Sheryl Sandberg’s influence reaches all of us. But it’s a troubling legacy

If you might be studying this, odds are that you’re one of the two.87 billion every day customers of the merchandise provided by Meta, the mum or dad firm of Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. If you aren’t utilizing any of these merchandise, you might be related to individuals who do use them. And this connects you to Sheryl Sandberg, who resigned final week from her position as Meta’s chief working officer.

Even you probably have by no means met her, interacted instantly along with her or learn her books on company feminism or bereavement, Sandberg has had an influence in your life. She’s not the one cause that our knowledge is tracked on-line, whether or not we use Meta’s merchandise or not. Many others have helped to create and exploit a complete business that income from our knowledge. What’s extra, lawmakers and regulators worldwide have completed little to cease this, in no small half as a result of corporations like those Sandberg helped run spend hundreds of thousands of {dollars} yearly lobbying to stop or water down any makes an attempt at regulation.

Still, as Shera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang write in An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, Sandberg “pioneered a whole new level of tracking” and led the creation of “a new business of data mining at scale”. Put merely, “scale” means so as to add income at a sooner price than prices. Sandberg as soon as mentioned that she felt she was “put on this planet to scale organisations” and she or he has the observe document to again it up.

At Google, the place she labored earlier than becoming a member of Facebook, she led the transformation of the search engine into the world’s main digital promoting enterprise. After she took up her position at Facebook, its promoting gross sales exploded from $777m in 2009 to $117bn in 2021 – the 12 months Meta reached a market valuation of a trillion {dollars}. Along the best way, the corporate acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, had a profitable preliminary public providing (IPO) and expanded from 400 staff to greater than 77,000 at the moment. Meta is now the second main digital promoting enterprise behind Alphabet, Google’s mum or dad firm.

Yet the place Sandberg sees scale, others see one thing sinister. The Harvard emerita professor Shoshana Zuboff, writer of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, has described Sandberg because the “Typhoid Mary” of surveillance capitalism owing to her position in spreading Google’s data-mining practices to Facebook. At the center of knowledge mining is an implicit settlement: the merchandise are “free” in that we don’t must pay cash to make use of them. Instead, we “pay” with our knowledge, exchanging our on-line behaviour, preferences, social community and privateness for connection.

In the early years of these corporations, it may need been attainable for us to be ignorant of the phrases of this settlement or to minimise our complicity in it. However, since 2016 none of us might be in any doubt. We realized that Russia had manipulated Facebook to intrude within the US election. We realized, due to this newspaper’s investigations, that Facebook had improperly shared the info of 87 million customers with Cambridge Analytica to facilitate focused political promoting within the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. We realized that supporters of the previous president Donald Trump had used Facebook to organise the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. And we realized that Meta has identified about and failed to repair its position in spreading misinformation and disinformation.

With every revelation, Sandberg’s response, in lockstep with that of Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been to disclaim, deflect, apologise and promise to do higher. Yet whereas Meta has made many modifications, the basic settlement stays the identical – we give them our knowledge in trade for his or her merchandise, they translate it into billions of {dollars} in promoting revenues and horrible issues typically occur alongside the best way. If we don’t prefer it, we’re free to depart, as Meta defined in a current replace to its privateness coverage. What was as soon as implicit is now specific. None of us can declare any extra that we have no idea what we’re taking part in.

In response, some customers have deleted Facebook, stop Instagram and left Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp for Signal, a extra privacy-preserving messaging app. However, the overwhelming majority of Meta’s customers proceed to make use of its merchandise. Investors have been equally unmoved; whereas Facebook’s share worth was risky from 2018 to 2020, it resumed hovering thereafter, reversed solely by a current privacy-protecting transfer from Apple and Zuckerberg’s pricey and, up to now unproved, pivot to the metaverse.

Concerns about our privateness, the integrity of our democracies or the security of our kids had little influence on the enterprise mannequin that Sandberg so finely honed. Nor did Facebook’s position in facilitating genocide in Myanmar, which was condemned by the UN in 2018. Sandberg mentioned she was devastated and promised to do higher when testifying earlier than the US Senate intelligence committee. However, as not too long ago as March this 12 months, the Associated Press reported it was nonetheless attainable to pay for adverts calling for the killing of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim group.

But failures of content material moderation, one of Sandberg’s different tasks as chief working officer, can be half of her document – and stay a problem for Meta. As Bloomberg reported final month, it’s nonetheless attainable to promote and purchase weapons on Facebook Marketplace. Livestreaming of shootings, intercourse trafficking and the problem of moderating hate speech versus freedom of expression stay unresolved.

Artificial intelligence alone can not clear up this and Meta has not employed anyplace close to sufficient human content material moderators, that suffer horrible injury to their psychological well being whereas cleansing up the platforms – whereas having fun with none of the wealth. These are issues for different corporations, of course, however as a result of of its scale, it’s an excellent larger drawback for Meta.

Sandberg, who will stay on Meta’s board, she says, and spend extra time on her philanthropy, will go down in historical past for her success in scaling Google and Facebook and her failure to take care of the prices of that success. That is her legacy. How we select to answer it is going to be ours.

Stephanie Hare is the writer of Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics

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