like these need to be treated with a pinch of salt. This is important to keep in mind, as I will refer to such PR speak from time to time throughout the book, but will not always reiterate this analytical caveat. In the case of the Like button and the meticulous timeline that Bosworth (2014) provides in the Quora thread, we also need to bear in mind how it conveniently places the invention of the button before FriendFeed’s Like button, which Facebook was accused of copying at the time.
If everybody has a Facebook story, so do Facebook’s own employees and spokespersons. The stories told by so-called insiders – employees, former employees, collaborators, partners, tech journalists etc. – raise questions about their validity and reliability. It might be tempting to treat insider accounts as being of higher order and somehow more truthful. Yet, we must be reminded that insider accounts are stories too, accounts that are fraught with their own methodological and interpretative challenges (Cunliffe, 2010; Herod, 1999). Public claims made by Facebook employees and other insiders are often characterized by the discourse of public relations, which usually aims to portray the company in a favourable manner (Bhatia, 2010). That said, I will not critically scrutinize the truth value of every public Facebook statement or other insider account referenced in this book. This does not mean, however, that we can take their claims at face value. Corporate speech is a discursive construction; it both ‘reflects and shapes a social order’ (Hoffmann et al., 2018: 201). As with any other form of narrative and storytelling, Facebook’s press releases, blog posts, corporate presentations, public speeches, revenue reports and anecdotes, are performative. Consider, for example, how Leah Pearlman, then product manager at Facebook, and part of the team that developed the awesome button, announced the launch of the button in a blog post:
This is similar to how you might rate a restaurant on a reviews site. If you go to the restaurant and have a great time, you may want to rate it 5 stars. But if you had a particularly delicious dish there and want to rave about it, you can write a review detailing what you liked about the restaurant. We think of the new ‘Like’ feature to be the stars, and the comments to be the review. (Pearlman, 2009)
In an attempt to frame the new Like button as a service to Facebook’s users, Pearlman strategically describes it as an overly positive metric. Of course, as has been raised time and again since, there was never an option to dislike, which would be the equivalent of being able to give a restaurant a one-star rating. While the concept of rating and numbering is hugely controversial (Espeland and Sauder, 2007; Esposito and Stark, 2019), it would be safe to say that the ability to hand out a five-star rating is worth nothing without the ability to also hand out a one-star rating. Yet, as Esposito and Stark remind us, ratings never mirror reality but need to be seen as second-order observations. Ratings function not to ‘inform us about how things are but because they provide an orientation about what others observe’ (2019: 3). Herein also lies the value for Facebook. Providing a Like button was not about mirroring reality but about orientation, creating a positive feedback mechanism that essentially circulates value to advertisers. The discursive construction and the use of metaphor in Perlman’s official announcement of the Like button is ultimately about corporate storytelling. Not only is Pearlman’s analogy wrong, but the ex-Facebook employee later professed regret for having played a role in creating one of the most addictive feedback loops in the advertising economy (Lewis, 2017; Karppi and Nieborg, 2020). Comparable to a five-star rating, the Like button isn’t like the restaurant rating on a reviews site. What Pearlman, Bosworth and the others conceived of back then is more akin to the reviews one would find in a travel guidebook. The whole idea behind guidebooks is to provide a selection of the best tips – or have you ever travelled to a new city with a guidebook full of mediocre suggestions?
A guidebook to Facebook?
Let’s stay with the guidebook metaphor a while longer. If the Like button laid the foundation for a carefully engineered attention economy centred on advertising, where is the guidebook for? Put differently, if we were to imagine Facebook as a geographical destination, where, in the travel book section, would we find its guidebook? Would it be like a city, or a state? Would Facebook even warrant a whole continent? And if we were to imagine a guidebook to the internet, where would Facebook be located? Would it be a website with a dedicated URL, under the apps section, a protocol or something else entirely? Media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan (2018) calls Facebook the greatest contender for becoming the operating system of our lives. The repercussions of this are much greater than competing for people’s laptops or mobile devices. Acting as the operating system of people’s lives means having the power to ‘measure our activities and states of being and constantly guide our decisions’ (p. 99). As Vaidhyanathan contends, Facebook is:
[t]he most influential media company in the world. It shapes the messages that politicians, dictators, companies, religions and more than two billion people wish to send in the world. It increasingly serves us news content, or content that purports to be news. It is the most powerful and successful advertising system in the history of the world. It’s increasingly the medium of choice for political propaganda. (2018: 101)
Government officials, the news media and scholars alike, have used all kinds of spatial metaphors to reckon with Facebook’s global power. Perhaps the most prevalent spatial metaphor has been to think of Facebook as a town square (Tussey, 2014). Whereas media and communication scholars have debated the public/private nature of Facebook since the very beginning, pointing to its porous and malleable boundaries, Zuckerberg has consistently framed Facebook as a public space. In an open letter describing a more privacy-focused vision of social networking, Zuckerberg (2019a) claims that Facebook and Instagram for the past fifteen years have served as the ‘digital equivalent of a town square’ (see also next chapter). The idea of Facebook as a digital town square is far from just empty company rhetoric. In Packingham vs North Carolina, the Supreme Court spoke forcefully about social media like Facebook as being vital for ‘speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge’ (Livni, 2017). In June 2017, the court unanimously overturned a North Carolina law that prohibited registered sex offenders from accessing social media for being unconstitutional. While the town square metaphor helps to illuminate Facebook’s role in accessing information and communicating with one another, the metaphor may give the wrong impression as to the nature of speech on privately owned platforms. As Ethan Zuckerman writes, ‘speech on these platforms is less like holding a rally in a public park – it’s more like giving a speech in a shopping mall […] where private actors have a great deal of control over speech that takes place on their property’ (2014: 152). The town square metaphor may also not be very suitable for making sense of the global reach and scale of Facebook. Besides, town squares generally don’t warrant guidebooks.
Nations, however, are great candidates for guidebooks. Indeed, Facebook is routinely described as a country. It is not too uncommon to read things like ‘if Facebook were a country, it would be the largest in the world’, or to hear Mark Zuckerberg being referred to as the head of the Facebook nation. While careful to not frame itself explicitly as a nation (with all that this entails), the metaphor has been used in several of Facebook’s public-facing ad campaigns as a way of describing how nations are like Facebook. In a cinematic ad entitled ‘The Things That Connect Us’ from 2012, the voice-over lists all the things that are just like Facebook, including ‘great nations’, because it ‘is something people build, so that they can have a place where they belong’ (more on this ad in Chapter 2).
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to frame himself and Facebook as a global do-gooder and democratic force. In a longer piece about Facebook’s mission to build a global community, Zuckerberg (2017a) puts Facebook firmly in the democratic driving seat. Zuckerberg notes how Facebook’s mission is to develop social infrastructure for a community – ‘for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all’. Whether it is about developing new drone, satellite or laser technologies to build the next-generation broadband infrastructure, or disaster relief funds and safety check functionalities, Facebook’s social services and infrastructure
