Is Facebook too big to fix?

What needs to be addressed isn’t so much some specific feature of the social media platform, but the entire underlying foundation of what it does

- Jeremy Au Yong

It is a truth universally acknowledged – at least in the media world – that a man in possession of an article that really irritates him must want the e-mail address of the writer so that he can provision the said author with a piece of his mind.

Anyone who has even a little experience writing can testify to the fact that they receive much more nasty correspondence when people hate something they wrote than when people actually quite agree with what they said.

That’s just how it works.

Happiness may make people smile to themselves. Anger makes people write in to demand that “the ignorant fat slob be fired”, or something to that effect.

We learnt last week from the growing Facebook whistle-blower scandal – or rather we had our suspicions confirmed – that this strong motivating power of fear and outrage has become the fuel that the social media giant runs on, much to the detriment of society.

And it is not entirely clear that Facebook is capable of fixing its problems or that anyone is going to force it to.

THE MOST IMPORTANT FACEBOOK SCANDAL, SO FAR?

This, after all, isn’t Facebook’s first rodeo. If anything, the trillion-dollar company which boasts hundreds of billions of users across products like WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook seems to have spent the past few years in a state of perpetual crisis management.

That said, the current crisis seems more pivotal.

Remember that time, not so long ago, when, because of Facebook’s shenanigans, we all had to learn about a company named Cambridge Analytica?