By Christopher Mims
What do Facebook Inc., the Soviet Union and the European
Reformation have in common? They all consist of networks that
formed quickly by leveraging new communications technologies and
then just as swiftly were taken over by a handful of people who
consolidated their influence over millions of people.
Some historians and scientists are coming to understand that the
internet -- and specifically Facebook -- are only the latest
examples of the revolution-spawning networks, common throughout
history, which give rise to hierarchies that both empower and
oppress.
In an indictment released Friday, special prosecutor Robert
Mueller described a scenario in which Russian operatives allegedly
exploited Facebook with the intent of influencing the 2016 U.S.
election. That Facebook could be used in this way should be no
surprise, since research has shown that the downside of powerful,
centralized networks is their susceptibility to being subverted and
exploited.
As recently as the Arab Spring in 2011, sober-sounding
intellectuals could plausibly argue that the disruptive force of
the internet, capable of upending old hierarchies, would provide
the means to spread democracy and grant new freedoms.
That view, says historian Niall Ferguson, author of the 2018
book "The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, From the
Freemasons to Facebook," was born of an all-too-common mistake --
the failure to appreciate that, even when new technologies come
along, it's still humans who are using them.
"From 1990s slogans about how we're all 'netizens' to the recent
Facebook talk of a global community, we've heard this argument ad
nauseam," Mr. Ferguson said. "And I think it has slightly robbed us
of our critical faculties."
Understanding why this happens -- why networks start out as
distributed power structures but quickly become vertical
hierarchies capable of rapidly disseminating both information and
propaganda -- requires a little network theory and some historical
perspective.
Take the Bolshevik revolutions of 1917, for instance. The
coalition of the armed forces and the industrial workforce that
overthrew the czar was, essentially, a distributed network. But the
circle of insiders who subsequently consolidated power over the
Communist Party -- whose control peaked with the rule of Joseph
Stalin -- is the hierarchy.
"A hierarchy is just a special kind of network where some nodes
have higher centrality -- the ones through which others have to
communicate or pass," Mr. Ferguson said.
Technology usually plays a role in revolutionary change. In
Russia, it was telegraphs and railroads. In the case of the
Reformation, the printing press allowed for the rapid spread of the
Bible in local languages. The distributed network of believers
posed a sudden threat to the established Catholic hierarchy, yet
once Protestantism achieved critical mass, its own hierarchy
arose.
"Luther thought that it would be great if everyone was connected
and could read the Bible in the vernacular," Mr. Ferguson said.
What Luther didn't anticipate is what would come next -- nearly 200
years of civil war.
"What happened in 16th century in Europe is visible in American
politics today, where you have two pretty hostile and separate
spheres of conservatives and liberals who are scarcely
communicating across a largely vacated middle," says Mr.
Ferguson.
To see how the power of nation- or globe-spanning networks can
be exploited, look at China's transformation of its internet into
the world's most sophisticated machine for censorship, surveillance
and social control.
The distributed nature of the internet should have posed a major
threat to a country like China. As internet activist John Gilmore
once said, "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes
around it."
Recognizing this, China built its portion of the internet from
the start as a hierarchy in which internet companies can only rent
bandwidth from government-controlled service providers. In other
words, all traffic is routed through a limited number of powerful,
central nodes.
Even when networks aren't architected for this kind of control,
they tend to organize themselves in ways that lead to
disproportionate influence by a handful of their members. When any
new person or entity joins a network, it is likely to attach to the
most visible hubs, making them even more influential, says
Albert-László Barabási, a theoretical physicist and one of the
founders of the field of network science.
In just a few years, Facebook became the world's most dominant
conduit of news and information but said it would remain neutral to
what spread through its channels. Meanwhile, a handful of engineers
were building algorithms to decide which of its 2.2 billion users
would see what.
By remaining agnostic about which influencers rose to
popularity, and helping them along by building recommendation and
newsfeed algorithms to enhance that popularity, Facebook allowed
Russia to rapidly gain influence on the site, says Nicholas
Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Yale who studies social
networks.
The company has taken steps to address these problems, but it's
Facebook's "original sin" -- to optimize for engagement above all
else as a servant of advertisers as much as of users -- that is at
the root of its issues, Dr. Christakis said.
According to Dr. Christakis, "You can connect a group of people
one way and they're kind, and cooperation spreads. But if you take
the same group of people and connect them in a different way,
they're mean sons of bitches, and they're cruel to each other."
Facebook isn't the only internet power structure like this, of
course. All the top social networks that use algorithmic feeds to
feature content have been exploited in similar ways. Alphabet
Inc.'s YouTube recently came under fire for allowing its AI to
promote extremist views. And in Friday's indictment, Mr. Mueller
named Twitter Inc. and Facebook-owned Instagram as well.
Historically, the only way to deal with this problem has been to
disrupt an established network with a fresh one. Fostering
competition could shift power away from Facebook.
Yet many have begun to argue that Facebook, with its dominance
of social media, should be treated as a monopoly, and even broken
up. One could argue that the grounds for doing so now include
national security.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 19, 2018 08:14 ET (13:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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