You’d swear he was a boy scout. “Kindness is what matters most to us,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg this summer at the launch of his social network Threads. In recent months, the big bad wolf of Tech has undergone a surprising makeover: he has donned the clothes of the white knight. Faced with Elon Musk who multiplies the excesses, the boss of Meta plays the good father of the family. On Threads, it even plans to grant Internet users an option they have always dreamed of: the freedom to interact with competing networks and recover their virtual belongings – subscribers, content, etc. – if they change stores. “Zuck” also became a hero in artificial intelligence (AI) when, on the advice of Yann Le Cun, star of the sector and “Mr. AI” of Meta, he decided in 2023 to make his language model (Llama ) “open source”. In other words, available to everyone.
The new angelism of the founder of Facebook does not lack salt. Behind the “network of friends”, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this February 4, there is indeed a ruthless logic and a lot of dirty tricks. Very early on, the young Zuckerberg ejected from the project the Winklevoss twins who had naively contented themselves with a handshake with him. In the decade that followed, Zuck grew his network at full speed and swallowed up the most dangerous competitors, one after the other. Instagram in 2012. WhatsApp in 2014. Romantic encounters, job search… He explores all areas of digital life, even going so far as to launch his own digital currency, Libra. A project that will give regulators a cold sweat, who will quickly put a stop to it.
To ensure global domination, Facebook is establishing itself in countries that make little profit, and where it allocates little budget to protect local Internet users, such as moderators likely to remove hateful content. The economic model that Facebook opts for will also transform the network. Although it has the appearance of a consumer group, its customers are not its members, but the companies to which it sells advertising targeting solutions. At the beginning, it offered classic banners, but with the arrival of Sheryl Sandberg, “Facebook will launch tools, such as the Like button, which analyze users more and more closely,” explains Pierre Harand, co-president of the marketing firm. fifty-five.
Zuckerberg, moderator of the global debate
The company is gradually becoming a cash machine. “While other popular networks like Snapchat are still not profitable,” points out Véronique Reille-Soult, president of Backbone Consulting and author of The Ultimate Power, The truth about the impact of social networks (Les éditions du Cerf). From social, Facebook is transforming into a continuous entertainment platform. The appearance of personalized news feeds, and no longer chronological, boosts audiences but gives the group “immense influence since the tool chooses what information is highlighted or not”, underlines Marc Faddoul, director of AI Forensic, a European non-profit organization that analyzes the impact of large platform algorithms.
True to his motorbike, “Move fast and break things”, Facebook has charted its course without offering solutions to the problems created. If the content that attracts the most attention is false or hateful stories, churned out by malicious agencies, what is their impact on democracies? How to prevent cyberbullying? When contacted, the group did not wish to answer our questions.
However, Zuckerberg is not responsible for everything that goes wrong in the digital world. In 2023, studies published in Nature And Science showed that changing the selection of content displayed to users for a few months did not have a huge impact on their political orientations – note that the researchers called for studying the subject over longer periods.
The questions Meta must answer are also real puzzles. Moderating the 1.7 million pieces of content published every minute on Facebook is extremely complex. Internet users try to circumvent filters by using coded expressions. “And the red lines are difficult to place: we want to eliminate pornography, but not The origin of the world by Courbet. The group has always been highly criticized. However, there was a lot of research and action undertaken within Facebook to prevent these abuses. And internal teams particularly mobilized around the protection of Internet users”, recalls a former engineer of the group.
Regulating the global debate is not only too much to ask of a company, but also absurd on a civic level. The problem points out, Bruno Breton, CEO of the social network analysis start-up Bloom, is that “politicians looked at the subject far too late”. The fact that Zuckerberg and the bosses of other major networks were only bombarded with questions about the protection of minors by the American Congress at the end of January 2024 – twenty years after the creation of Facebook – is a telling sign of this.
Nerdy Facebook versus TikTok
It’s difficult to say whether Mark Zuckerberg’s metamorphosis in recent months is sincere. She is in any case clever. That the boss of Meta finally embraces the idea of creating open networks gives a boost to his empire – which really needs it. Instagram is still popular among young people, but they consider Facebook out of date compared to TikTok. Becoming a fervent promoter of open source AI is also smart. Experts in creating large language models are not commonplace. And, in this closed club, they attach importance to being able to publish their work. It doesn’t cost Meta much. Unlike OpenAI, it will not directly market AI: Meta already has popular services and a thriving business model. The objective is to enrich what already exists.
And on this point, AI opens up immense prospects for Zuckerberg. Social networks are entirely centered on the content we create – videos, images or texts. Internet users are therefore crazy about generative AI which allows them to quickly produce much more sophisticated ones. Capable of reliably translating exchanges in real time, these technologies will also make communication between countries simpler than ever. Behind the scenes, Meta will be able to offer companies powerful advertising creative AI, capable of designing superb campaigns and virtual influencers in three clicks.
In the long run, AIs will also understand the questions asked of them more thoroughly. “Meta will be able to sell increasingly efficient customer service chatbots to businesses,” points out Vincent Luciani, CEO of the AI consultancy Artefact. In the field of generative AI, Meta has considerable firepower. The group has large teams in the field and a trove of user data to train these models.
Meta and the moral dilemmas of AI
Above all, the group has bottomless pockets. In 2023, Meta recorded $134.9 billion in revenue and $39 billion in profits. “All supported by an audience that continues to grow,” points out Emmanuel Amiot, partner at Olivier Wyman, which publishes the e-pub Observatory. Four billion souls, at the last census. This financial base allows Zuck to buy an incredible quantity of H100, the AI chips that everyone is snapping up. “They are harder to find than drugs,” joked Elon Musk in the spring, who obtained 15,000 for Tesla. Meta has just ordered… 350,000.
This golden age of generative AI, however, risks placing Mark Zuckerberg before even more complex moral dilemmas. Already, these tools are used to mass generate venomous content: false pornographic images of personalities, or complete strangers, fake news… “If Meta needs to invest in AI, it is also to keep a train going. “advance on these subjects and develop protective detection AI”, deciphers Olivier Martret, from Serena Capital. The good news is that the public authorities have taken the issue head on, quickly this time. No offense to him, “Zuck” will not be alone in drawing the line between Good and Evil.
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