Mark Zuckerberg: A Comic Book Villain for Our Times
Yesterday the Washington Post ran a story indicating that, for several years, Facebook assigned the “anger emoji” five times more algorithmic weight than the “like” emoji. That choice did two things. First, it generated more actual anger in the world, given the platform’s reach of several billion users. Second, it turbocharged the spread of lies, distortions, and disinformation, as internal company research — finally leaked to the public — showed a significant correlation between enraging content and utter, batshit crazy lies and bullshit.
In the United States, that anger manifested in events like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the January 6, 2021 attack on our Capitol. In other nations, it was far worse. In Myanmar, for example, Facebook anger-weighting helped unleash murder, rape, and genocide. Quite intentionally, the psyops guys in that nation’s military created inflammatory memes specifically designed to weaponize Facebook in their efforts to turn the Buddhist majority against the Muslim minority. In 2018, the army and violent mobs eradicated more than 24,000 Rohingya people during the Facebook-inspired purge.
24,000.
Facebook claims that they have changed the emoji-weighting policy. Yet, when so many lies pass unchallenged on this site, I suppose it’s up to you if you believe them or not. My sense is that even if they tweaked that one part of the internal alchemy, they made up for it by reintroducing rage drivers somewhere else.
Let’s face it, for all the benefit it provides, Facebook is toxic.
What’s remarkable to me today is just how cinematically grotesque that particular manifestation of Facebook’s toxicity truly was — and I mean that literally. While reading the story in the Post yesterday, I had this nagging thought that I’d seen this all before on the big screen.
It took a while for the reference to surface, but by the late afternoon, I had it.
Christopher Nolan, in 2005, made the blockbuster Batman Begins staring the ever-charming Christian Bale as the Dark Knight. The movie, by my reckoning, was an over-long and poorly scripted bogfuck — but it did give us a nearly perfect template for understanding Mark Zuckerberg’s captaincy here at Facebook. One of the many villains in Batman Begins was Scarecrow, given form by the genuinely excellent Cillian Murphy. Scarecrow was, of course, a mad scientist — as that is the trope of comic book movies. His backstory detailed a life of humiliation and bullying as a child and an adulthood spent pursuing the chemical origins of fear. Once he’s gone full-bonkers, he designs a drug that, if widely enough dispersed, could terrorize all of Gotham City by eliciting the citizenry’s darkest fears.
To spread the drug and achieve his nefarious ends, Scarecrow doped the city’s water supply.
In Batman Begins, the gruff and gritty Bale shows up in a fancy car to save the day — but sadly, that’s where our comparison breaks down. We don’t have a Caped Crusader who can toss the evil genius into a cell at Arkham Asylum. All we’ve got is a Captured Congress and a population that loves, loves, loves to be enraged. All we have is a nation addicted to its own epinephrine and cortisol cocktail of violence and mindless wrath. Would that it were all as easy as in the movies.
I don’t have a solution for any of this, and complaining about Facebook on Facebook is obviously problematic. Moreover, in this much, at least, Mark Zuckerberg is absolutely correct: The anger that his platform amplifies arises from people. Anger, simply, is an essential part of who we are. Rage, like it or not, is a central aspect of what it means to be human.
What right does any of us have to deny people their emotions?
That’s a fair argument to make in a democracy. Though, of course, we also have to recognize that an unregulated Facebook might make democracy untenable in very short order. It’s a fair argument to have in either America or Myanmar or any other place on the planet where folks communicate their convictions and ideals. Though one must admit that if you’re being beaten to death or raped by a murderously violent mob inspired by Zuckerberg amplified lies, it’s probably not very persuasive.
Whatever decisions lie ahead, this much is true: We will make choices as a functioning polity, or Facebook will make those choices for us as a profit-driven company — and rage, oh my, how it sells.
