The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

by Scott Galloway

Getting rid of them would force Facebook to accept responsibility as the editor of the world’s most (or second most) influential media company. It would have to s...

That would spark outrage and suspicion—the same kind that mai...

More important, by trashing fake stories, Facebook would also sacrifice billions of cl...

the term platform was never meant to absolve companies from taking responsibility for the damage they do.

If Facebook is by far the largest social networking site, reaching 67 percent of U.S. adults,48 and if more us, each day, are getting our news from it,

then Facebook has become, de facto, the largest news media firm in the world.

The question is, does news media have a greater responsibility to pursue, and police, the truth? Isn’t...

We tend to think of social media as neutral—they’re just serving us stuff.

But research shows that what we click is driven by deeply subconscious processes.

We click on impulse rather than forethought. We are driven by deep subconscious needs for belonging, approval, and safety.

Facebook exploits those needs and gets us to spend more time on the platform (its core success metric is time on site) by giving us plenty of Likes.

compares social media notifications to slot machines.

They both deliver variable rewards: you’re curious, will I have two Likes or two hundred?

while you’re there, here are these fake news stories that bots have been littering the information space with. Feel free to share them with your friends, even if you haven’t read them—you

you know you’ll get your tribe’s approval by sharing more of what they already believe.

When fake news activities move from sporadic and haphazard to organized and systematic efforts, they become disinformation campaigns with the potential to disrupt the foundations of governance in entire countries.

team. To involve humans would supposedly bring on implicit and explicit biases.

But AI has biases as well. It’s programmed, by humans, to select the most clickable content. Its priorities are clicks, numbers, time on site.

AI is incapable of distinguishing fake news, only at best to suspect it, based on origin. Only human fact checkers can ascertain if a story is fake or not...

There’s a bigger, if unpublicized, reason Facebook as of yet refuses to bring back and increase the number of human editors—it would introduce cost. Why do something the users can do themselves?

Facebook has good reason not to see itself as a media company. It’s too much work and would introduce friction to growth.

Facebook has embraced the healthy gross margins and celebrity of a media company, but is allergic to the responsibilities of a media firm.

How is Facebook a media firm? It’s a company that owns a communication channel, a medium ...

The majority of media firms accept the responsibility of applying an expensive attribute: discretion.

Traditional media has reverted to their static role as the apologist for big tech, pondering whether this “is even possible” for Facebook.

This is not about the realm of the possible, but the realm...

The most innovative thing of 2016 wasn’t the Apple Watch or Alexa, but Russia’s weaponization of our pride and joy, Facebook.

When you claim it’s impossible to ensure no weaponization of your platform, don’t you mean “unprofitable”?

It could be stopped, but at substantial detriment to your free cash flow.

Haven’t you chosen profits ov...

If CNBC, ESPN, or Condé Nast had been weaponized by a foreign actor, and had taken money for ads actively inciting racial and political divisions, these firms would have been shut down, received massive fines, or seen major advertisers stop spending.

None of these has happened at Facebook.

The media scrutiny Facebook has endured creates an illusion of seve...

None of the platforms have been fined for their disregard of our borders, and their businesses continue to accelerate,

because they are monopolies.

The platform has been weaponized; our faux outrage hasn’t translated to any tangible action, and it’s going to get worse.

Media platforms where you are the product have empowered, connected, and facilitated greater empathy among billions of people.

The greatest threats to modern civilization have come from people and movements who had one thing in common: controlling and perverting the media to their own devices in the absence of a fourth estate that was protected from intimidation and expected to pursue the truth.

More than anything else, we want to know.

Google answers every question.

Our pagan ancestors lived mostly with mysteries. God heard your prayers but didn’t answer many of them.

Unlike our ancestors, we are able to find safety in facts. Our questions are answered immediately, our rest assured.

Prayers to Google, however, are answered.

Three and a half billion times each day human beings turn their gaze not upward but downward to their screen. We won’t be judged for asking the wrong question.

And answers, mysteriously, appear.

Google’s algorithms, a work of divine intervention in the eyes of most of us, summon compilations of useful information.

we confide in Google at a level and frequency that would scare off any friend, no matter how understanding.

We place immense trust in the mechanism.

One in six Google queries have never been...

What other institution—professional or clergy—has so much credibility and trust that people bring their previousl...