An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Sir,

I write this in the full knowledge that the the man to whom I send this letter will never read it. I imagine no one will ever read it, though a program might place it in this or that wastebasket. This is because there is actually nothing social about social media, and nothing personal about the way we now communicate. I write this to make sense of it for myself.

My father spent many years as a teacher of philosophy and the humanities, and he did his best. Still, he was never admired in the eyes of the world. He accepted this, and came to his own peace with this. His life always revolved around finding just a few people he could help, and in his free time he would write down his own thoughts about what he loved. Only a handful cared about him, but he cared about everyone who crossed his path.

One day, our family decided to share his writings. Of course no fancy publishers would be interested, so we started a blog over at Google. We shared links to that blog every single day on a Facebook page, and there were a few people who read along. The whole point of it was something we called A Stoic Breviary, daily reflections on passages from Stoic philosophers.

Harmless, right? No. After a few years, Facebook suddenly started blocking the links. There was no warning, no explanation, and no recourse. All we saw was the ominous message: "this website violates Facebook community standards."

Why? No reason was given. Can it be fixed? No, because there is no process for fixing it, and no actual human beings to speak to. Click the "appeal" button, and you never hear anything back at all. You are now excluded, a pariah. People post child pornography, or snuff videos, or political slander, but a page that posts foolish philosophical musings is a danger to the community.

So we are wrong, but we don't know what we actually did that was wrong. We are judged, without any measure for why, or by whom. We don't know who actually decided this, and we have no way to challenge it. We have no means to make our case, to meet our accusers, or to be treated fairly.

I suspect some algorithm probably "saw" a daily link to a single site, over a long period of time, and "decided" it was bad. No human being followed the links, or read the content, or considered any actual personal element.

In a single moment, years worth of posts, images, and discussions were suddenly erased. All the work was gone. It means nothing to a corporation, and it means nothing to a man worth billions. It means quite a bit, however, to a family that cares deeply about these messages. They may have been irrelevant to you, but they were everything to us.

When society ceases to be about the relationships between actual human beings, and becomes a set of formulaic rules written by programmers, we have a problem. There is nothing social about it at all, when human judgment and human concern are removed from the equation.

Mr. Zuckerberg, I just read a news story today about your commitment to "free expression". You were clearly speaking about people far more important than us. You are free to speak on the network news, and you own the only real way for the rest of us to share our thoughts and feelings in an online public forum. I am horrified that your company now decides what we may or may not say to one another.

—bsc