Understanding how the intersection of Facebook’s incentives and their potential misalignment with the values of libraries and society is likely to be a driving force in creating the technology of the future.
This column examines different models Facebook has tried to resolve the legitimacy challenges raised by its massive scale.
The misinformation example highlighted in the previous column and the XCheck controversy in this part underscore that an organization of Facebook’s size creates problems that may have similar dynamics to smaller social media companies or other large technology companies, but the resolutions to those problems might look very different.
Navigating the challenges of this kind of social media will be one of the primary tests of how libraries deal with technology in the future and set the course for the technology that comes after.
