How Facebook’s Algorithm Makes Zuckerberg the Most Powerful Human in History | Oliver Luckett

There's been so much conversation recently about societal bubbles, echo chambers, media bubbles, personal algorithm bubbles. My newsfeed told me that everyone thought the same way I did. And there's a conflict there. One of the biggest reasons that those emerged was that companies like Facebook—at the end of the day, you're the product they're selling. They're actually selling you as a sale on that network; they're selling you to advertisers. So they need to put a nice polite bow around you, and they need to find look-alike audiences that think like you and look like you.

And the easiest way to do that is algorithmically to focus on, and at the same time, there was never the dislike button; there was the like button. So if you have a positive-based signaling system like that that is designed to create a polite community of like-minded people, so that I could be targeted easier by an advertiser because my information is what's being sold, then the result of that is going to be a nice polite bubble echo chamber.

And we're seeing that right now. People are astonished that I didn't see the other half of this community, literally half of them that thought differently than me. I don't see the ideas of that. At no point in modern history or in any human history has one person had as much control over what we think, what we see, or what we do than Mark Zuckerberg. He has more power than anyone in human history right now.

And the scariest thing about it is because I don't think he's innately a bad person; I don't know him enough to say one way or the other. But the problem is it's not transparent. We have no idea what dials are being pulled or what knobs are being turned that are controlling the information coming to us.

There are two big moments that I've had that made me really think about this. The first is that I used to represent a bunch of celebrities who were uncomfortable coming into platforms like Facebook because they didn't know if it was about them as a celebrity or if it was about them as a high school friend. So we worked early on with Facebook and with other platforms to kind of set a set of rules: here's how we would engage with a famous person, and a Facebook page would mean this.

And so we helped those celebrities create content to talk to their audiences and build a direct connection. Suddenly, there were people like Mark Wahlberg or Charlize Theron or Hugh Jackman or any of these people that are massive accounts inside of social; they suddenly looked like massive media networks. The idea that one person could push a button and reach 20 million fans was a big threat to a business model based on me selling the advertising, not on the celebrity selling the advertising.

And that was really one of the births of the algorithmic suppression of content. We started seeing that on code drop Tuesdays in Facebook. Suddenly, a person that would reach five million people out of the 12 million that they had as fans—people loved their content and would engage 100,000 likes, 300,000 likes, really great content that people loved—we would just see that being dialed down.

We started seeing it at such a mass scale, and that's where a lot of the ideas of this book came from: I was looking at a trillion pieces of data a month across this network that was connected to at times over eight billion connections in a system that was only 700 million people at the time. So we had a really good snapshot of what was happening.

As the business model grew for Facebook, it was dial it down, dial it down weekly, and people started screaming, "But you bait and switched me! You told me to make content. I went out there and I put money into your system to gain followers, to gain fans." It wasn't just celebrities; it was companies like The New York Times or companies like yourselves or companies that wanted to reach an audience and build a base. Then suddenly, Facebook said, "Well, you know, I understand that this is based on a trusted system between you and your consumer, and that consumer subscribed to you because they really want to hear from you, but we're the business in between now."

And that's a hard business to be in from a long-term perspective because I subscribed to someone because I trust that source and I need that source. That algorithm—until we have transparency—and then at the same time, you read about these studies where Facebook arbitrarily without anyone knowing took 300,000 random people and turned up positive content that week and turned up negative content the next week.

They just wanted to do an experiment on people. You can't do experiments on people without them agreeing. Oh, it's in our click-through terms of service 27 pages deep: we're going to do random experiments on you socially. Those are things that are really troubling to me, and those are things that in my mind are a rallying cry around transparency of these algorithms, around transparency of why am I getting this information?

What is the reason behind this? And not six different emotions that I can express of "wow" or sadness or anger, like "fuck you, I'm not that stupid. Give me transparency." If 70 percent of millennials are now receiving news information from Facebook, please show me some transparency in the sources, in the trust factor. What is the edge rank?

Facebook perfected edge rank as a concept that now puts it in people's vocabulary of the trusted credit score between myself as a content provider and my audience. We don't know anymore. There is no transparency. It's really arbitrary, and that scares me. That terrifies me.

And it's not just in the newsfeed. I had an experience where I sent an image from a medical textbook of a guy that I was in a fight with, and I was like, "You're acting like you have a micropenis." I went in Google and I searched and I typed "micropenis," and of the first image I got was from a medical textbook of a 47-year-old person. I dragged that into my Facebook chat window and sent it.

Instantly, I was riding passenger in a car; the stereo went off because my Spotify was connected. My Facebook account was blocked; of course, Instagram, I couldn't get into that. I couldn't get into SoundCloud because I used my Facebook for there. I was like, "What?" So I tried to log back into Facebook. It said, "You're under investigation for international child pornography." I was like, "What?"

So I went back to Google, and I was like, "Okay, that's a medical textbook. It's a 47-year-old; I have the proof that this is not child pornography." And then I was enraged. I was like, "Who do I call?" So I went in the helpline, and they said, "There's nothing you can do. You're under review. We'll get back to you within three days maybe." That was the response.

I was like, "Wait, these people have my identity. All these things that I'm relying upon are connected to this system." The guy never received the image on the other side because I called him, and I said, "Did you get an image for me?" He said, "No, it just shut off." That's terrifying to me.

Someone can just be erased from a system without any recourse, without anything? That's too much power for one person. And so I've been pushing a lot, and what I've been saying lately is somebody should invent identity within the blockchain so that we have an identity system that is mine. In Iceland, we have this thing called a Kennitala. It's a unique identifier that is literally your unique ID: your genetic records, your health records, your financial records—all in one—and it allows me to have total transparency across a system and anyone that I'm encountering.

So you don't need a payday lender or a check-cashing place or a credit score or any of these third-party parasites that exist in our system because you have real identity. Those are kind of fundamental things that I think out of this new awareness we're going to start realizing that we need incorruptible identity. We need to have our digital identity as part of us, of who we are as human beings, as part of this system.

Because relying upon a commercial interest like Facebook to have our identity, to capture everything it means in our digital life, and they can just flip a switch—ask anybody that's been blocked by Facebook. There is no recourse. You're up to somebody in a farm deciding whether or not you're a good person or a bad person or whether or not you deserve an account. That is way too much power for any institution to have over us.