The Times Literary Supplement

How Facebook divides us

BERNIE HOGAN

This article is the first in a new series looking at the moral dimensions of modern life

Facebook is the world’s largest and most powerful social network: membership is creeping up on 2 billion people. It’s been linked to some of the world’s most significant social movements of the past few years, from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter. When the Paris and Orlando shootings happened, like many people, I turned to Facebook to see if my friends were safe. Facebook does not merely host some data about our relationships, but operates for many as the de facto site for maintaining contact with friends and family.

If Facebook is this important both in social and political life, does it then have an ethical responsibility to its users? It appears that the site already enshrines these responsibilities in its “core principles”, including the “freedom to share and connect”, “equality”, “social value” and “transparent process”. These are admirable goals; alas, they do not always hold up in practice.

Facebook is currently creaking under the weight of these responsibilities because of two issues identified by social scientists: “collapsed contexts” and “filter bubbles”. The issue of collapsed context is the perennial problem of what to do about content that’s fit for one group but not another. This content could be as innocuous as party photos that mum and dad would not appreciate or as damaging as inadvertently outing gay men and women in repressive regimes. Facebook’s mantra of “open and connected” can sometimes work at cross purposes. By encouraging as much content to be shared as widely as possible, this pushes us to withhold information that might not appeal to a wide range of our friends. Facebook has clearly not solved this problem – instead it has effected a long series of changes to its privacy controls, with no end in sight.

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Continua qui: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/facebook-trump-brexit/