Familiarity breeds contempt: Using Facebook doesn’t mean you understand it
During Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony on Capitol Hill, jokes and memes proliferated across social media claiming that the age of the members of the U.S. Senate is the reason they don’t understand Facebook. It wasn’t just anonymous trolls getting in on the spectacle; it was a lot of people who should know better. The truth is that Facebook is a complicated product, and just using Facebook to manage your personal profile doesn’t mean that you understand it. That’s true whether you’re 20 or 80 years old.
There are entire specialist job fields that have been created by the past decade’s boom in social media apps. Being able to upload your vacation photos doesn’t mean you are the data engineer who knows how and where they are being stored, or the intellectual property lawyer that can explain who owns the rights to them. Video production on livestreaming platforms from Twitch to YouTube has become almost as sophisticated as TV, but issues like what counts as a video view remain totally opaque even to ad buyers that spend millions of dollars trying to gain visibility on social networks. Ad buyers also know that a certain amount of money is wasted on ads that display to bots and click farms, but they don’t really know how much or have a lot of leverage to do anything about it. The idea that your U.S. Senator, whether that’s Ted Cruz or Dianne Feinstein, is going to have a handle on these issues when they don’t work with them on a daily basis is laughable. It’s not because they’re old, they just have other things to be doing that better relate to serving their constituents.
The paradox of social media is that it only works when people agree to share information, but the gatekeepers of these networks realize they have a competitive advantage in not sharing any meaningful information about the inner workings of the systems they have built. A site like Facebook is essentially a black box to everyone that does not work at Facebook. Every time a change to the algorithms that decide what to display on the website is announced, or more likely, noticed — about 50,000 people that don’t work at Facebook blink, because it means a platform they depend on to do their jobs has changed and they have to learn a new set of norms and guidelines.
Your Senator or Congressperson probably has a consultant on retainer who claims to have special knowledge about how to navigate Google’s ranking algorithm or get lots of likes on Facebook posts. But even that expert consultant only knows where the chips fall and not the actual rules of the game. Unless you know how much a Facebook ad costs, what a good click-through-rate is, or what programming stack Facebook uses… you know less about Facebook than the 100th or 1000th guy waiting in line for free swag at SXSW.
Expecting politicians who are elected based on unrelated credentials in society or in business to be able to master all of this arcane knowledge is itself an ignorant assumption. The content on a site like Facebook or Twitter is just the visible end result of a much more complicated ecosystem of engineers, network infrastructure, data centers, media companies, and ad agencies. Even Mark Zuckerberg (“the Zucc”) only controls one piece of what is really a multipolar ecosystem, and adding politicians into the mix will most likely weaken that control.
