Facebook is 20. It still hasn’t grown up

Opinion

February 11, 2024 — 2.00am

Facebook has turned 20.

The social media company that began life in 2004 as a “hot or not” website from 19-year-old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, eventually growing into a $1 trillion behemoth, would now be old enough to legally, in Australia at least, drink and smoke if it were a person.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month to discuss child safety online. Credit: AP

Some say Facebook is the new tobacco: an addictive substance that doles out regular dopamine hits – in Facebook’s case in the form of “likes” and comments – with severe negative health consequences, particularly for young people.

It’s arguably worse and, like smoking, we likely won’t know the true impact for decades.

The story of Facebook’s first 20 years is one of initial promise and optimism being replaced over its evolution by rampant privacy intrusions, misinformation and an overall malaise that has long dogged the company, though not its share price.

Facebook’s decline – setting aside its eye-watering valuation – is symptomatic of the ruination of everything we once loved about the internet.

It has fallen victim to “enshittification”, a term coined by the writer and futurist Cory Doctorow to describe the decay of online platforms. As Doctorow put it: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Nearly every online service you can think of – Twitter, Reddit, Google search and Bandcamp – are now shadows of their former selves thanks to enshittification, and Facebook is arguably the poster child.

Facebook was once a far more friendly, fun and innocent place to spend time online. It was a simpler platform, and it was good to its users. Its feed was filled with inane status updates (everyone must know what I just had for dinner), tedious photos of said dinner, and general life updates including new jobs and successful marriage proposals.

Its premise was simple: to be a place to connect with your friends and family online. It could be a time suck, sure, but a time suck without the toxicity and rampant misinformation that we have now.

But gradually Facebook changed. What began as a tool for connection became a hub of division and unforseen consequences. The feed became increasingly flooded with advertising, fake news and abuse. When their parents joined, many users – in particular those aged 18 to 30 – left the platform altogether, flocking instead to cooler platforms like TikTok, or switching to group chats and texting.

While Facebook’s first decade was largely successful, its second has seen it deteriorate in the face of scandal after scandal. The company has failed at every hurdle to accept responsibility for the content posted on its platform and, even two decades in, has not proven it can be trusted to act in the best interests of its users.

In 2012, the company conducted experiments on around 70,000 users without their consent, removing certain words from their newsfeeds to test how it affected their reactions to posts. It took two years for those experiments to be made public.

Nearly 10 years later, in 2021, employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before US Congress that the company puts profits over safety. Haugen helped release the so-called “Facebook Papers” which detailed the platform’s fading popularity with teenagers and its inability to counter hate speech.

That same year, Facebook blocked the pages of Australian charities, health organisations and government services during a pandemic and raging bushfires, all to protest a law that would force it to compensate local publishers for news.

And, in 2022, the company paid a whopping $1.1 billion to finally settle legal action relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their personal data released en masse to third parties without consent.

Facebook’s algorithms, which remain shrouded in secrecy, have often fed our worst tendencies, encouraging everything from home decor envy to political extremism and violence, as has been seen in the US and Myanmar.

Earlier this month, it became apparent just how unrecognisable Facebook is now from its 2004 self. In front of the US Senate Committee, Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley executives were forced to face parents holding photographs of their dead children, who were victims of online sexual exploitation and cyberbullying.

Senators were united across the aisle about the damage done by the likes of Facebook to the health and wellbeing of children.

Shares in Facebook parent company Meta are sitting pretty near their all-time highs, giving the company a valuation of more than $1 trillion.Credit: AP Photo/Tony Avelar

“They’re responsible for many of the dangers our children face online,” the judiciary committee’s chairman, Democrat Dick Durbin said. “Their design choices, their failures to adequately invest in trust and safety, their constant pursuit of engagement and profit over basic safety have all put our kids and grandkids at risk.”

Republican Senator Josh Hawley – who couldn’t be more different politically from Durbin – also repeatedly criticised Zuckerberg.

“Your product is killing people,” he told the executive.

Alongside the user addiction and negative mental health outcomes, Facebook itself has an existential problem. Two years ago, Zuckerberg changed its parent company’s name to Meta, and splashed billions on building the “metaverse”, a three-dimensional virtual reality. Those efforts haven’t amounted to much – the buzz about artificial intelligence quickly superseded the metaverse – and the company is now having an identity crisis.

Investors aren’t fazed. Shares in Meta are sitting near their all-time high. They are clearly bullish that despite the myriad missteps, further growth is still on the horizon, whether that be in the metaverse or elsewhere. They’re trusting Zuckerberg, who maintains absolute control of the company through his share ownership, to figure it out.

But we can’t wait another 20 years for Facebook, or its CEO, to grow up.

Regulators, governments and users are more aware than ever of the pitfalls of social media. Many of those pitfalls will be amplified by the power of generative AI, which is already proliferating deepfake pornography and proving that Facebook and its ilk are still not yet ready to be trusted to police their own platforms. Zuckerberg and his peers such as Elon Musk have proven they’re incapable, or unwilling, to do that work themselves.

Hopefully, the next generation of start-up founders will learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. The entrepreneurs building whatever ends up becoming the next Facebook will likely be more thoughtful – and more adult – than what came before. And the internet will be a better place for it.

David Swan is technology editor.

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