Facebook wants to do good but ends up giving Americans a bad name

The Ugly American, the title of a novel published in 1958 by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, entered the language to refer to boorish American officials abroad who sought to improve the lives of natives without taking the trouble to learn their language, culture, or needs.

A long line of ugly Americans, mostly politicians and government officials from both parties, have believed that applying simple formulas based on idealised versions of US institutions -- democracy, markets, and human rights -- could convert countries like Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style consumer utopias. Inevitably, these Americans caused more harm than good.

Today, the notion is not applied to a government official but a private citizen, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

Mr Zuckerberg seemingly has received an endless stream of criticism because of Facebook's lamentable impact on American politics and culture.

Less attention has been given to Facebook's impact on foreign markets, which Mr Zuckerberg penetrated with no evident concern about the possible consequences of conducting massive social experiments in countries with weak institutions and histories of instability.

Back in 2015, Mr Zuckerberg teamed up with the musician Bono to advocate a human right to internet access. The duo wrote for the New York Times:

In Ethiopia and Tanzania, for example, farmers connect to get better prices, track inventory and make mobile insurance payments in case of bad weather. In Nigeria, citizens use BudgIT, a mobile app, to assess whether governments keep their spending promises…. In Guatemala, cellphones inform mothers how to have healthy pregnancies. In Kenya, women receive financial services via their cellphones.

Reality has turned out a bit different. In Ethiopia, Facebook posts "incite[d] mob violence, ethnic clashes, crackdowns on independent press or outspoken voices". In Nigeria, Facebook users circulated grisly images of dead bodies, which were falsely presented to suggest that members of one ethnic group massacred members of a rival ethnic group, and sparked a wave of horrific killings. In a country with 24 million Facebook users, only four people were employed to fact-check Facebook posts.

In Myanmar, Facebook accounts were used to stir up ethnic violence against the Rohingya, tens of thousands of whom have been killed and many more driven into exile. Similar accounts of Facebook being used to inflame conflict and provoke massacres have been given for Sri Lanka, Yemen, Iraq, and Bangladesh. And in many other countries, from Vietnam to Poland, governments or their supporters have used Facebook to target, harass, and endanger dissidents, political opponents, and vulnerable minorities.

In the Times piece, Mr Zuckerberg was touting internet access, not Facebook itself. But by now we know that internet access and Facebook are intertwined, both in Mr Zuckerberg's plan and in reality. In many countries, Facebook and its properties, Instagram and WhatsApp, are the dominant social media platforms, as they are in the United States.

Both the internet and Facebook have done very well since that article was published. From 2015 to today, the percentage of the global population with internet access increased from 41% to 66%, while Facebook's monthly active user base increased from 1.49 to 2.89 billion. While the extent of Facebook's contribution to the erosion of democracy and human rights over this period is unknown, the platform has clearly played a role in some of the worst atrocities around the globe, and in the coarsening of political life virtually everywhere.

But while Mr Zuckerberg's goal of "building a global community resembles American foreign policy, Facebook is of course a private entity. It is subject to American jurisdiction, not the other way around. The US foreign policy establishment, along with Congress and the president, might consider whether America owes it to the world to rein in Facebook in countries that lack the institutional capacity to do it themselves.

A few reforms suggest themselves. The US Congress could pass a law that requires American social media companies to devote resources to monitor and fact-check content abroad in proportion to the amount they spend on these activities in the US.

The title of Burdick and Lederer's novel actually referred ironically to one of the few good Americans in the story. The negative meaning stuck because the shorthand was more useful: the bad type of American greatly outnumbered the good. And now, thanks in part to Facebook's foreign policy, the ugly American is everywhere. 

https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/2213455/facebooks-ugly-american-problem-abroad