thus entitles.
Alternatively, the issue could simply be whether a warning notice is appropriate given the graphic nature of anti-government material. I made the horrible mistake, for example, of watching the slow beheading of a Western hostage by a terrorist group in the Middle East. Even a year or two later, I could still hear the man’s raspy voice shouting for dear life as his throat was being gradually deprived of air. Because I ignored the “graphic content” warning, perhaps the issue facing YouTube in 2011 does indeed go beyond whether such a warning should apply. In my case, my curiosity got the better of me. Should YouTube have been responsible for protecting me from myself? That could be good business, as I stayed away from the platform for a while because I realized what emotional power "real" videos could have. Yet this would open YouTube employees and their managers up to grasping what is actually political power, at the very least if the subject matter itself is political. A blurry line exists between business and political power in the business realm. Power-aggrandizement can take advantage of the discretion. Perhaps social media managements could limit their intervention only to extremely graphic content, with review taking place in the company in the particularly harsh cases.Still, in a free society, citizens ultimately must take responsibility for ignoring warnings.
Regarding Facebook, The New York Times reported on March 26, 2011 that the company “has remained mostly quiet about its increasing role among activists in the Middle East who use the site to connect dissident groups, spread information about government activities and mobilize protests. But Facebook is now finding itself drawn into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has been pushed to defend its neutral approach and terms of service to some supporters of Israel, including an Israeli government official. Yuli Edelstein, an Israeli minister of diplomacy and diaspora affairs, sent a letter [in March, 2011] to Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to remove a Facebook page created that March named the Third Palestinian Intifada." The page, which called for an uprising in the occupied Palestinian territory that May, had more than 240,000 members at the time. "As Facebook’s C.E.O. and founder, you are obviously aware of the site’s great potential to rally the masses around good causes, and we are all thankful for that," Mr. Edelstein wrote. "However, such potential comes hand in hand with the ability to cause great harm, such as in the case of the wild incitement displayed on the above-mentioned page." Facebook had, so far, not removed the page. The administrators of the page were not advocating violence so the page fell within the company’s definition of acceptable speech, company officials said. "We want Facebook to be a place where people can openly discuss issues and express their views, while respecting the rights and feelings of others," said Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for public policy at the company. Facebook was trying to maintain its neutrality without getting political.
The problem is, “wild incitement” could pertain to the pro-democracy rallies that had been taking place throughout the Middle East at the time. Even if violence were being called for in the Intifada, would Facebook (or Instigram) remove such content if it had been put up by an Egyptian or Libyan protester?More pointedly, what if a page or photo referred to “wild incitement” in the midst of being attacked by government troops or police? How far removed is an occupied people to such intimidation on a daily basis? Should they be barred from tweeting, “Come help me at X intersection b/c police are beating my elderly parents”? The staff at Facebook were smart not to intervene in disputes between a government and its people. If anything, an America-based company should have a bias in favor of liberty in taking the side of the oppressed, for the United States came into existence from British oppression. Relatedly, the U.S. Government itself acts in concert with its own beginning whenever it takes the side of a people protesting against governmental oppression. Of course, American companies acting in favor of American values make de facto political judgments and decisions whose application in other cultures may be ill-fitting or even inappropriate.
Yet it is possible that particular company policies are inherently to the advantage of vengeful governments and thus a threat to Facebook’s customers under those governments. For example, The New York Times reported at the time that “Human rights advocates have also criticized Facebook for not being more flexible with some of its policies, specifically its rule requiring users to create accounts with their real names. Danny O’Brien, the Internet advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, cited the case of Michael Anti, an independent journalist and blogger from China whose Facebook account was deactivated in January because he had not used his state-given name to create it. In addition to losing the ability to publish and communicate on Facebook, and not wanting to use his real name because of China’s strict rules governing freedom of speech and harsh response to those activists who violate them, he . . . lost the contact information for thousands of people in his Facebook community. ‘One can’t expect all of these services to provide everything to everyone,’ said Mr. O’Brien. ‘I think that part of the solution is to provide people with a dignified way of leaving the service.’”
O’Brien was giving too much credit to Facebook. It is insufficient to expect Facebook to have merely provided its customers with a dignified way to leave (or be deprived of service). In addition, Facebook ought to have respected the preference of some of its customers to anonymity, especially if their respective real names could bring them into harm's way. Facebook would have still had those customers’ contact info (more of which could be demanded and verified in such cases), so anonymity would not have been an excuse to get away with unethical or illegal conduct, such as publicly defaming someone by making false claims. At the very least, I contend that a person’s anonymity being refused is a basis for that person to lie ethically about being on Facebook.
Moreover, Facebook’s insistence at the time that real names must be used adds to the argument that the U.S. Constitution should be amended to include an explicit right to privacy. Much of the criticism of Roe v. Wade is actually that the justices “found” such a right being implicit in that constitution. Even people in favor of making abortion legal could (and have) raise the objection. Another entails whether the decision should be federal or have remained with the States.
While the problem regarding Facebook's insistence that customers use their real names may have had implications for U.S. constitutional law, bad business (i.e., bad customer service) may have been Facebook's underlying problem. In fact, Facebook having had respect for its potential and actual customers who preferred anonymity could have sent a message stronger than any from the protesters or human rights advocates in the Middle East, namely: “Look over here! Real freedom is indeed possible!”
