At the moment, critics can (and have) held Facebook accountable for its failure to adequately moderate the content it disseminates — allowing for hate speech, vaccine misinformation, fake news and so on. Once end-to-end encryption is put in place, Facebook can wash its hands of the content. We don’t want to end up with all the same problems we now have with viral content online — only with less visibility and nobody to hold responsible for it.
It’s also worth noting that encrypted messaging, in addition to releasing Facebook from the obligation to moderate content, wouldn’t interfere with the surveillance that Facebook conducts for the benefit of advertisers. As Mr. Zuckerberg admitted in an interview after he posted his plan, Facebook isn’t “really using the content of messages to target ads today anyway.” In other words, he is happy to bolster privacy when doing so would decrease Facebook’s responsibilities, but not when doing so would decrease its advertising revenue.
Zeynep Tufekci
I’m very much behind on my blog writing, but this seems a good time to link back to this story. As with Facebook’s plans for a global currency, an earlier report that the company plans to integrate its separate messaging apps was confirmed in March by an official statement from Mark Zuckerberg. There are many possible unintended consequences, but what struck me most was that the majority of reactions were negative, whereas back in 2016, when Apple refused to break the encryption of an iPhone at the request of the FBI, the public opinion sided with Apple. To me, it seems fundamentally a very similar case: a private company is making information encrypted, essentially hiding it from potential law enforcement inquiries. Has the public opinion really shifted to view this as a complex issue, warranting a nuanced solution? Or it’s just the knee-jerk reaction of ‘we trust Apple more than Facebook’? I fear it’s still predominantly the latter than the former…
Post a Comment