Since Cambridge Analytica happened, Facebook’s story has played out like a series of PR nightmare episodes — one leading to another but none quite so damaging as the latest series of disclosures made by former employee and whistleblower, Frances Haugen. Haugen’s disclosures paint Facebook as a muti-headed beast, filling in as the poster child for almost everything we fear about the Internet — from preferential treatment for elites to harmful mental health impact on teenage girls, from ignoring hate speech out of political expediencies to misleading the most high-profile accountability mechanisms it has set up.
With the emergence of social media in the 2000s, it was believed that this was a significant shift towards greater democratisation of information. The mounting loss of faith in mainstream media led many to believe that this would limit the ability of editors, compromised by economic and political compulsions, to play the role of gatekeepers. It was hoped that public accountability would emerge from the networked nature of the new media. This vision of social media as a democratising actor was based on the ideal that it would be open, neutral and egalitarian, and enable genuine public-driven engagement.
Over time, it has been realised that far from being open, neutral or egalitarian, social media platforms introduce their own parameters to shape how information is accessed, which only amplifies the issues plaguing mainstream media.