Facebook at 20: how safe is social media?

There wasn’t much cause for celebration at Facebook this week as the social media giant prepared to turn 20.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and CEO of parent company Meta, was one of several tech bosses grilled – and in some cases, criticised – by the US Senate about their online child safety policies. “You have blood on your hands,” Republican senator Lindsey Graham told Zuckerberg.

The hearing began with “testimonies from those targeted by abusers on social media”, said The Independent, and was held amid a bipartisan push to pass the Kids Online Safety Act. It was an inauspicious start to birthday celebrations for Facebook, which has long been accused of doing little to protect its users.

Amid “macroeconomic turmoil” in 2022, said Hannah Murphy in the Financial Times, social media companies began facing criticism from politicians and the public, “who felt they had prioritised profit over safety”. Social media sites harvested data while they “algorithmically curated content curation and online popularity contests”.

At this week’s Senate hearing, the CEOs “acknowledged shortfalls” and highlighted measures taken to improve their products, said ABC News. But the senators “hammered” the top bosses for “lobbying efforts” that have “gotten in the way of federal legislation”. Senator Josh Hawley told Zuckerberg that Facebook was “a disaster for teenagers” – a statement “met with applause and cheers”,  saidThe Independent.   

Until now, these social media companies “have mostly been free to make the rules”, said The Economist, but from 25 August they will “lose much of this sovereignty”, after the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) comes into force. 

So far regulators across the world have tried to fix problems “after the fact”, but the new rules are designed to “help them get ahead of the game”. Tech companies have begun to tweak their services, with Facebook “developing tools that will tell users when the visibility of their posts has been limited”. The changes “should make online platforms safer and better”, but depends on “how the DSA is put into practice”.  

Despite the concerns raised by politicians and the wider population, however, a study by the Oxford Internet Institute concluded that there was “no evidence linking Facebook adoption and negative well-being”. The evidence for harm is “on balance, more speculative than conclusive”, the researchers said.

What next?

Zuckerberg has “cast about for other big ideas to futureproof his company”, including direct messaging, streaming and crypto, said Bloomberg, “before falling for the idea of the metaverse”. He “committed Facebook to this vision so completely” that he changed the company’s name to Meta. But his new project “looks like a colossal failure”, with the company losing $50 billion and still “unclear that it’s hit on something regular people will ever want to use”.   

Although the core business remains profitable, Bloomberg added, “its days of hockey-stick growth are over”, with some employees claiming that “stultifying bureaucracy” has led to “the departure of talented workers”. And “those familiar with a company that’s spent years lurching from one crisis to the next” are “already bracing for another case of whiplash”.     

Zuckerberg is about to embark on “his most ambitious plan yet”, wrote Danny Forston in The Sunday Times – building an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. Whether AGI or the “singularity” – the point in the future “where tech becomes out of control and irreversible” – is achievable “and not a science-fiction fantasy” is up for debate. 

Zuckerberg, however, hopes to have more success than he did with “the last hair-brained scheme he tried to foist onto the world”.