Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is a company that has historically been known to have high interest in human behavior and a monetary interest in modifying it to suit stakeholder interests. The article that I chose as an example to illustrate that fact is one posted by Janus Rose on Motherboard (an online tech publication owned by Vice) titled, “Zuckerberg’s Meta Endgame Is Monetizing All Human Behavior.” Rose was reporting on Facebook’s move to rebrand and expand as Meta in 2021. This involved a basic run-down of Facebook’s history as a company as she believes the rebrand was made in bad faith effectively highlighting the secret fears of many social media users (Faverio, 2023). Not only does Meta store personal data on its users across its many platforms, it also creates algorithms that utilize this data to create custom tailored ads and content sorted by metadata (what developers use to describe articles, pages, and images in code to make it accessible to search engines and built-in AI algorithms without having to process the entirety of a file or code).
With the advancement of AI technology that far surpasses its common use as a search engine as far as the internet is concerned, companies like Meta have started to utilize it to reduce staff workloads and downsize their moderation departments. Online moderation and censorship is now carried out by AI bots that are programmed with the relevant or desired parameters based on keywords, image composition, and metadata. This eliminates the abstract thinking necessary for effective and ethical moderation as contextual and situational considerations are not considered when using AI for moderation purposes. As Meta illustrated in 2012 and beyond (Rose, 2021), they use a combination of personal data mining and AI technology to influence their uses’ behavior in a way that fits the narrative that they are pursuing as an organization at the time.
Meta benefits monetarily, as Rose pointed out in her article, from the sale and mining of our personal data, but they also benefit in other ways. Every ad that users see nets Meta money from the company that they run ads for and they also see a cash benefit when users click on ad links. They also continue to use AI moderators despite how ineffective of a method it is toward meaningful and productive user motivated moderation expectations. With those factors in mind, it is safe to say that Meta operates on an ego leadership style as these business practices sow extreme social unrest that spills over, often violently, into the real world. Users accuse Meta of only caring about their bottom-line and the evidence points in that direction despite its efforts to become a global industry leader in sustainability practices (Meta, 2023b).
It is my assessment that Meta will remain in the future, but not as a social networking company. The information that they gather, and their insidious methods of en masse behavioral modification, will allow them to expand into other sectors of society and professional specializations with relative ease. They have already tried doing so with the creation of Metaverse and Oculus headset technology, but their more successful ventures such as contracts with the government to provide requested data (Meta, 2023a) makes it an invaluable tool for years to come.
References
Faverio, M. (2023, October 19). How Americans feel about and manage data privacy: Key findings. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/18/key-findings-about-americans-and-data-privacy/
Meta. (2023a). Government Requests for User Data. Retrieved November 5, 2023, from https://transparency.fb.com/reports/government-data-requests/
Meta. (2023b). Homepage – Meta Sustainability. Retrieved November 5, 2023, from https://sustainability.fb.com/
Rose, J. (2021, November 1). Zuckerberg’s Meta Endgame Is Monetizing All Human Behavior. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/88g9vv/zuckerbergs-meta-endgame-is-monetizing-all-human-behavior
