Facebook! Face Up!!
- fmcinerney
- Nov 22, 2017
- 3 min read
Facebook allowed Russia to direct 3,000 political ads designed to influence the 2016 U.S. election to 126 million people, 98% of those who voted. Even though Don Trump lost the popular vote by 3.0 million, or 2.3%, Russia’s Facebook play won him the Electoral College by a tiny 75,000 popular votes, or 0.058%, spread over three states.
For Vladimir Putin, using Facebook to get Trump elected was, as Wellington said of Waterloo, “a near run thing.” But, it worked. And Facebook’s brand was ruined. Its lack of transparency makes it utterly untrustworthy.
For those of us who understand a thing or two about how information works in our Zettabyte Era, to save its brand Facebook must face up and face up fast.
Facebook has something few others do: a fast-growing Information Surface that inflates with the Cloud. Facebook’s Information Surface reaches over two billion worldwide, making it way bigger and more powerful than the Center of Everything (China in Chinese). Something that Xi Jinping can’t tolerate and is doing everything to reverse.
The Information Surface is the fabric of intersections between devices that enable apps (like your smartphone), the apps themselves and the systems that connect the two. These intersections are where all money is made in modern business. It is where business scales.
Steve Jobs was the first to figure out how to monetize Information Surfaces. As he told Walt Mossberg in his famous interview, “Anyone could have done this. They just didn’t.”
Zuckerberg knows that Information Surfaces inflate at the rate of the Moore Curve, growing exponentially, times the number of Cloud-attached devices, growing exponentially, times the number of apps, also growing exponentially. In other words, fast. Catch this and you catch money. Lots of it.
The key is that the Information Surface remembers everything that touches it. That’s right, everything. Kind of like the super translations that Hawking says occur on the surfaces of Black Holes, anything that touches the Information Surface stays there. Forever.
Died-in-the-wool McLuhanists like Publius can tell you that he first thing Marshall McLuhan would have said is that print memory is in books and libraries. Trying to “recall” this memory was a complex exercise that involved months in the stacks, as they were called, searching line-by-line for information. Some stuff just wasn't there to be found. Searching for old video tapes and recordings wasn’t much easier.
Not so in Marshall’s predicted a world of “electric all-at-onceness,” our Information Surface. McLuhan, who was not even slightly shy, would have reminded Mark Zuckerberg very publicly that, on the Information Surface, those 3,000 Russian ads and their 126 million targets are as alive now as they were the moment they were created. No hard-to-search books for them. Every one of the instants that the 3,000 ads hit their 126 million targets still exists.
Job One for Zuckerberg is to face up.
He can use the memory retention of the Information Surface to tell all of Russia’s 126 American million targets who hit them, with what and when. Zuckerberg does not have to wait for regulators to impose rules. He can explain immediately to his Facebook customers how they were affected and by whom. He can show how each Russian ad was designed and what it was designed to achieve. He can promise that Facebook will do this in real time in the future. No waiting for Congressional hearings years after the fact.
Zuckerberg must face up. He must show voters the world over how Facebook will protect them. In detail. He must restore his badly damaged brand. Investors will be thrilled.
Update March 21, 2018
Zuckerberg has had months to fix Facebook's brand. He did nothing. Now, the Cambridge Analytica scandal shows that he not only let the Russian FSB put Don Trump in office but he let the Trumpista's themselves do dirt on our democratic system. It is amazing how disinterested Zuckerberg seems to be in protecting his brand, shareholders and customers. Something is definitely out of kilter.