07-02 Social Media

If the product is free, you are the product. Great line.
I recently started getting ads for philately and erectile dysfunction. The former I get since I am an avid stamp collector and was recently checking out some new stamp sites. But the latter? I guess the Overlords know something I do not.
Poor Mark Zuckerberg. He didn’t expect this. As a young tech-head he just wanted to create something cool. And he did. A site to measure female students’ hotness which evolved into one of the most potent forces of our day. At over two billion users it must be considered a Nation. Except, unlike a Nation, it does not run on deficits and isn’t consumed by regulations and borders.
In fact Facebook and its big sisters, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn and a host of others, are more than a driving force, they are major disruptors. Millennials rely on them for their news and advertisers for their customers. The first group pays nothing and the other pays 50 billion USD per year.
Micro-targeting is the magic that draws the ad men, leaving newspapers to flounder without that revenue and journalists reduced to scrambling around the blogosphere.
Facebook, for so many users, is fantastic, uniting people across the world, for free. Google gives us immediate access to everything everywhere, for free. Instagram lets us post and enjoy photos from next door to outer space, for free.
But it doesn’t take a genius to realize that there’s a larger issue out there; abuse of all this free data that fills thousands of acres of server farms around the planet. We are shocked when we hear Russia is manipulating the Brexit voters and the US electorate; a game Russian can play for the cost of one US military super jet. For decades, Russian hackers have strut their wares. In fact one of the best Anti-Virus companies, Kaspersky, is Russian. But the West is no different, just more subtle, until a whistle blower shocks the world with how we do the same, manipulating elections. Remember how Obama was given kudos for his early adoption of social media to beat out Hillary Clinton? And now Hillary’s bleaching of her home email servers doesn’t look so sinister.
We are at an interesting period in the West regarding the use and abuse of social media. For countries like China it’s easy – just ban the services or filter them to death. They don’t want another Arab Spring uprising largely coordinated by social media.
Remember how we snickered as President Trump bitched about Fake News? No longer. At the time of writing this, Malaysia is voting on a law to curtail fake news. Imagine where that might lead? The US and UK governments are pouncing on Social Media leaders, demanding answers on what they are doing to our cherished democracy.
Poor Mark Zuckerberg. He didn’t ask for this. Will his noble service and those of his sisters be subjected to new stringent Malaysian type laws? Will they be regulated like some energy utility? Will the officers of these organizations be culpable?
Since we in the West love our tech Titans, I expect the outcome will be modest. People will still gladly give away their likes and dislikes for free and the authorities will somehow create a new series of reasonable laws. But behind the scenes, global AI, big data, the Internet of Things will move forward at a pace hard for most to fathom.
As Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”