Opening Insights: From Bad to Worse
Leadership, direction and marketing are terms that are incredibly important and interdependent. The leadership of a company drives the direction and marketing with the mission, vision and goals of the organization. When the mission, vision and goals of the organization are not aligned with the interests of the common good eventually the truth surfaces.
As Facebook continue to try and keep their head above water a 2016 memo by VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth just surfaced suggesting that the platform's growth should be the primary objective: above concerns of suicide, bullying or organized terror attacks.
Informational Insights: Facebook Leadership in Action
The 2016 memo, titled “the ugly” and was published on Buzzfeed1. In the memo Bosworth writes, “anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”
...Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.
So we connect more people
That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
And still we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.
That isn't something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.1
While Bosworth came out claiming that this internal memo was from 2016, it is clear from his 2017 opening keynote at OMR Festival 2017, what his and Facebook's primary objective was and has always been: to connect people no matter the consequences, with no responsibility or accountability for the outcome which may have been initiated and facilitated using their platform. The ends may have justified the means for Facebook, however the realities of their lack of leadership, social conscience, social care or concern and "deliberately exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology"2 have destroyed any consumer trust in the platform.
Sources:
1 https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data?utm_term=.ykM1R1vBx#.rj2JKJXqp
2 //www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/03/26/david-martin-jones-utopian-ambitions-meet-big-data/
Possibilities for Consideration: Social Media Realties
- Where do we go from here?
- Do we leave Facebook, like the drunk leaving the bar?
- Do we say drinking the kool aid and ignore the consequences of our social presence and how we are being manipulated?
- Do we jump to a more "ethical" social media platform, like the drunk finding a new watering hole?
- Have we become too conditioned, too trained to seek that like to leave...?
- Have we become too conditioned to not just Facebook, but all the social media and tech giants that use our vulnerabilities and sell our data, to keep us distracted and addicted?
Add Your Insight: Reunite Under Human Interests?
Whenever a new technology is introduced into society, there must be a counterbalancing human response - that is, high touch - or the technology is rejected... We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature.
JOHN NAISBITT