Getting answers is , in part , what journalism is about , so it give me no pleasure to state upfront that I have none where Facebook hardware tzar and resident blusterer Andrew “ Boz ” Bosworth ’s recent faculty memo is worry .
The needlessly long , meandering note — firstobtainedby the New York Times and laterpostedby Boz himself to his news feed , a Facebook product he helmed the production of much earlier in his incumbency at the societal web — spot on election security , misinformation , the press being wrong and unfair to Facebook , filter bubbles , polarization , the blasted unfair press , corporate responsibility , and the probably - well - meaning - but - definitely - wrong - and - speculative extremity of the press . Boz makes a telephone number of the spurious , hagiographic , take consistent with the fellowship ’s common public - face messaging . It also take , within musing about his desire to squash President Donald Trump ’s re - election chances while praising his 2016 hunting expedition for running “ single upright digital advertizement campaign I ’ve ever take in from any adman , ” what we ’ll generously call an analogy to J.R.R. Tolkien ’s stultify Lord of the Rings . Observe :
It occurs to me that [ maintaining the same ad policies as during the 2016 election ] very well may lead to the same consequence . As a attached liberal I find myself urgently wanting to pull any lever tumbler at my disposal to avoid the same result . So what remain my helping hand ?
Photo:Facebook
I recover myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this second . Specifically when Frodo offer the ring to Galadrial [ sic ] and she imagines using the mogul righteously , at first , but knows it will eventually buy her . As tempting as it is to use the pecker available to us to commute the final result , I am surefooted we must never do that or we will become that which we reverence .
alas , the lunar time period of Content has washed this miserable bauble ashore and we ’re tasked with beholding its many - splendored dumbness .
Here are the three major actors of this scenario :
The One Ring : an infernal artifact containing much of the inwardness of Sauron , a bad guy usually portrayed as an enormous flaming orb . In most representative fatigue it confers invisibility but custom is highly psychologically addictive and physically deleterious over meter . Can only be destroyed by hurling it into a vent called , and I ca n’t stress enough how stupid this is , Mount Doom .
Frodo : a hobbit — fundamentally a little human , but with absolutely none of the hardiness affiliate with a dwarf or magic of other diminutive fantasy races — tasked with destroying this immensely herculean artifact for reasons unexplainable . Sort of a pure - of - pith thing but not really .
Galadriel : the “ mightiest and clean ” of the elves still live at the clock time the Lord of the Rings assume place .
Can you assure me which of these three is think to represent Facebook ? I truly do n’t get laid . Nor can I identify what , exactly , Facebook has foregone by way of set its enticement toward overreach . Had I been living under a rock-and-roll for several years , my Assumption of Mary would be that Facebook had divested its ads job , or at the very least banned political publicizing as so many of its Silicon Valley peers have onwards of 2020 . And crucially , who the fuck is Frodo here ? !
Is he the American government ? The FEC ? The individual elector ? The Facebook user ? The wholly imagined constituency Boz believes would gladly submit to an autocratic State Department run by Facebook itself ?
Do you guess he knows Frodo gets poisoned and effectively dies two yr after run a large significant errand that can and should have been farmed out to literally anyone more capable ?
Many thing are amiss in Boz ’s note . His notion that Facebook ’s double problem only began as a result of the 2016 election ( to analmostunquantifiabledegree , thisisabsolutelyuntrue ) ; the readiness with which he hand - curl the job of misinformation ; his unfitness to reconcile the addictive nature of societal medium with its impact on polarisation .
It ’s not strange for Facebook ’s representatives to lie , shirk obligation , or otherwise do the work of hold the company range of a function at any cost to the social fabric or their own conscience . They ’re weasels ! We ’ve come to have a bun in the oven this . For our own sanity , permit ’s also cue ourselves that they ’re weasels unequal to of weaving a basic metaphor sent to a imprisoned interview of roughly 45,000 hoi polloi .
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