Cory Doctorow on why Facebook is the worst of the worst when it comes to Big Tech

Many people have observed that Facebook’s customers aren’t the users who socialise on its platform, but the advertisers who pay to reach those users. “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is often invoked to explain why Facebook treats its users so badly.

But being Facebook’s customer – an advertiser or even a publisher – doesn’t mean you’ll get better treatment from the company. Time and again, the company has been caught stealing from advertisers, falsifying its records about who it showed their ads to, and for how long. At least half of the ads that companies pay Facebook to show to its users aren’t actually seen by a human being – but Facebook bills the advertisers for that money anyway.

The same goes for the publishers whose commercially prepared reporting, opinion and coverage are a major reason that Facebook users are attracted to the platform. In 2015, Facebook decided to use these publishers as part of its bid to dethrone Google’s YouTube service as the leading video platform online.

The result – the notorious “pivot to video” – was a devastating fraud, a mass-extinction event for media companies. Facebook lied to media companies about the popularity of Facebook videos, falsely claiming that Facebook users had all but abandoned reading text in favour of watching videos. They told the same lies to advertisers, whom they fraudulently billed for phantom ads that never ran on videos that were never watched. Media companies around the world fired their print journalists and built out expensive video production divisions.

This was Facebook’s version of “fake it until you make it”. The company wanted to be the number-one internet video platform, so it declared that it already was that platform, and suckered advertisers and media companies into participating in its delusion.

This is just a slightly sleazier version of what other companies had done before – think of Steve Jobs promising media companies that if they invested in making apps for his new iPad they would reap massive profits, tapping into a new movement in which readers were willing to “pay for content”.

Jobs had no idea if Apple users would pay for apps, but he won either way: if media companies filled his App Store with software, then other software developers would follow, and some of them would eventually make apps that his customers valued, which would sell more iPads – even if no one was willing to pay for the news.

And if people were willing to pay for the news, well, Apple would be able to rake off 30 per cent of the sale price of the app (and, once companies had completed their “pivot to apps,” Jobs altered the deal, to guarantee Apple 30 per cent of the app’s sale price – and of all the purchases users made within the app; that is, the entire lifetime revenue of every app-using customer these companies had).

Apple’s bet paid off. Users were willing to pay for apps – not as much as Jobs promised, but there were success stories like the New York Times that Apple could gesture toward when smaller newspapers complained they’d spent all their available cash flow building an app that no one wanted to pay to use.

But Steve Jobs’s famed “reality-distortion field” did not materialise for Mark Zuckerberg. Despite Facebook’s egregious lies about the popularity of video on its platform, despite the billions media companies poured into video production based on those lies, despite Facebook’s content-recommendation algorithms putting their fists on the scales to ensure that every user’s feed was a wall of Facebook videos, Facebook users just didn’t want video.

When the dust settled, advertisers lost the hundreds of millions they spent on ads that no one ever saw. Media companies had no way to service the debt or satisfy the investors that supplied the capital for their pivot to video. Worse, they had laid off their newsrooms and replaced them with video producers – many lured away from stable jobs with huge cash promises based on Facebook’s fake video viewership numbers.

Even after laying off their video producers, these media companies couldn’t recover. For one thing, they had jettisoned the staff and contract writers they’d need to pivot back to text, and even if they could get the band back together, they had blown through so much money on videos for an imaginary audience that they didn’t have anything left to pay these writers.

Media companies imploded. The industry shed hundreds of jobs – young, promising creators at the start of their careers met with ruin, and many old veterans exited the field in ignominy, unable to find another job.

The idea that Facebook abuses its users because they’re not its customers is just wrong. It treats its customers terribly. It also treats its workers abysmally – think of the traumatised army of content moderators whom Facebook puts to work in the content mines, screening images and videos of torture, sexual abuse, murder and other things they’ll never un-see.

Facebook treats you terribly, but that’s not because you’re not its customer. They treat you terribly because they treat everyone terribly. They’re a monstrous company.

It may seem like I’m picking on Facebook, and in truth, I am. All the tech giants are pretty terrible, but I’d argue that Facebook is uniquely bad.

This is an extract from The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso) by Cory Doctorow – out now. Order a copy here.

Cory will be our guest on A Drink with the Idler on Thursday 12 October 6-7pm.

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