Just Like Bad Fish Being Sold In Your Market: Why A Re-Branding Won’t Help Facebook, Transparency Will

Re-branding won't help Facebook escape its' responsibilities; history tells us this just ask BP, Shell, or SeaWorld. I have written a lot about Facebook in the last three years because it is the fulcrum for several challenging debates about the concept of brand, social, and even economic responsibility in a digital economy. Leadership in the new digital world has some complex dynamics which most of us were never trained to handle, yet we are faced with managing now. You cannot disguise this tension with a simple re-branding exercise. 

It's effortless to dismiss responsibilities in a marketplace or platform economy around products. Much like a fish market, each customer decides to transact with a vendor. They don't know if the fish on show stinks unless they smell it or actually have a detailed knowledge of fish or cook it at home. How many of us have that level of expertise to judge the quality of fish available? We trust the vendors and the marketplace. Information can be much the same as fish in a fish market. 

We often take a vendor at their word. We don't know what is fresh, authentic, truthful, and that's actually what we are being told it is. Logic says not to buy fish late on a Saturday evening or first thing Monday. However, that is still not a perfect filter. If we get burnt with the experience, we don't go back to that vendor.  

Unfortunately, no matter what Facebook does, it seems to refuse to accept that for the market to flourish in the long run, it has to be exponentially more responsible to all the people on its platform. It is far tougher to work out the freshness of data, pictures, ideas, and expressions than it is to work out the freshness of fish in a market. 

In the last few days' Facebook executives have leaked the idea that governments should regulate content standards for all tech companies. 

Governments are notoriously slow, clumsy and by their very nature politically tarnished.

If Facebook or The Facebook is going to attempt to continue to operate as one of the great breeds of technology, part of their responsibility will be to lean in and actively solve this challenge in the same way the fish market owner has to orchestrate quality control.

All of us recognize the inherent difficulties behind quality controlling experiences and ideas that Facebook faces. However, if you are making money bringing eyeballs and brains into that market or platform, you have to be incredibly transparent about that journey and process.  

The recent whistleblowers on Facebook are a concerning reminder of how important transparency is for leaders in a digital economy. A lack of transparency and responsibility killed E-Bay's long-term growth. Solving it has been a boon to Etsy and how they handle quality control. Airbnb, too, has learned the importance of protecting the platform's power for the whole collective, their renters, the boarders, the neighbors, employees, etc. That filter is far tougher to achieve in a place where what is mostly for sale are opinions, beliefs, illustrations of ideas, and lives. 

As the owner of this marketplace, Facebook has to see information like a product. They have to be responsible for un-truths and false representations, and predatory behavior. We buy experiences and ideas in a digital economy and not just things. Facebook is selling us time, ideas, expressions, or windows into our lives; a simple rule should apply to all include have to take responsibility for this, or you should not be enabled to make money. There is a good reason why Google fell away from social platforms. There is sound logic for how Microsoft has abandoned China as it could not deliver true honest transparency for its users.

In full disclosure, my opinions have evolved rapidly here as we have all watched the power of these markets to amplify, vector, and even distort the facts. In July 2019, I wrote about Zuckerberg's then planned move to become a digital currency bank. In July 2020, I wrote a piece defending the idea of free markets and Facebook. In April of this year, I wrote in Forbes about the threat to sovereign currencies from athletes and celebrities, including Facebook. Facebook has a simple responsibility. Be transparent about the challenges; nobody is going to other markets for social interactions with this much intensity and passion. The marketplace or platform in a technology market will only be as good as the company's leaders are. Their transparency is the cost of winning in a digital world where experiences and ideas are sold like fish in the fish market.