[Kip Currier: On today's MSNBC Morning Joe show, The New York Post's
John Podhoretz pontificated on the same provocative assertions that he wrote about in
his March
21, 2018 opinion piece, excerpted below. It’s a post-Cambridge
Analytica “Open Letter polemic” directed at anyone (--or using Podhoretz’s term,
any fool) who signed up for Facebook “back
in the day” and who may now be concerned about how free social media sites like
Facebook use—as well as how Facebook et
al enable third parties to “harvest”, “scrape”, and leverage—people’s personal data.
Podhoretz’s argument
is flawed on so many levels it’s challenging to know where to begin. (Full
disclosure: As someone working in academia in a computing and information
science school, who signed up for Facebook some years ago to see what all the “fuss”
was about, I’ve never used my Facebook account because of ongoing privacy
concerns about it. Much to the chagrin of some family and friends who have
exhorted me, unsuccessfully, to use it.)
Certainly, there is
some level of “ownership” that each of us needs to take when we sign up for a
social media site or app by clicking on the Terms and Conditions and/or End
User License Agreement (EULA). But it’s also common knowledge now (ridiculed by
self-aware super-speed-talking advertisers in TV and radio ads!) that these agreements
are written in legalese that don’t fully
convey the scope and potential scope
of the ramifications of these agreements’ terms and conditions. (Aside: For a clever
satirical take on the purposeful impenetrability and abstruseness of these lawyer-crafted
agreements, see R. Sikoryak’s 2017 graphic novel Terms
and Conditions, which visually lampoons an Apple iTunes user contract.)
Over the course of
decades, for example, in the wake of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments and
other medical research abuses and controversies, medical research practitioners
were legally coerced to come to terms with the fact that laws, ethics, and
policies about “informed consent” needed to evolve to better inform and protect “human
subjects” (translation: you and me).
A similar argument
can be made regarding Facebook and its social media kin: namely, that tech
companies and app developers need to voluntarily adopt (or be required to
adopt) HIPAA-esque protections and promote more “informed” consumer awareness.
We also need more computer
science ethics training and education for undergraduates, as well as more
widespread digital citizenship education in K-12 settings, to ensure a level
playing field of digital life awareness.
(Hint, hint, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos or First Lady Melania Trump…here’s a mission critical for your patronage.)
Podhoretz’s
simplistic Facebook
user-as-deplorable-fool rant puts all
of the blame on users, while negating any
responsibility for bait-and-switch tech companies like Facebook and data-sticky-fingered
accomplices like Cambridge Analytica. “Free” doesn’t mean tech companies and
app designers should be free from enhanced and reasonable informed consent responsibilities they owe to their
users. Expecting or allowing anything less would be foolish.]
"The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein said it best: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Everything has a cost. If you forgot that, or refused to see it in your relationship with Facebook, or believe any of these things, sorry, you are a fool. So the politicians and pundits who are working to soak your outrage for their own ideological purposes are gulling you. But of course you knew.
You just didn’t care . . . until you cared. Until, that is, you decided this was a convenient way of explaining away the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
You’re so invested in the idea that Trump stole the election, you are willing to believe anything other than that your candidate lost because she made a lousy argument and ran a lousy campaign and didn’t know how to run a race that would put her over the top in the Electoral College — which is how you prevail in a presidential election and has been for 220-plus years.
The rage and anger against Facebook over the past week provide just the latest examples of the self-infantilization and flight from responsibility on the part of the American people and the refusal of Trump haters and American liberals to accept the results of 2016.
Honestly, it’s time to stop being fools and start owning up to our role in all this."
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