Lawrence Lessig: Facebook Exploits Insecurity to Sell Ads

I mean, even the reality is, you know, Facebook is a technology. I mean, here, Facebook friends are going to really hate me for this, but here, Facebook is a technology to exploit insecurity for the purpose of selling ads. That's what it does. What it does is make you feel like you check and you're like, why didn't she like that photograph or why isn't he friended me? And so you constantly engage because you're constantly trying to feed this, you know, Facebook. And that is exploiting Tristan Harris's work. It's really powerful here. It's exploiting your insecurity. Is that really what it is? Because I've always thought about it as being a fast food version of the nutrients that we're missing in an actual real community. That's so good. That's exactly the right way to think about it. But just in the same way that fast food companies figure out how to exploit the brain chemistry that makes it so that you eat chicken wings, you know, barbecue chicken wings, because they know that's what's going to feed that kind of addiction. And just like gaming companies figure out how to tweak the game so that they know how to get the addiction out of your kids, this company is really great of getting you to like turn over as much as you can to them to build you into this quote community. Why are they doing that? Not because Mark Zuckerberg is some kind of freaky guy who wants to know your secrets, but because the more you turn over to them, the better their ads are in feeding you information. So this is a technology for the purpose of engendering advertising. And so that advertising gets really, really good. And so, you know, you could say that Facebook is tilted to the left, but the reality is there was an extraordinary amount of exploitation of the advertising inside of Facebook to feed information to the right in this last election. I mean, this is what Kathleen Hall Jamins' book about this is really quite amazing in documenting. And that's because it's gotten really good and being able to segment markets on the basis of what people know or care about. Again, not because anybody planned it. Nobody wrote Jew Hater, but because the AI is smart enough to figure that out. And so when you build this technology that is driven to the purpose of making it easier to sell ads, you produce this world that, you know, has no necessary connection to people figuring out what the truth is. Again, think of cable television. Cable television is about building really loyal community, building the tribal sense of the community. If telling the truth did that, they would tell the truth. If not telling the truth does that, they will not tell the truth. The question is not whether you're telling the truth or not. The question is what builds the advertising base. And so this reality that we have these platforms that are ad driven, to store or constructs, drives that platform to develop in certain ways. And that's why I think it's important to think, well, what if we could create a competitive environment where there were different platforms available, ones that were not focused on, you know, driving ads. And this is something that, again, I think... How would they fund those? Isn't that the reason why something like Google or Facebook has gotten so big is because there's so much money behind it? Well, two things, because they've been allowed to get so big and because so much money behind it. Well, who would stop them? The antitrust departments. So the antitrust department would step in and say, Facebook, you've become too successful. The way you're buying up competitors is disturbing to us. Well, but again, think of the difference in that sentence. You've become so successful. That's one sentence. And what we want to do in America is encourage companies to become successful. I believe in innovators and markets working. That's really great. But you've bought your competitor as a separate statement. Like you have a bunch of money because the stock is so valuable because people think you're the future of money. But then you turn and use that money to buy competitors. What are you putting up, Jamie? What is this? That's the total number they've spent in the last, I don't know, I think it was seven years. It's all the companies they bought. Scroll back. Don't move. Total cost of acquisitions. What is that? $23 trillion? No, billion. Billion. $23 billion, more than the gross domestic product of Fiji, Zimbabwe, and Maldives. Maldives combined. $19 billion of that was for that one. What's that? Really? Yeah. $19 billion? Yeah. Holy. It's insane. Anyway, yeah. But the point is, when you're talking about acquisitions, you're not necessarily talking about companies that are succeeding because they're so good.