A few years ago it was common to see posts on Facebook along the lines of “Facebook owns all your photos on the platform, copy and paste this text to take back control”.
Sometimes these posts would arrive bearing the textual equivalent of an empty briefcase, spiced up with legalese like: “I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to my personal information, pictures, and posts, both past and future….”
These statuses came in waves, sweeping across our feeds. This has since been myth-busted repeatedly, so I hope we’re all now on the same page: first, that is not what Facebook T&Cs actually say. Second, posting that text to your status — no matter how much jargon you throw in it — is not going to achieve much.
Still, it wasn’t that long ago — about 2012 in my circles — that this was of considerable concern for many. It’s funny (in a painful, slapstick way) to consider how naive we were about Facebook then. The social network had been around for about five years, and advertising was present from nearly its beginning, but we couldn’t have grasped how pivotal it would become in global societies, in our lives, and exactly how our data would play into that.
Alert privacy advocates warned us. And this is likely the root of the “photo copyright” panic. Like all good urban legends, these grew from a nugget of truth, the language in the T&Cs was purposefully broad.
Today’s Facebook terms of service note that you retain ownership of your content, but also “you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free and worldwide licence to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of your content”. Pragmatically, they need this to show the selfie you uploaded to your friends. They are also creating room for themselves to use your public comments and pictures in an advert or on-device mock-up, for example.
The worry that Facebook could be licensing your photos and selling them on turns out to be a red herring. The platform and its parent company — now called Meta — is making bank on your back, just not in the way most people expected.
Facebook has perfected the art of selling and exploiting data, your data. It knows almost every possible metric of its 3-billion users. It knows your birth date, location, political leanings and favourite musicians. It knows who you know, what celebrities you like, the schools you attended, the jobs you’ve had, and the locations you’ve visited.
That alone is a gold mine for advertising, but the real magic lies in exploiting this knowledge to keep you engaging with content, whiling away hours on its app. Researchers tell us the likes, outrage and notifications function not unlike the blinks and beeps of slots machines, and just as rigged.
Facebook’s algorithm prioritises controversial content, and in this way promotes disinformation. This is no longer a matter of solid-but-speculative talk from critics. The recent leak of internal documentation shows it was built this way, weighting the reaction (“love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry”) emojis on posts as five times more valuable than simple likes (the “thumbs up” icon).
This was flagged by concerned insiders in 2017. In 2019 its own data boffins found that posts meeting with angry reactions were far and away more likely to include “misinformation, toxicity and low-quality news”, according to the Washington Post’s outstanding explainer on this in October this year. Posts are given a score in this way, and that is used to determine where and when you see it.
They knew. They knew the result of this was wider sharing of harmful and divisive content. The content moderators were left tramping at the outskirts of a raging wildfire. The system wasn’t malfunctioning. The malfunction was the system.
Content moderation teams were even more poorly equipped to manage harmful content that didn’t appear in English. For some the harms go way beyond that low-grade stress a Facebook feed full of bile and bigotry can induce.
In 2018 an investigation by Reuters and the Human Rights Centre at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law showed how Facebook failed to curb hate speech and posts that amount to incitement of violence against the Rohingya ethnic minority community in Myanmar.
At the time, 700,000 Rohingya had already fled the country, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to bolster the Burmese content moderation team. Still, thousands of posts calling for a Nazi-esque final solution were left to fester on what is essentially the front page of the internet in that country.
This week a group of Rohingya refugees filed a suit against Meta in California, seeking $150bn on the grounds that Meta failed to act against the hate speech. It also cites reports that the Myanmar military used fake social accounts for “information combat”. They are not the first to lodge filings along these lines, in the US and abroad.
Crucially, no-one is saying Meta is directly responsible for these types of comments, but rather that it has a duty of care (or moderation) for comments on its platform.
Various legal experts have said they don’t feel the class action is likely to succeed. The platform and its parent are protected (in the US) under the controversial section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grants broad protections against liability for external or user content. A recent oped in the LA Times makes the point that this amounts to something like a federal subsidy, shielding Facebook from what it calls “an important form of societal regulation: lawsuits”.
In the case of our comments, our data, and — yes — our photos, Facebook is not the author, but the distributor. It has taken raw material and created an incredible profit machine based on processing, displaying and feeding that back to us. Now we’re being asked to determine, both legally and socially, whether we can and will hold it responsible for this.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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