Once upon a
time, most of us wanted to love Facebook. Or rather, we loved connecting with
friends, acquaintances, even strangers, all around the world, and all free of
charge, too. The fact that it was free because we gave Facebook our data in
return seemed a minor inconvenience. But in 2016, the remaining Facebook
romantics learned that the world’s largest social network was also being used
for highly nefarious purposes like election interference. Now whistleblower Frances
Haugen has outlined just how common dirty activity is within the Facebook
empire. Social networks are part of critical national infrastructure and should
be treated as such.

The same
year Facebook was founded, I moved to San Francisco. I was a correspondent for
Swedish media then, and within a couple of years I’d written about this new
website that seemed to be getting really popular. That was the first time
Facebook had been mentioned in Swedish media. Today virtually every Swedish
friend and acquaintance of mine uses Facebook, as of course do some two billion
other people around the world. In many developing countries, Facebook is the internet.

In interviews with the Wall Street Journal and Senate testimony, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen explained — and documented, providing voluminous evidence — the many dirty activities that take place on Facebook: Chinese surveillance of Uyghurs living abroad, Iranian espionage, algorithms that amplify disinformation. But it’s not just activity by sundry organizations that simply take advantage of Facebook — it’s activity by the company itself. She brought to the public’s attention how at Facebook knew that Instagram (which it owns) causes harm to teenage girls’ mental health and how Facebook allows public figures to post inflammatory content and disinformation. Facebook’s products, Haugen said, “harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy.”

Haugen has
done democracy, national security, and civic discourse an immense favor by
mustering the courage to blow the whistle. But while she provided enormous
documentation and detail, what she said can’t have surprised anyone. Ask virtually
any teenage girl, and she will tell you  that other girls’ perfect (and often
tinkered-with) Instagram pictures make her feel bad about her body. Ask
virtually any American and he or she will be concerned about how fellow
Americans self-radicalized using Facebook misinformation and disinformation to the
point where they stormed the Capitol on January 6.

Facebook
considers itself straightforward business operation, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg even
likes to portray it as a 21st-century agora. Compared to many of the giants of
previous generations of American companies, though, Facebook places little
emphasis on corporate citizenship. While such companies often took into account
what was good for America, Facebook — it is clear from Haugen’s documentation —
focuses on Facebook’s benefit, to the detriment of democracy and civic
discourse.

Maybe it has
to be thus. Nobody can force good corporate citizenship on companies. Imagine
if airlines, power plant operators, and telecommunications companies operated
without oversight. They might be good corporate citizens, or they might not —
but because they’re part of critical national infrastructure, they are
regulated. Today Facebook, too, is part of critical national infrastructure:
its products form a vital part of daily life.

To be sure,
nobody likes more government regulations, and regulators have their own
challenges. Who decides what is the common good? Nevertheless, an entire
industry that operates with minimal oversight around the world — an industry
that can influence people’s individual behavior and, indeed, the way in which
democratic societies conduct public discourse and elect their leaders — must
clearly follow more stringent rules than, say, footwear makers.

Soon after Facebook
rival Twitter was founded, I went to visit them in San Francisco, just like I
regularly visited lots of startups. It was a bunch of guys at a few desks, with
bikes leaning against various walls — hardly the notion of a public power in
the making. Zuckerberg, too, didn’t found Facebook with the ambition of making
it part of critical national infrastructure. Success, though, bestows
responsibility, and if companies don’t voluntarily take it, society has to step
in.

Between 2017 and 2019, the UK Parliament’s Committee on Digital, Culture, Media, and Sports conducted an inquiry into disinformation and fake news. This was shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the committee unsurprisingly wanted to hear from Facebook. “We invited Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook . . . to give evidence to us and to this Committee; he chose to refuse, three times,” the Committee noted in its final report, adding that “by choosing not to appear before the Committee and by choosing not to respond personally to any of our invitations, Mark Zuckerberg has shown contempt towards both the UK Parliament and the ‘International Grand Committee’, involving members from nine legislatures from around the world.” Such behavior, too, shows why regulation has become unavoidable.

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