Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Tristan Harris, cofounder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology.
- Tristan Harris, a former Google employee who now advocates for a more "humane" internet, describes Facebook as an uncontrollable, monstrous duck.
- In a recent interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Harris pointed to Facebook's business model as a cause of polarization and extremism in our society.
- A combination of antitrust regulation and employee action should be used in order to "slay the duck," Harris argues.
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To one of the foremost activists for a more "humane" internet, Facebook has become a monster.
"It is a monster they can't control, and that's what we should be talking about," Tristan Harris, director and cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology, said in an interview with Business Insider at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this week.
"They built a Frankenstein and there's no easy way, with the DNA that it has, to make it a safe monster," Harris said.
Facebook's effect on society is just one part of the problem, Harris argues. The spirit of Facebook - the "move fast and break things" mentality - has skewed what's acceptable across the industry. Harris described it as a race to the bottom, where companies have started to use "less ethical, more extreme, more lizard-brain-level access" in search of more human attention. Facebook's business model has become infectious to other tech companies, he argued. It "jumps into their skin and animates them."
The problem is pervasive, Harris said. And since this business model has become the foundation for the industry as a whole, it can't be easily changed without destroying something fundamental.
"Once you have a duck, you can't turn a duck into a chicken when the DNA has already been baked," Harris said.
Harris went as far as to suggest that the only ways to fix a company like Facebook would be to break it up, through methods like antitrust legislation, or to completely remove the leadership making the decisions, like Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg. Gradual change may not be possible, he said, especially given their financial incentives of continuing to prioritize growth.
"I think people have to ask, 'Do you trust these particular human beings to make quick changes this far down the line after this many apologies?'" Harris said.
Harris previously worked for Google as a design ethicist before leaving the company and becoming an outspoken advocate for ethical technology. These days, his organization has a mission to "reverse 'human downgrading' and realign technology with humanity" through methods like encouraging tech workers to drive change in their organizations and pushing lawmakers to regulate the "attention economy."
Harris said that Facebook's culture and business model were responsible for producing polarization and extremism in our society. He pointed to a 2019 study by researchers from Northeastern University, University of Southern California, and the nonprofit Upturn that found that left-leaning political ads targeted at a left-leaning audience go further than ads that reach across the aisle.
"You start getting more polarization just through the natural operation of the business model," Harris said. "So fundamentally, even if you solve the fake news, et cetera, you still get polarization-for-profit as the designer of the business model."
Facebook's business has been under a microscope for the past several years, for everything from its mishandling of user data, to hate speech and disinformation on the platform, to Russian agents using Facebook to influence the 2016 election, to the company's decision not to fact-check political ads. The result has been intense scrutiny of Facebook's power, not just in the tech sector, but nationally and globally as well. In the view of advocates like Harris, the company has become an uncontrollable beast.
Facebook did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Slaying the duck
So, how do we fix the problem? "Slay the duck," Harris said, citing antitrust regulation.
Using antitrust regulation to curb tech companies' power has become a talking point among several Democratic presidential candidates, most notably Sen. Elizabeth Warren. In leaked audio published by The Verge, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a Warren presidency would "suck" for the company, as Warren has made breaking up big tech part of her campaign platform, and has described companies like Facebook and Amazon as monopolies.
Antitrust laws would curb some of Facebook's control, Harris said.
"The issue is about power," he said. "If you want to change their behavior, you have to have power to do so. And if they have totalizing power and asymmetric manipulation of the entire political environment - including dollars, they can out-spend any activist or nonprofit businesses - you can't compete with that level of power."
While applying these laws to the tech sector would be effective, Harris argues that there might be a stronger action society could take, one that places the power in the hands of employees: recruitment.
"They're seeing it harder and harder to recruit and retain the best employees, and that's actually one of the strongest, most immediate forms of pressure, faster than regulation - the fact that they can't hire and retain the best employees," Harris said.
Harris said it's a focus of his organization - building awareness of these issues in a way that engineers can understand in hopes it creates a "culture of responsibility" among the Silicon Valley talent pool.
"It's not just that we have this minor addiction problem or we have these bad apples, a few bots ... a few bad fake news stories," Harris said. "People have to understand the gravity of the problem."