![]() When Facebook went down this week, so did the company’s other platforms Instagram and WhatsApp. The inevitability question is complicated by another dimension of scale: that Facebook is not just a U.S. Zuckerberg may well will Facebook’s inevitability into being, but we still have time to determine if we should govern Facebook as if it is inevitable. It’s hard to make a similar case for Facebook. policy, militarization and geopolitics that defending their scale is a matter of national interest. But it is at least within the realm of reason to accept that financial institutions are truly so intertwined with U.S. There is a lot to be said about whether banks should have been bailed out and who paid the long-term cost for doing so. The politics of platform scale is similar to the politics of “too big to fail” that made banks impervious to the risks of their own making during the 2008 financial crisis. It can also be seen as a foundational principle of technology’s pursuit of scale as politics. Mark Zuckerberg’s speechwriter from 2009 to 2011, Kate Losse, says that one of his favorite sayings during her time with him was “ companies over countries.” The statement could be brushed off as the braggadocio of a young billionaire. That is something that Facebook’s founder is well aware of. Yet the kinds of decisions that platforms must make, especially in content moderation, are precisely the kinds of decisions that should not be automated, and perhaps cannot be.” Entrusting decisions to algorithms when they should be made by humans is a political decision this means scale is politics. He is also the author of “Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media.” Tarleton has argued that “platforms now function at a scale and under a set of expectations that increasingly demand automation. Tarleton Gillespie is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and an affiliated associate professor at Cornell University. When platforms prioritize scale over users’ safety or even the user experience, the people who own the platform have chosen a set of political beliefs that inform their economic decisions. ![]() Opening up Facebook gave it incentives to scale and to make scale its No. It is clear now that this was also the moment that Facebook was set on the course to becoming the political boondoggle it is today. At the time, this expansion felt like a democratization of an elite online platform. ![]() By that time, anyone above age 13 with an email address could join the platform. I would not try again for two more years. I dropped that class and deactivated that, my first Facebook account. I did not realize that this digital space was an extension of the university’s institutional life, so I was surprised and dismayed when the professor scolded me for making a joke on my Facebook wall. It forced me to “like” the literature professor who encouraged us to sign up, followed by the other students in the class. I joined Facebook using my university email address, which at the time was required to sign up.įacebook’s layout and organization of information - what scholars now call “affordances” - were not intuitive to me. A young literature professor used Facebook to cultivate informal communication with the traditional-age students. I was taking classes in an adult enrichment program at a small Catholic school in Charlotte, N.C. The first time I logged in to the social networking site was around 2006. It is easy to forget how new Facebook is, but remember I do.
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