With prefers-reduced-motion, developers can create UIs that don’t move when users opt out. Could this feature be a way of meeting WCAG 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide?

Rian recently asked this question in Fronteers Slack and I thought I would write up some thoughts around this for later reference. I will go into three things: what’s 2.2.2 about, how could using prefers-reduced-motion be a way to meet it and is that desirable?

What is 2.2.2 about?

Moving, blinking and scrolling content can be a barrier to:

• people who cannot read text fast or track moving objects
• people who use screen readers, this kind of content can cause trouble there
• people who have attention deficit disorders

Success Criterion 2.2.2 says that for such content, there should be a “mechanism for the user to pause, stop, or hide it”. The exception is content that is considered “essential”, like when removing it would radically change the content or if this UI is really the only way to display the functionality. If this content auto-updates, a mechanism to set how often updates happen is also fine.

All of this is about content that moves regardless of user interaction. For content that moves when people “interact” (eg scroll or zoom), think parallax effects, this could badly effect people with vestibular disorders. 2.3.3 Animation from Interactions (Level AAA) is specifically about this interaction-triggered motion.

Is prefers-reduced-motion sufficient for 2.2.2 conformance?

What and how

These days, most operating systems let users indicate whether they want to see less motion.

On macOS, the setting is under Accessibility, Display, Reduce motion

This functionality exists for pretty much the same reasons as Success Criterion 2.2.2. In Media Queries, Level 5, CSS adds a way for web developers to respond to and honour the setting to prefer reduced motion.

In CSS, it works like this:

.thing {
  /* some rules */
}
@media (prefers-reduced-motion) {
  .thing { 
    /* some rules for if user
       prefers reduced motion*/
  }
}

In JavaScript, you can also read out the value for prefers-reduced-motion with matchMedia, and even add listen to its change event:

var query = window.matchMedia('(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)');

query.addEventListener('change', () => {
  if (!query.matches) {
    /* some rules */
  } else {
    /* some rules for if user
       prefers reduced motion*/
  } 
}

Conformance

I would say a UI that has moving parts that would cause it to fail 2.2.2, could meet it if those moving parts are removed under the condition of prefers-reduced-motion being set to true. In practice, for this to work, a user would have to set this preference in their operating system and they use a browser that supports it.

The crucial part of the Success Criterion text, I think, is:

for [moving, blinking and scrolling content] there is a mechanism for the user to pause, stop, or hide it

(emphasis mine; exception and exact definition of the content this applies removed for clarity)

I feel setting ‘prefers reduced motion’ could count as such a mechanism, for most cases of moving content.

Is it “accessibility supported”?

In WCAG, there is this concept of ‘accessibility supported’, meaning that you can somewhat trust on platform features, but only if you’re certain they will work for most of your users. Like, if there was an amazing new HTML tag that allowed you to do very accessible tabs, but only one obscure browser can actually render it, that is not considered accessibility supported.

“Accessibility supported” requires two things to be true: it has to work in a user’s assistive technology and there are browsers, plugins or even paid user agents that support the feature (paid, as long as price and findability are same for users with and without disabilities). W3C and the WCAG authors (AGWG) only provide these rules, not a specification of what meets them or doesn’t meet them, so it’s up to the accessibility community to agree.

I believe this is a feature that doesn’t depend on assistive technology support as it lives in browsers, so I will deem that first clause to be not applicable and look just at the browser support. For ‘prefers-reduced-motion`, caniuse shows 93% of users are on browsers that support it. It is important to note that some screenreader users may be on older browsers, for a variety of reasons. Among respondents to WebAIM’s most recent screenreader user survey, Internet Explorer usage was 3.3%. To include even those users, one could use prefers-reduced-motion defensively.

I wrote this would be fine to meet WCAG in ‘most cases’. When is it not? Examples could be those when the ‘moving’ means the site adds new content, like in a stock ticker, as Jonathan Avila suggests on GitHub. Not adding that content would be undesirable, as it would make that content unavailable to users with the setting turned on.

Is this desirable?

If we want an accessible web, we shouldn’t just look for the bare minimum to conform. When I carry out accessibility conformance evaluations, measuring that minimum is what I consider my goal, but, of course, web accessibility is about more than such audits. People with disabilities should have equal usability and that requires best practices and user testing, in addition to standards conformance.

So, ‘is this desirable?’ is a usability question. Will people who need the setting actually discover, understand and use it? The setting can be in a variety of places. MDN has a list of settings that cause Firefox to honour prefers-reduced-motion, presumably these are similar for Chromium and Webkit based browsers. It seems likely to me that lots of people won’t find this setting. So it doesn’t just give control to end users, it also shifts the burden of knowing and using the setting to them. Operating systems can (and sometimes do) improve discoverability of features like these, though.

Generally, I love the idea of features like prefers-reduced-motion standardised primitives to accommodate specific user requirements. I think it’s better than every web developer inventing their own controls to meet the same user needs. In the case of 2.2.2, controls like pause buttons or duration settings. I love the idea that the platform offers generalised controls that aren’t just used on one specific website, but can be respected by all websites.

Similar features

After I published this post, Bram Duvigneau of the Dutch accessibility consultancy Firm Ground, sent me a note that included a few more web platform features that help meet WCAG criteria:

• in most modern browsers, there is a global mute key. Might this mean websites don’t need to build their own mute buttons to meet 1.4.2 Audio Control?
• also in most modern browsers, are controls to decrease and increase text size: we no longer expect websites to have their own buttons for this either

The ‘Mute this tab’ button in a Firefox tab

The mute and text sizing buttons are much easier to find in web browsers for users. Should browsers also expose a much easier to find ‘stop motion’ button whenever a website implements prefers-reduced-motion, so that a user is more explicitly presented with this option?

Summing up

As you can read, I’m a little torn on whether prefers-reduced-motion is a sufficient way to meet 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide for specific cases of that criterion. In terms of conformance, I would say yes, this is acceptable (with exceptions). In terms of actual usability, which is what is most important, I’m torn as it only actually works if real users find this setting on their device.

Over to you! If you’re reading this, I would love to hear what you think!

---

Originally posted as Meeting “2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide” with prefers-reduced-motion on Hidde's blog.

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The applause seemed louder than usual. They were stoked, this community of European nerds, designers and lots of people in between. At last. After almost two years without Beyond Tellerrand conferences, Marc Thiele decided to make it work and run another event. It was great to see him back on stage, introducing speakers and more.

Of course, it was anything but a normal event. Not all regulars could or wanted to attend. Naturally, they were missed. Those who did attend, mostly local or local-ish, had to stick to the ‘2G+’ rule: to be vaccinated, recovered or PCR tested. I felt lucky I could be there, to attend a number of wonderful talks, meet folks in person and speak. I didn’t find the risk assessment easy… for myself, for others… but, given the circumstances, it seemed like the right call to attend.

The talks

Recordings of last week’s Beyond Tellerrand are already up on YouTube and Vimeo. Check out the event page for links: there is awesome content about variable fonts, quarantine life, sketching as a tool, the <head> tag and how it affects web performance, the attention economy, OAuth from a usability perspective, creative typography and how modern font tech allows for it, data visualisation and experiencing disability.

Recordings for all talks are available

I opened the second day with a full length talk just about semantics. Inspired by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who equated meaning to use, I explained semantics is fundamentally about a system of meaning that is shared. Shared through a standard: HTML. This is how it differs from other examples of shared languages, like design systems and APIs. Through examples, I tried to show how semantic HTML affects end users and talked a little about gotchas (see the recording for more).

In person

It was special to me to speak at Beyond Tellerrand. Not only was it ten years after attending the first edition, it was also after over a year of just virtual talks. Virtual events are great. They have allowed me to speak in more places, without the travel. Last month I could attend W3C TPAC and Accessibility Toronto on the same day, while I also met my manager in Boston for a 1:1 and cooked family dinner at home. Which brings me to the downside… if you can be everywhere at once, are you really anywhere fully?

In virtual events, I’ve often not attended the whole thing, because I find that a lot harder while at my desk and at home. At my desk, there is also other work waiting. At home, there is family. I love my work, but picking between work and family is easy, I will pick family, unless I’ve actually travelled away.

In person, it felt easier to focus on just the event. It meant that I could bump into people in the hallways. Not literally, of course. I got more immediate feedback and much more time with attendees, organisers and fellow speakers. The feeling of being in an auditorium with others, laughing about the same jokes, enjoying the same beautiful typography on a huge screen, inpromptu ramen lunches… it’s all hard to replicate virtually.

Accessibility Club and Indie Web Camp

In the days after the conference, some of us gathered in the newly opened Zentralbibliothek, Düsseldorf’s public library. On Wednesday there was an Accessibility Club Meetup. I talked about opportunities for browsers to contribute to accessibility issues. Molly Watt shared her experiences as a deafblind user of technology and urged us to make less assumptions about and test more with users. Karl Groves warned us to not trust vendors of accessibility overlays. This was all livestreamed and it was awesome to watch Marc and Aaron setting up their elaborate streaming setup.

On Thursday, I left for home, but not before I had attended the informal yet important pre-event coffee session and the planning for that day’s Indie Web Camp. It was my first Indie Web Camp, and I had wanted to attend for a while. I decided to work on the Webmentions on this website. That afternoon, in my train back, I tweaked how likes and shares, the most common form of Webmention I receive here, are displayed. They now show all in one paragraph, rather than as individual comment-like entries. This cleaned up the comment section for most posts on this site, which was nice.

Summing up

This was fun, and I hope it can happen again in the not too distant future. In the next few weeks, I have some more virtual and hybrid events. Here’s to hoping that 2022 will bring more opportunities to safely gather in person with web friends, including those who live further away. Because, for one, I missed this.

---

The post In person was first posted on hiddedevries.nl blog | Reply via email

The applause seemed louder than usual. They were stoked, this community of European nerds, designers and lots of people in between. At last. After almost two years without Beyond Tellerrand conferences, Marc Thiele decided to make it work and run another event. It was great to see him back on stage, introducing speakers and more.

Of course, it was anything but a normal event. Not all regulars could or wanted to attend. Naturally, they were missed. Those who did attend, mostly local or local-ish, had to stick to the ‘2G+’ rule: to be vaccinated, recovered or PCR tested. I felt lucky I could be there, to attend a number of wonderful talks, meet folks in person and speak. I didn’t find the risk assessment easy… for myself, for others… but, given the circumstances, it seemed like the right call to attend.

The talks

Recordings of last week’s Beyond Tellerrand are already up on YouTube and Vimeo. Check out the event page for links: there is awesome content about variable fonts, quarantine life, sketching as a tool, the <head> tag and how it affects web performance, the attention economy, OAuth from a usability perspective, creative typography and how modern font tech allows for it, data visualisation and experiencing disability.

Recordings for all talks are available

I opened the second day with a full length talk just about semantics. Inspired by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who equated meaning to use, I explained semantics is fundamentally about a system of meaning that is shared. Shared through a standard: HTML. This is how it differs from other examples of shared languages, like design systems and APIs. Through examples, I tried to show how semantic HTML affects end users and talked a little about gotchas (see the recording for more).

In person

It was special to me to speak at Beyond Tellerrand. Not only was it ten years after attending the first edition, it was also after over a year of just virtual talks. Virtual events are great. They have allowed me to speak in more places, without the travel. Last month I could attend W3C TPAC and Accessibility Toronto on the same day, while I also met my manager in Boston for a 1:1 and cooked family dinner at home. Which brings me to the downside… if you can be everywhere at once, are you really anywhere fully?

In virtual events, I’ve often not attended the whole thing, because I find that a lot harder while at my desk and at home. At my desk, there is also other work waiting. At home, there is family. I love my work, but picking between work and family is easy, I will pick family, unless I’ve actually travelled away.

In person, it felt easier to focus on just the event. It meant that I could bump into people in the hallways. Not literally, of course. I got more immediate feedback and much more time with attendees, organisers and fellow speakers. The feeling of being in an auditorium with others, laughing about the same jokes, enjoying the same beautiful typography on a huge screen, inpromptu ramen lunches… it’s all hard to replicate virtually.

Accessibility Club and Indie Web Camp

In the days after the conference, some of us gathered in the newly opened Zentralbibliothek, Düsseldorf’s public library. On Wednesday there was an Accessibility Club Meetup. I talked about opportunities for browsers to contribute to accessibility issues. Molly Watt shared her experiences as a deafblind user of technology and urged us to make less assumptions about and test more with users. Karl Groves warned us to not trust vendors of accessibility overlays. This was all livestreamed and it was awesome to watch Marc and Aaron setting up their elaborate streaming setup.

On Thursday, I left for home, but not before I had attended the informal yet important pre-event coffee session and the planning for that day’s Indie Web Camp. It was my first Indie Web Camp, and I had wanted to attend for a while. I decided to work on the Webmentions on this website. That afternoon, in my train back, I tweaked how likes and shares, the most common form of Webmention I receive here, are displayed. They now show all in one paragraph, rather than as individual comment-like entries. This cleaned up the comment section for most posts on this site, which was nice.

Summing up

This was fun, and I hope it can happen again in the not too distant future. In the next few weeks, I have some more virtual and hybrid events. Here’s to hoping that 2022 will bring more opportunities to safely gather in person with web friends, including those who live further away. Because, for one, I missed this.

---

Originally posted as In person on Hidde's blog.

Reply via email

Last week, I attended a conversation with Cecilia Kang, the New York Times journalist who co-authored An Ugly Truth with Sheera Frankel. It was a lot about patterns in Facebook’s decisions, leadership style and press relations.

I was delighted to be back in a conference hall, and it happened to be the one where we hosted Fronteers 2009 and Mobilism 2011, the memories! These events had sponsors like Opera, Internet Explorer 8 and Blackberry. Anyway, I digress, let’s talk about Facebook.

Profit over people

Facebook wants two things, Kang emphasised: connect all people together through technology and grow their business. Sounds reasonable? Maybe, but these goals impact one another in a very specific way. Facebook sells ads. You can get most people to look at ads if the content triggers people, including when it is upsetting, hateful content. Growing business ends up growing hate. The site does bring people together, yes, but it profits most when they are upset together. And, problematically, maximising profit is the end goal, The Ugly Truth shows.

Is bad content a problem? Kind of, but most platforms have some of that and we should probably blame the authors of that content, not Facebook. Is profit a problem? Or maximising it? It isn’t that per se. All companies try to make profit, most try to make a lot. The problem is profit at the expense of people’s wellbeing and safety. This is where the tobacco and oil company comparisons come in. Facebook understands which content angers or harms people. They ran experiments with happier and less depressing newsfeeds. They knew about persecution of Rohingya people in Myanmar, fired up by a politician they gave a voice. They knew about extremists using their platform to organise storming the Capitol. They knew about the medical misinformation that undermined solutions for the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The thing is, extremism, misinformation and hate thrive on amplification, on being widely shared. Facebook’s inaction is so problematic, because it facilitates and accelerates that amplification to make more money. There would be extremists, liars and haters in a world without Facebook, but they would thrive a lot less less. They would thrive less on regular tv, and they would thrive less on a social media platform with more ethical content priorities. There are other platforms too that are based on amplification, which often have similar problems, but this is post is not about them.

The Facebook Papers, a large set of documents released by whistleblower Frances Hauben to a dozen news outlets, clearly confirm the conclusions of An Ugly Truth: Facebook knows what they amplify and don’t care enough to stop. Of course, they contract huge amounts of content moderators and mark COVID-19 information from trusted sources, but leadership decisions consistently put engagement (profit) before safety (moderating harmful content).

The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance:

Again and again, the Facebook Papers show staffers sounding alarms about the dangers posed by the platform—how Facebook amplifies extremism and misinformation, how it incites violence, how it encourages radicalization and political polarization. Again and again, staffers reckon with the ways in which Facebook’s decisions stoke these harms, and they plead with leadership to do more.

And again and again, staffers say, Facebook’s leaders ignore them.

(From: ‘History Will Not Judge Us Kindly’ in The Atlantic)

The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series evolves around the same conclusion in its opening words:

Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands. (…)Time and again, the documents show, Facebook’s researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them.

(From: ‘The Facebook Files’)

Inaction is a pattern An Ugly Truth confirms. Time after time, when Facebook leadership can choose between what’s good for people and what’s makes them more profit, they choose profit. These aren’t always at odds, but when they are, profit is consistently prioritised. And with that, the amplification of bad content.

Besides amplification of harmful content for profit, Facebook also engages in large scale data collection, as Shoshana Zuboff explained in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Facebook tracks even users who deactivated and had shady data sharing deals with device manufacturers.

Journalists have reported on lots and lots of serious problems related to Facebook’s priorities, some of which I linked above. This brings us to another pattern: Facebook’s press teams downsize the problems or outright deny them. They’ll call a story an absurd suggestion, only for it to turn out to be mostly accurate. They will also often point to the competition, which sometimes has similar problems. Or they attack the messenger. When Frances Hauben was testifying, Andy Stone, a Facebook PR person, shamelessly tweeted:

Just pointing out the fact that @FrancesHaugen did not work on child safety or Instagram or research these issues and has no direct knowledge of the topic from her work at Facebook.

Which is why she brought documents, as Jane Chung aptly replied. This time the press team responded childishly, the book also shows that they like to spin stories and deny truths when they see a chance.

The leadership

The book also goes into the people running Facebook and how to see the world. When I think of Mark Zuckerberg’s world view, I think about that time he called people who trusted him with their data “dumb fucks”. I hesitate to reduce a person’s world view to one quote from their past, but reading The Ugly Truth made me feel that his decisions and priorities of today still show he tends to dismiss other people’s safety.

When he addressed Georgetown University, he said he doesn’t want to ‘censor political speech’ and focused on free speech. The ideology seems to be that a president’s freedom to incite violence or spread covid misinformation, and the public’s freedom to ‘judge for themselves’, are more important than people’s safety. Everyone wants freedoms, but the question is whose freedom gets priority.

Mark Zuckerberg, Kang explained in Amsterdam, is inspired by Silicon Valley men like the controversial libertarian Peter Thiel, and not so much by what his own employees tell him. They often don’t bring important things to him, Kang said, as the company has a culture of protecting the leader. People want to be friends with him, not appear too critical. Maybe that’s the case for many CEOs, but it does make one wonder what the company had looked like under different leadership, that took inspiration from different places.

So, what now?

I think everyone gets how Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, React and Oculus have their merits. They can and often do bring people together. Make the world a better place. I don’t mean this sarcastically. Ok, I’m not personally so convinced of Oculus, I’m more of a real world person, but I’ll leave that for a later post. These platforms aren’t inherently bad, they bring lots of good to many people. The bad they bring sometimes merely reflects the bad that’s out there in the world. But it’s clear that Facebook’s role is often that of a megaphone, not just a mirror.

Some of the audience questions were along the lines “could we remove the bad parts of Facebook?” This is a tricky question, because of where most of the problems manifest. They aren’t in one team that messes things up, they are right in the business model that pays everyone’s salary. Removing the bad parts might not leave us with much left. There are also countless stories of people trying to “change the company from within”, which has now become a bit of a meme.

More legislative controls are expected, likely in the US and Europe and likely somewhere in the next 5 years or so. Maybe this will get us more of the good parts and less of the bad parts of Facebook.

Until, then, this is my personal list of things we can all do now:

• refuse to work at Facebook; it’s like voting, your individual vote doesn’t matter, but millions of individual votes can push the world in a clear direction, in this case one where Facebook has a hard time finding employees
• quit working at Facebook (I know, controversial), for the same reasons
• stop or reduce usage of Facebook/Meta and its products (including, dare I say it, React)
• help non-tech friends and family move away from Facebook
• stop advertising on Facebook (some companies have)
• help small business friends by building them a simple website outside Facebook’s walled garden
• read up on patterns in tech companies, check out books like An Ugly Truth and Super Pumped (on Uber)

Wrapping up

In conclusion, the issue isn’t that Facebook has harmful content or makes profit, it’s that its leadership consistently decides to prioritise their profit over preventing harm. They know they have problems, but decide against fixing them and aren’t honest about this to the press. This is why we all need a lot less Facebook in our lives, and I urge you to join the movement.

Looking back, the time of Opera, Internet Explorer 8 and Blackberry felt more innocent. The monopolies felt less harmful. I, for one, am very curious how the world will look back at today’s Facebook in ten years time. Let’s hope their patterns will have changed for good.

---

The post Patterns was first posted on hiddedevries.nl blog | Reply via email

Last week, I attended a conversation with Cecilia Kang, the New York Times journalist who co-authored An Ugly Truth with Sheera Frankel. It was a lot about patterns in Facebook’s decisions, leadership style and press relations.

I was delighted to be back in a conference hall, and it happened to be the one where we hosted Fronteers 2009 and Mobilism 2011, the memories! These events had sponsors like Opera, Internet Explorer 8 and Blackberry. Anyway, I digress, let’s talk about Facebook.

Profit over people

Facebook wants two things, Kang emphasised: connect all people together through technology and grow their business. Sounds reasonable? Maybe, but these goals impact one another in a very specific way. Facebook sells ads. You can get most people to look at ads if the content triggers people, including when it is upsetting, hateful content. Growing business ends up growing hate. The site does bring people together, yes, but it profits most when they are upset together. And, problematically, maximising profit is the end goal, The Ugly Truth shows.

Is bad content a problem? Kind of, but most platforms have some of that and we should probably blame the authors of that content, not Facebook. Is profit a problem? Or maximising it? It isn’t that per se. All companies try to make profit, most try to make a lot. The problem is profit at the expense of people’s wellbeing and safety. This is where the tobacco and oil company comparisons come in. Facebook understands which content angers or harms people. They ran experiments with happier and less depressing newsfeeds. They knew about persecution of Rohingya people in Myanmar, fired up by a politician they gave a voice. They knew about extremists using their platform to organise storming the Capitol. They knew about the medical misinformation that undermined solutions for the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The thing is, extremism, misinformation and hate thrive on amplification, on being widely shared. Facebook’s inaction is so problematic, because it facilitates and accelerates that amplification to make more money. There would be extremists, liars and haters in a world without Facebook, but they would thrive a lot less less. They would thrive less on regular tv, and they would thrive less on a social media platform with more ethical content priorities. There are other platforms too that are based on amplification, which often have similar problems, but this is post is not about them.

The Facebook Papers, a large set of documents released by whistleblower Frances Hauben to a dozen news outlets, clearly confirm the conclusions of An Ugly Truth: Facebook knows what they amplify and don’t care enough to stop. Of course, they contract huge amounts of content moderators and mark COVID-19 information from trusted sources, but leadership decisions consistently put engagement (profit) before safety (moderating harmful content).

The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance:

Again and again, the Facebook Papers show staffers sounding alarms about the dangers posed by the platform—how Facebook amplifies extremism and misinformation, how it incites violence, how it encourages radicalization and political polarization. Again and again, staffers reckon with the ways in which Facebook’s decisions stoke these harms, and they plead with leadership to do more.

And again and again, staffers say, Facebook’s leaders ignore them.

(From: ‘History Will Not Judge Us Kindly’ in The Atlantic)

The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series evolves around the same conclusion in its opening words:

Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands. (…)Time and again, the documents show, Facebook’s researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them.

(From: ‘The Facebook Files’)

Inaction is a pattern An Ugly Truth confirms. Time after time, when Facebook leadership can choose between what’s good for people and what’s makes them more profit, they choose profit. These aren’t always at odds, but when they are, profit is consistently prioritised. And with that, the amplification of bad content.

Besides amplification of harmful content for profit, Facebook also engages in large scale data collection, as Shoshana Zuboff explained in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Facebook tracks even users who deactivated and had shady data sharing deals with device manufacturers.

Journalists have reported on lots and lots of serious problems related to Facebook’s priorities, some of which I linked above. This brings us to another pattern: Facebook’s press teams downsize the problems or outright deny them. They’ll call a story an absurd suggestion, only for it to turn out to be mostly accurate. They will also often point to the competition, which sometimes has similar problems. Or they attack the messenger. When Frances Hauben was testifying, Andy Stone, a Facebook PR person, shamelessly tweeted:

Just pointing out the fact that @FrancesHaugen did not work on child safety or Instagram or research these issues and has no direct knowledge of the topic from her work at Facebook.

Which is why she brought documents, as Jane Chung aptly replied. This time the press team responded childishly, the book also shows that they like to spin stories and deny truths when they see a chance.

The leadership

The book also goes into the people running Facebook and how to see the world. When I think of Mark Zuckerberg’s world view, I think about that time he called people who trusted him with their data “dumb fucks”. I hesitate to reduce a person’s world view to one quote from their past, but reading The Ugly Truth made me feel that his decisions and priorities of today still show he tends to dismiss other people’s safety.

When he addressed Georgetown University, he said he doesn’t want to ‘censor political speech’ and focused on free speech. The ideology seems to be that a president’s freedom to incite violence or spread covid misinformation, and the public’s freedom to ‘judge for themselves’, are more important than people’s safety. Everyone wants freedoms, but the question is whose freedom gets priority.

Mark Zuckerberg, Kang explained in Amsterdam, is inspired by Silicon Valley men like the controversial libertarian Peter Thiel, and not so much by what his own employees tell him. They often don’t bring important things to him, Kang said, as the company has a culture of protecting the leader. People want to be friends with him, not appear too critical. Maybe that’s the case for many CEOs, but it does make one wonder what the company had looked like under different leadership, that took inspiration from different places.

So, what now?

I think everyone gets how Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, React and Oculus have their merits. They can and often do bring people together. Make the world a better place. I don’t mean this sarcastically. Ok, I’m not personally so convinced of Oculus, I’m more of a real world person, but I’ll leave that for a later post. These platforms aren’t inherently bad, they bring lots of good to many people. The bad they bring sometimes merely reflects the bad that’s out there in the world. But it’s clear that Facebook’s role is often that of a megaphone, not just a mirror.

Some of the audience questions were along the lines “could we remove the bad parts of Facebook?” This is a tricky question, because of where most of the problems manifest. They aren’t in one team that messes things up, they are right in the business model that pays everyone’s salary. Removing the bad parts might not leave us with much left. There are also countless stories of people trying to “change the company from within”, which has now become a bit of a meme.

More legislative controls are expected, likely in the US and Europe and likely somewhere in the next 5 years or so. Maybe this will get us more of the good parts and less of the bad parts of Facebook.

Until, then, this is my personal list of things we can all do now:

• refuse to work at Facebook; it’s like voting, your individual vote doesn’t matter, but millions of individual votes can push the world in a clear direction, in this case one where Facebook has a hard time finding employees
• quit working at Facebook (I know, controversial), for the same reasons
• stop or reduce usage of Facebook/Meta and its products (including, dare I say it, React)
• help non-tech friends and family move away from Facebook
• stop advertising on Facebook (some companies have)
• help small business friends by building them a simple website outside Facebook’s walled garden
• read up on patterns in tech companies, check out books like An Ugly Truth and Super Pumped (on Uber)

Wrapping up

In conclusion, the issue isn’t that Facebook has harmful content or makes profit, it’s that its leadership consistently decides to prioritise their profit over preventing harm. They know they have problems, but decide against fixing them and aren’t honest about this to the press. This is why we all need a lot less Facebook in our lives, and I urge you to join the movement.

Looking back, the time of Opera, Internet Explorer 8 and Blackberry felt more innocent. The monopolies felt less harmful. I, for one, am very curious how the world will look back at today’s Facebook in ten years time. Let’s hope their patterns will have changed for good.

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Originally posted as Patterns on Hidde's blog.

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