Facebook is not your Friend

Two weeks ago, there was a major brouhaha over the discovery that the social network Facebook had engaged in research to measure and manipulate its users’ moods. The company had given access to users’ data and profiles to social scientists, who then manipulated the users’ News Feeds (the constantly updating set of profile updates, pictures and interactions from ‘friends’ that users see when they are logged into the site). The researchers tweaked News Feeds to make them more positive or negative, in an effort to find out whether that would make the users more or less positive in their status updates.

The main controversy was over the fact that this research was carried out without the users’ knowledge and permission (though the obvious criticism of this is that knowing your mood was being manipulated would change how you behaved on the site – the old ‘Heisenbergian’ model of social science research). There were also some earnest defenders of Facebook’s efforts. These centred around the fact that the company eventually owned up to the fact that it had engaged in the research, and that it was, mostly, benign.

Take that as you will, but the creeping sense of foreboding you may have felt was not misplaced. It turns out that Facebook had conducted other experiments in the lead-up to the American mid-term elections in 2010, and these experiments then had actual, real-world effects. These included measuring and manipulating users’ propensity to vote, and to model which party users belonged to and send messages based on that. That particular experiment was conducted on 61 million Americans (approximately 90 million voted that year, meaning that two thirds of voters were unwitting participants in that experiment).

What does that have to do with you, you may ask. You’re happily sitting in Nairobi reading the newspaper and having a cup of coffee. Yes, you’re logged on to Facebook and are constantly glancing at it on your phone, computer or tablet, but these problems are distant to you. This is until the revelations late last week. It turns out that it was not just social scientists and Facebook researchers who were interested in users’ moods. Part of the funding for the research came from the United States military, which is interested in ‘emotional contagion’. According to the Atlantic Monthly, quoting a US Defense Department website, the research was to help in identifying social ‘tipping points’. ‘The tipping points in question include “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey.”’

You can have no doubt that the lead-up to the Saba Saba rallies yesterday was equally closely studied. The ethnically-tinged messages of hate and hubris, as well as the plans for disruption, earnest calls for calm and peace, and official updates from both camps were fodder for the site, and, it turns out, foreign governments.

We often treat social media as if they are benign utilities, staying in the background while we busily update our lives and share our feelings on them.

The amount of information we’re willing to share is astounding. People post condolence messages before the closest of kin are aware that the person has died. People post pictures of two-hour-old babies – before the new mother has even come out of the delivery room. We share our messages of the deepest bile and ethnic animosity for like-minded bigots (sometimes writing them in the vernacular, as if that gives them an extra cloak of invisibility from the ‘wrong’ eyes).

I’m not trying to turn you off social media, least of all Facebook. I am an inveterate social media user, who is fond of casting argumentative cats among the social media pigeons and engaging in the ensuing disputes. My class teacher in Standard Seven called me ‘too argumentative’ (I don’t think she meant it kindly), and this is the perfect medium for me to argue to my heart’s content.

But even then, I’m acutely aware that there is nothing innocent about membership of and participation in social media sites. They are there purely for the purpose of making money. As you catch up with old friends and subject your children to far more exposure than will ever be healthy, the companies are harvesting your information and making money off it in increasingly creepy ways. The more information you offer up, the more complete your profile becomes and the more lucrative you are to these companies.

And as the revelations last week showed, these companies are domiciled in particular parts of the world, under specific jurisdictions. You vote for and pay your taxes to the government of Kenya (which you can theoretically put to task to regulate any institution within our borders), but the social media sites to which you offer up so much private, intimate information are not regulated by that government.

So use these media to your heart’s content, but be aware that if your heart is not content, it may just be that someone in a far-off land is pulling emotional levers that you’re unaware of.

Also published in the Business Daily on 8 July 2014 at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Facebook-News-Feed-experiment/-/539548/2375086/-/item/0/-/er4kw4/-/index.html