By Esteban Magnani
Special
Mark Zuckerberg was 25 years old when, in 2010, he said: “People really feel more and more comfortable sharing not only information of different kinds, but also doing it more openly and with more people. That social norm is something that has simply evolved over time. “
This then very young and successful entrepreneur was right: social norms change over time as we can perceive when talking to even someone of an older generation.
What Zuckerberg did not clarify at the time, perhaps because he was not so clear, is that Facebook and other social networks accelerated the decline of the “private” to minimal corners. Now it is common to know what people eat that we have not seen in years, if they stopped smoking, how they feel after a separation, where they spend the holidays or how much they miss a loved one who is no longer there. In just under two decades thousands of irrelevant details, but also intimate or unspeakable secrets, multiply on thousands of screens destroying what was considered “private.”
The other thing that Zuckerberg did not say is that his own company needed to push the frontier of the private because its business model requires that content: on the one hand, to keep “friends” (another term that has mutated) in front of the screen and consuming advertising; on the other, to obtain more data that allows to know in detail the interests, habits and consumption of each person to guide them where advertisers want.
So when Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014 – at the time with 450 million users – for $ 19 billion, it was unlikely that the data collected by the messaging system was discarded.
Facebook needs various data: what we search on the internet, what we publish openly or what we chat with friends believing a certain intimacy, allows us to draw more precise profiles to sell things, manipulate or know how much can be charged for something without risking the sale. Worse still, the data is also used to find out which fake news is most likely to convince someone, or how to produce moral outrage against this or that politician. This data, bought or stolen, gives great power to those who have it, process it and know how to use it. Facebook, like any company, seeks to maximize its profits. Every time you make a decision that is not governed by that goal, you suffer shareholder punishment. With more than 2,700 million monthly users (almost a third of the world’s population) Facebook is in a privileged position to modify “social norms”, especially in times of pandemic and digitization. The times he rushed he had to go back, as in the current case of WhatsApp. The social reaction to the laundering of something that was already happening is marked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, political instability in some central countries, and the role of fake news.
Facebook always took one step back only to advance two, albeit more carefully. Will he do it again?
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