Facebook’s Many Problems Can Be Solved With One Big Change: Charge Users
The Facebook Papers highlight an array of serious problems with its product. Most of them can be tempered if users had to pay to use Facebook.
Since Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, first revealed herself as the whistleblower behind the Facebook Papers earlier this month, Facebook has become the subject of the closest thing to a public reckoning it has ever faced.
The papers have not revealed anything Big Tech pundits don’t already know, but they are nonetheless meaningful in that they serve as concrete confirmation. We no longer have to say “might be.” Facebook is a breeding ground for hate speech and misinformation and Instagram is a toxic entity for teenage girls. In the words of Mark Ruffalo’s character in Spotlight: they knew and they let it happen.
There’s a common line of thinking in media and business criticism and it’s that if you aren’t paying for the product, then you are actually the product. This is something often discussed when it comes to Facebook — primarily because Facebook has been at the center of so many data and privacy scandals — and what it means is that because Facebook is a business and the service is free to use, the company has to…
