Getty / KC Green / Via gunshowcomic.com



If you want to see whether Google and Facebook are serious about fixing their mutual problems with privacy and misinformation, watch what happens at their upcoming annual showcases. A few weeks from now, Facebook and Google will hold their yearly developer conferences, massive events meant to celebrate their platforms and visions for the future. They're typically packed full of grand pronouncements, flashy demos, and Google Glass-wearing skydivers or CEO-impersonating celebrities. Bands play. Drinks flow. They are spectacles, intended to ignite enthusiasm and burnish the Facebook and Google brands. But after a year in which Facebook and Google played pivotal roles in spreading misinformation and were exposed as data-greedy growth goblins, there should be little cause for celebration. If the platforms are serious about healing themselves, you should be able to see it in a show that's more about fixing what's broken rather than building something new. And if they aren’t serious? Expect the same shiny, happy-fun wow-fests. If the onstage apology is shorter than the post-show afterparty, it will make clear that the contrition tours of 2017 and 2018 have been little more than lip service, and we can expect more of the same old fuckups and same old promises to do better.

In 2018 spending millions on rah-rah promotional spectacles for platforms like Facebook’s and Google’s is particularly unseemly when set against the conga line of travesties they’ve enabled.

Maybe this year instead of celebrating their platforms, Google and Facebook should fix them.

What good can come from introducing a new suite of world-changing products without fixing the glaring, gaping holes inside ones that have already changed the world?

Look, Facebook, to use your own metric: It's not about what you say. It's time to do something. Instead of touting the next big thing, Facebook and Google might do well to focus on the current thing and solve the problems that they have so far failed miserably and repeatedly to address. And perhaps instead of pushing developers to rally around a seventy-dozenth new messaging client, augmented reality experiences, and AI-powered personal assistants, Facebook and Google should own up to their mistakes and get developers excited about their platforms by fixing them. What good can come from introducing a new suite of world-changing products without first repairing the glaring, gaping holes inside ones that have already changed the world?

