Facebook is doing online dating. We're totally not cool with that...
Natasha Lomas
This week Facebook has launched a major new product play, slotting an
algorithmic dating service inside its walled garden as if that’s
perfectly normal behavior for an ageing social network.
Insert your [dad dancing GIF of choice] right here.
Facebook getting into dating looks very much like a mid-life crisis — as
a veteran social network desperately seeks a new strategy to stay
relevant in an age when app users have largely moved on from social
network ‘lifecasting’ to more bounded forms of sharing, via private
messaging and/or friend groups inside dedicated messaging and sharing
apps.
The erstwhile Facebook status update has long been usurped by the
Snapchat (and now Instagram) Story as the social currency of choice for
younger app users. Of course Facebook owns the latter product too, and
has mercilessly cloned Stories. But it hardly wants its flagship service
to just fade away into the background like the old fart it actually is
in Internet age terms.
Not if it can reinvigorate the product with a new purpose — and so we arrive at online dating.
Facebook — or should that be ‘Datebook’ now?! — is starting its dating
experiment in Colombia, as its beta market. But the company clearly has
ambitious designs on becoming a major global force in the increasingly
popular online dating arena — to challenge dedicated longtime players
like eHarmony and OkCupid, as well as the newer breed of more
specialized dating startups, such as female-led app, Bumble.
Zuckerberg is not trying to compete with online dating behemoth Tinder,
though. Which Facebook dismisses as a mere ‘hook up’ app — a sub
category it claims it wants nothing to do with.
Rather it’s hoping to build something more along the lines of ‘get
together with friends of your friends who’re also into soap
carving/competitive dog grooming/extreme ironing’ than, for e.g., the
raw spank in the face shock of ‘Bang with Friends‘. (The latter being
the experimental startup which tried, some six years ago, to combine
Facebook and sex — before eventually exiting to a Singapore-based dating
app player, Paktor, never to be heard of again. Or, well, not until
Facebook decided to get into the dating game and reminded us all how we
lol’d about it.)
Mark Zuckerberg’s company doesn’t want to get into anything smutty, though. Oh no, no, NO! No sex please, we’re Facebook!
Facebook Dating has been carefully positioned to avoid sounding like a
sex app. It’s being flogged as a tasteful take on the online dating
game, with — for instance — the app explicitly architected not to push
existing friends together via suggestive matching (though you’ll just
have to hope you don’t end up being algorithmically paired with any
exes, which judging by Facebook’s penchant for showing users ‘photo
memories’ of past stuff with exes may not pan out so well… ). And no
ability to swap photo messages with mutual matches in case, well,
something pornographic were to pass through.
Facebook is famously no fan of nudes. Unsurprisingly, then, nor is its
buttoned up dating app. Only ‘good, old-fashioned wholesome’ text-based
chat-up lines (related to ‘good clean pieces of Facebook
content&rsquo here please.
If you feel moved to text an up-front marriage proposal — feeling 100%
confident in Facebook’s data scientists’ prowess in reading the social
media tea leaves and plucking your future life partner out of the mix —
its algorithms will probably smile on that though.
The company’s line is that dating will help fulfil its new mission of
encouraging ‘time well spent’ — by helping people forge more meaningful
(new) relationships thanks to the power of its network (and the data it
sucks out of it).
This mission is certainly an upgrade on Facebook’s earlier and baser
interest in just trying to connect every human on planet Earth to every
other human on planet Earth in some kind of mass data-swinging orgy —
regardless of the ethical and/or moral consequences (as Boz memorably
penned it), as if it was trying to channel the horror-loving spirit of
Pasolini’s Salò. Or, well, a human centipede.
But that was then. These days, in its mid teens, Facebook wants to be
seen as grown up and a bit worth. So its take on dating looks a lot more
‘marriage material’ than ‘casual encounters’. Though, well, products
don’t always pan out how their makers intend. So it might need to screw
its courage to the sticking place and hope things don’t go south.
From the user perspective, there’s a whole other side here too though.
Because given how much baggage inevitably comes with Facebook nowadays,
the really burning question is whether any sensible person should be
letting Mark Zuckerberg fire cupid’s arrows on their behalf?
He famously couldn’t tell malicious Kremlin propaganda from business as
usual social networking like latte photos and baby pics — so what makes
you think he’s going to be attuned to the subtle nuances of human
chemistry?!
Here are just a few reasons why we think you should stay as far away from Facebook’s dalliance with dating as you possibly can…
It’s yet another cynical data grab
Facebook’s ad-targeting business model relies on continuous people
tracking to function — which means it needs your data to exist. Simply
put: Your privacy is Facebook’s lifeblood. Dating is therefore just a
convenient veneer to slap atop another major data grab as Facebook tries
to find less icky ways to worm its way back and/or deeper into people’s
lives. Connecting singles to nurture ‘meaningful relationships’ is the
marketing gloss being slicked over its latest invitation to ask people
to forget how much private information they’re handing it. Worse still,
dating means Facebook is asking people to share even more intimate and
personal information than they might otherwise willingly divulge — again
with a company whose business model relies upon tracking everything
everyone does, on or offline, within its walled garden or outside it on
the wider web, and whether they’re Facebook a user or not.
This also comes at a time when users of Facebook’s eponymous social
network have been showing signs of Facebook fatigue, and even changing
how they use the service after a string of major privacy scandals. So
Facebook doing dating also looks intended to function as a fresh
distraction — to try to draw attention away from its detractors and
prevent any more scales falling away from users’ eyes. The company wants
to paper over growing scepticism about ad-targeting business models
with algorithmic heart-shaped promises.
Yet the real underlying passion here is still Facebook’s burning
desire to keep minting money off of your private bits and bytes.
Facebook’s history of privacy hostility shows it simply can’t be trusted
Facebook also has a very long history of being outright hostile to
privacy — including deliberately switching settings to make previously
private settings public by default (regulatory intervention has been
required to push back against that ratchet) — so its claim, with Dating,
to be siloing data in a totally separate bucket, and also that
information shared for this service won’t be used to further flesh out
user profiles or to target people with ads elsewhere across its empire
should be treated with extreme scepticism.
Facebook also said WhatsApp users’ data would not be mingled and
conjoined with Facebook user data — and, er, look what ended up
happening there…!!
————————————————————————————————–>
And then there’s Facebook record of letting app developers liberally
rip user data out of its platform — including (for years and years)
‘friend data’. Which almost sounded cosy. But Facebook’s friends data
API meant that an individual Facebook user could have their data sucked
out without even agreeing to a particular app’s ToS themselves. Which is
part of the reason why users’ personal information has ended up all
over the place — and in all sorts of unusual places. (Facebook not
enforcing its own policies, and implementing features that could be
systematically abused to suck out user data are among some of the many
other reasons.)
The long and short history of Facebook and privacy is that
information given to it for one purpose has ended up being used for all
sorts of other things — things we likely don’t even know the half of.
Even Facebook itself doesn’t know which is why it’s engaged in a major
historical app audit right now. Yet this very same company now wants you
to tell it intimate details about your romantic and sexual preferences?
Uhhhh, hold that thought, truly.
Facebook already owns the majority of online attention — why pay the
company any more mind? Especially as dating singles already have
amazingly diverse app choice…
In the West there’s pretty much no escape from Facebook Inc. Not if
you want to be able to use the social sharing tools your friends are
using. Network effects are hugely powerful for that reason, and Facebook
owns not just one popular and dominant social network but a whole
clutch of them — given it also bought Instagram and WhatsApp (plus some
others it bought and just closed, shutting down those alternative
options). But online dating, as it currently is, offers a welcome
respite from Facebook.
It’s arguably also no accident that the Facebook-less zone is so
very richly served with startups and services catering to all sorts of
types and tastes. There are dating apps for black singles; matchmaking
services for Muslims; several for Jewish people; plenty of Christian
dating apps; at least one dating service to match ex-pat Asians; another
for Chinese-Americans; queer dating apps for women; gay dating apps for
men (and of course gay hook up apps too), to name just a few; there’s
dating apps that offer games to generate matches; apps that rely on
serendipity and location to rub strangers together via missed
connections; apps that let you try live video chats with potential
matches; and of course no shortage of algorithmic matching dating apps.
No singles are lonely for dating apps to try, that’s for sure.
So why on earth should humanity cede this very rich, fertile and
creative ‘stranger interaction’ space, which caters to singles of all
stripes and fancies, to a social network behemoth — just so Facebook can
expand its existing monopoly on people’s attention?
Why shrink the luxury of choice to give Facebook’s business extra
uplift? If Facebook Dating became popular it would inexorably pull
attention away from alternatives — perhaps driving consolidation among a
myriad of smaller dating players, forcing some to band together to try
to achieve greater scale and survive the arrival of the 800lb Facebook
gorilla. Some services might feel they have to become a bit less
specialized, pushed by market forces to go after a more generic (and
thus larger) pool of singles. Others might find they just can’t get
enough niche users anymore to self-sustain. The loss of the rich choice
in dating apps singles currently enjoy would be a crying shame indeed.
Which is as good a reason as any to snub Facebook’s overtures here.
Algorithmic dating is both empty promise and cynical attempt to humanize Facebook surveillance
Facebook typically counters the charge that because it tracks people
to target them with ads its in the surveillance business by claiming
people tracking benefits humanity because it can serve you “relevant
ads”. Of course that’s a paper thin argument since all display
advertising is something no one has chosen to see and therefore is
necessarily a distraction from whatever a person was actually engaged
with. It’s also an argument that’s come under increasing strain in
recent times, given all the major scandals attached to Facebook’s ad
platform, whether that’s to do with socially divisive Facebook ads, or
malicious political propaganda spread via Facebook, or targeted Facebook
ads that discriminate against protected groups, or Facebook ads that
are actually just spreading scams. Safe to say, the list of problems
attached to its ad targeting enterprise is long and keeps growing.
But Facebook’s follow on claim now, with Dating and the data it
intends to hold on people for this matchmaking purpose, is it has the
algorithmic expertise to turn a creepy habit of tracking everything
everyone does into a formula for locating love.
So now it’s not just got “relevant” ads to sell you; it’s claiming
Facebook surveillance is the special sauce to find your Significant
Other!
Frankly, this is beyond insidious. (It is also literally a Black
Mirror episode — and that’s supposed to be dysfunctional sci-fi.)
Facebook is moving into dating because it needs a new way to package and
sell its unpleasant practice of people surveillance. It’s hoping to
move beyond its attempt at normalizing its business line (i.e. that
surveillance is necessary to show ads that people might be marginally
more likely to click on) — which has become increasingly problematic as
its ad platform has been shown to be causing all sorts of knock-on
societal problems — by implying that by letting Facebook creep on you
24/7 it could secure your future happiness because its algorithms are
working to track down your perfect other half — among all those 1s and
0s it’s continuously manhandling.
Of course this is total bunkum. There’s no algorithmic formula to
determine what makes one person click with another (or not). If there
was humans would have figured it out long, long ago — and monetized it
mercilessly. (And run into all sorts of horrible ethical problems along
the way.)
Thing is, people aren’t math. Humans cannot be made to neatly sum to
the total of their collective parts and interests. Which is why life is
a lot more interesting than the stuff you see on Facebook. And also why
there’s a near infinite number of dating apps out there, catering to
all sorts of people and predilections.
Sadly Facebook can’t see that. Or rather it can’t admit it. And so
we get nonsense notions of ‘expert’ algorithmic matchmaking and ‘data
science’ as the underpinning justification for yet another dating app
launch. Sorry but that’s all just marketing.
The idea that Facebook’s data scientists are going to turn out to be
bullseye hitting cupids is as preposterous as it is ridiculous. Like
any matchmaking service there will be combinations thrown up that work
and plenty more than do not. But if the price of a random result is
ceaseless surveillance the service has a disproportionate cost attached
to it — making it both an unfair and an unattractive exchange for the
user. And once again people are being encouraged to give up far more
than they’re getting in return.
If you believe that finding ‘the one’ will be easier if you focus on
people with similar interests to you or who are in the same friend
group there’s no shortage of existing ‘life avenues’ you can pursue
without having to resort to Facebook Dating. (Try joining a club. Or
going to your friends’ parties. Or indeed taking your pick from the
scores of existing dating apps that already offer interest-based
matching.)
Equally you could just take a hike up a mountain and meet your
future wife at the top (as one couple I know did). Safe to say, there’s
no formula to love. And thankfully so. Don’t believe anyone trying to
sell you a dating service with the claim their nerdtastic data
scientists will hook you up good and proper.
Facebook’s chance of working any ‘love magic’ will be as good/poor
as the next app-based matchmaking service. Which is to say it will be
random. There’s certainly no formula to be distilled beyond connecting
‘available to date’ singles — which dating apps and websites have been
doing very well for years and years and years. No Facebook dates
necessary.
The company has little more to offer the world of online dating
than, say, OkCupid, which has scale and already combines the location
and stated interests of its users in an attempt to throw up possible
clicks. The only extra bit is Facebook’s quasi-bundling of Events into
dating, as a potential avenue to try and date in a marginally more
informal setting than agreeing to go on an actual date. Though, really,
it just sounds like it might be more awkward to organize and pull off.
Facebook’s generic approach to dating is also going to offer much
less for certain singles who benefit from a more specialized and
tailored service (such as a female-focused player like Bumble which has
created a service to cater to women’s needs; or, indeed, any of the
aforementioned community focused offerings cited above which help people
meet other likeminded singles).
Facebook appears to believe that size matters in dating. And seems
to want to be a generic giant in a market that’s already richly catering
to all sorts of different communities. For many singles that catch-all
approach is going to earn it a very hard left swipe.
Dating takes resource and focus away from problems Facebook should actually be fixing
Facebook’s founder made ‘fixing Facebook’ his personal priority this
year. Which underlines quite how many issues the company has smashing
through its plate. We’re not talking little bug fixes. Facebook has a
huge bunch of existentially awful hellholes burning through its platform
and punching various human rights in the process. This is not at all
trivial. Some really terrible stuff has been going on with its platforms
acting as the conduit.
Earlier this year, for instance, the UN blasted Facebook saying its
platform had became a “beast” in Myanmar — weaponized and used to
accelerate ethnic violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Facebook has admitted it did not have enough local resource to stop
its software being used to amplify ethnic hate and violence in the
market. Massacres of Rohingya refuges have been described by human
rights organizations as a genocide.
And it’s not an isolated instance. In the Philippines the country
has recently been plunged into a major human rights crisis — and the
government there, which used Facebook to help get elected, has also been
using Facebook to savage its critics at the same time as carrying out
thousands of urban killings in a bloody so-called ‘war on drugs’.
In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging app has been identified as a
contributing factor in multiple instances of mob violence and killings —
as people have been whipped up by lies spread like lightning via the
app.
Set against such awful problems — where Facebook’s products are at
very least not helping — we now see the company ploughing resource into
expanding into a new business area, and expending engineering resource
to build a whole new interface and messaging system (the latter to
ensure Facebook Dating users can only swap texts, and can’t send photos
or videos because that might be a dick pic risk).
So it’s a genuine crying shame that Facebook did not pay so much
close attention to goings on in Myanmar — where local organizations have
long been calling for intelligent limits to be built in to its products
to help stop abusive misuse.
Yet Facebook only added the option to report conversations in its Messenger app this May.
So the sight of the company expending major effort to launch a
dating product at the same time as it stands accused of failing to do
enough to prevent its products from being conduits for human rights
abuses in multiple markets is ethically uncomfortable, to say the least.
Prospective users of Facebook Dating might therefore feel a bit
queasy to think that their passing fancies have been prioritized by
Zuckerberg & co over and above adding stronger safeguards and
guardrails to the various platforms they operate to try to safeguard
humans from actual death in other corners of the globe.
By getting involved with dating, Facebook is mixing separate social streams
Talking of feeling queasy, with Facebook Dating the company is
attempting to pull off a tricky balancing act of convincing existing
users (many of whom will already be married and/or in a long term
relationship) that it’s somehow totally normal to just bolt on a dating
layer to something that’s supposed to be a generic social network.
All of a sudden a space that’s always been sold — and traded — as a
platonic place for people to forge ‘friendships’ is suddenly having
sexual opportunity injected into it. Sure, the company is trying to keep
these differently oriented desires entirely separate, by making the
Dating component an opt-in feature that lurks within Facebook (and where
(it says) any activity is siloed and kept off of mainstream Facebook
(at least that’s the claim)). But the very existence of Facebook Dating
means anyone in a relationship who is already on Facebook is now, on one
level, involved with a dating app company.
Facebook users may also feel they’re being dangled the opportunity
to sign up to online dating on the sly — with the company then committed
itself to being the secret-keeping go-between ferrying any flirtatious
messages they care to send in a way that would be difficult for their
spouse to know about, whether they’re on Facebook or not.
How comfortable is Facebook going to be with being a potential aid
to adultery? I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that pans out. As
noted above, Facebook execs have — in the past — suggested the company
is in the business of ‘connecting people, period’. So there’s perhaps a
certain twisted logic working away as an undercurrent and driving its
impulse to push for ever more human connections. But the company could
be at risk of applying its famous “it’s complicated” relationship status
to itself with the dating launch — and then raining complicated
consequences down upon its users as a result. (As, well, it so often
seems to do in the name of expanding its own business.)
So instead of ‘don’t mix the streams’, with dating we’re seeing
Facebook trying to get away with running entirely opposite types of
social interactions in close parallel. What could possibly go wrong?! Or
rather what’s to stop someone in the ‘separate’ Facebook dating pool
trying to Facebook-stalk a single they come across there who doesn’t
responded to their overtures? (Given Facebook dating users are badged
with their real Facebook names there could easily be user attempts to
‘cross over’.)
And if sentiments from one siloed service spill over into mainstream
Facebook things could get very messy indeed — and users could end up
being doubly repelled by its service rather than additionally compelled.
The risk is Facebook ends up fouling not feathering its own nest by
trying to combine dating and social networking. (This less polite phrase
also springs to mind.)
Who are you hoping to date anyway?!
Outside emerging markets Facebook’s growth has stalled. Even social
networking’s later stage middle age boom looks tapped out. At the same
time today’s teens are not at all hot for Facebook. The youngest web
users are more interested in visually engaging social apps. And the
company will have its work cut out trying to lure this trend-sensitive
youth crowd. Facebook dating will probably sound like a bad joke — or a
dad joke — to these kids.
Going up the age range a bit, the under ~35s are hardly enamoured
with Facebook either. They may still have a profile but also hardly
think Facebook is cool. Some will have reduced their usage or even taken
a mini break. The days of this age-group using Facebook to flirt with
old college classmates are as long gone as sending a joke Facebook poke.
Some are deleting their Facebook account entirely — and not looking
back. Is this prime dating age-group suddenly likely to fall en masse
for Facebook’s love match experiment? It seems doubtful.
And it certainly looks like no accident Facebook is debuting Dating
outside the US. Emerging markets, which often have young, app-loving
populations, probably represent its best chance at bagging the critical
mass of singles absolutely required to make any dating product even
vaguely interesting.
But in its marketing shots for the service Facebook seems to be
hoping to attract singles in the late twenties age-range — dating app
users who are probably among the ficklest, trickiest people for Facebook
to lure with a late-stage, catch-all and, er, cringey proposition.
After that, who’s left? Those over 35s who are still actively on
Facebook are either going to be married — and thus busy sharing their
wedding/baby pics — and not in the market for dating anyway; or if they
are single they may be less inclined towards getting involved with
online dating vs younger users who are now well accustomed to dating
apps. So again, for Facebook, it looks like diminishing returns up here.
And of course a dating app is only as interesting and attractive as
the people on it. Which might be the most challenging hurdle for
Facebook to make a mark on this well-served playing field — given its
eponymous network is now neither young nor cool, hip nor happening, and
seems to be having more of an identity crisis with each passing year.
Perhaps Facebook could carve out a dating niche for itself among
middle-age divorcees — by offering to digitally hand-hold them and help
get them back into the dating game. (Although there’s zero suggestion
that’s what it’s hoping to do with the service it debuted this week.)
If Zuckerberg really wants to bag the younger singles he seems most
interested in — at least judging by Facebook Dating’s marketing — he
might have been better off adding a dating stream to Instagram.
I mean, InstaLovegram almost sounds like it could be a thing.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/40258
Join Geezgo for free. Use Geezgo's end-to-end encrypted Chat with your Closenets (friends, relatives, colleague etc) in personalized ways.>>
Comments
Post a Comment