如果Facebook被关闭会发生什么？

What would happen if Facebook were turned off?

Feb 14th 20192019年2月14日

THERE HAS never been such an agglomeration of humanity as Facebook. Some 2.3bn people, 30% of the world’s population, engage with the network each month. Economists reckon it may yield trillions of dollars’ worth of value for its users. But Facebook is also blamed for all sorts of social horrors: from addiction and bullying to the erosion of fact-based political discourse and the enabling of genocide. New research—and there is more all the time—suggests such accusations are not entirely without merit. It may be time to consider what life without Facebook would be like.

从来没有像Facebook这样聚集了如此多的人。每月约有23亿人(占世界人口的30%)使用该网络。经济学家估计，它可能为用户带来数万亿美元的价值。但Facebook也被指责造成了各种各样的社会恐慌:从上瘾和恃强凌弱，到侵蚀基于事实的政治言论，以及促成种族灭绝。新的研究——而且一直有更多的研究表明，这种指责并非完全没有根据。也许是时候考虑一下没有Facebook的生活会是什么样子了。

To begin to imagine such a world, suppose that researchers could kick a sample of people off Facebook and observe the results. In fact, several teams of scholars have done just that. In January Hunt Allcott, of New York University, and Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer and Matthew Gentzkow, of Stanford University, published results of the largest such experiment yet. They recruited several thousand Facebookers and sorted them into control and treatment groups. Members of the treatment group were asked to deactivate their Facebook profiles for four weeks in late 2018. The researchers checked up on their volunteers to make sure they stayed off the social network, and then studied what happened to people cast into the digital wilderness.

为了开始想象这样一个世界，假设研究人员可以让一群人离开Facebook，然后观察结果。事实上，有几个学者团队就是这么做的。今年1月，纽约大学的亨特·奥尔科特、斯坦福大学的卢卡·布拉格里、萨拉·艾克迈耶和马修·根茨科发表了迄今为止规模最大的这类实验的结果。他们招募了数千名facebook用户，并将他们分为对照组和治疗组。该治疗小组的成员被要求在2018年晚些时候停用他们在Facebook上的个人资料四周。研究人员对志愿者进行了检查，以确保他们远离社交网络，然后研究了被扔进数字荒野的人的情况。

Those booted off enjoyed an additional hour of free time on average. They tended not to redistribute their liberated minutes to other websites and social networks, but chose instead to watch more television and spend time with friends and family. They consumed much less news, and were thus less aware of events but also less polarised in their views about them than those still on the network. Leaving Facebook boosted self-reported happiness and reduced feelings of depression and anxiety.

那些被解雇的员工平均享有额外一小时的自由时间。他们倾向于不把空闲的时间重新分配到其他网站和社交网络上，而是选择看更多的电视，与朋友和家人呆在一起。他们消耗的新闻要少得多，因此他们对事件的意识也就少得多，而且他们对事件的看法也比那些仍在网络上的人更不两极分化。离开Facebook提高了自我报告的幸福感，减少了抑郁和焦虑的感觉。

It also helped some to break the Facebook habit. Several weeks after the deactivation period, those who had been off Facebook spent 23% less time on it than those who had never left, and 5% of the forced leavers had yet to turn their accounts back on. And the amount of money subjects were willing to accept to shut their accounts for another four weeks was 13% lower after the month off than it had been before. Users, in other words, overestimate how much they value the service: a misperception corrected by a month of abstention. Even so, most are loth to call it quits entirely. That reluctance would seem to indicate that Facebook, despite its problems, generates lots of value for consumers, which would presumably vanish were the network to disappear.

这也帮助一些人打破了使用Facebook的习惯。在停用期过后的几周，那些离开Facebook的人花在Facebook上的时间比那些从未离开过Facebook的人少23%，而被迫离开Facebook的人中有5%还没有重新打开自己的账户。而且，在一个月的休假后，受试者愿意接受的再关闭账户四周的金额比之前减少了13%。换句话说，用户高估了他们对这项服务的价值:一个月的弃权纠正了他们的错误认识。即便如此，大多数人仍不愿就此完全放弃。这种不情愿似乎表明，尽管Facebook存在问题，但它为消费者创造了大量价值，如果网络消失，这些价值可能会消失。

Yet that is not quite clear. Consider the choice faced by the treatment group when the deactivation period is over: to rejoin the network or remain off while the rest continue to like and share. It is possible that a user might not want to go without a service used by 2.3bn others, but also that the world would be better off if the service did not exist at all.

然而，这并不十分清楚。当失活期结束时，请考虑治疗组面临的选择:重新加入网络或保持关闭，而其他人继续喜欢和分享。用户可能不希望没有其他23亿用户使用的服务，但如果这项服务根本不存在，世界将变得更美好。

How could that be? A social network thrives thanks to increasing returns to scale. The more people on a network, the more potential connections it facilitates and the larger its value to each user. Such effects helped power Facebook’s rise; founded in 2004, it took off as the share of the population online grew explosively. New netizens naturally gravitated to the social network used by most of their friends and family, which reinforced Facebook’s advantages—in much the same way that a booming city attracts new residents because of the opportunities created by the large pool of people already there. You could say Facebook is the world’s first digital megacity, thronging with people, enabling huge amounts of human contact, both good and bad.

怎么会这样呢?社交网络的繁荣得益于规模收益的增长。网络上的人越多，它所提供的潜在连接就越多，对每个用户的价值也就越大。这些影响推动了Facebook的崛起;该公司成立于2004年，随着在线用户比例的爆炸性增长，它开始腾飞。新网民自然会被他们大多数朋友和家人所使用的社交网络所吸引，这就加强了Facebook的优势——就像一个繁荣的城市吸引新居民一样，因为已经有大量的人在那里创造了机会。你可以说Facebook是世界上第一个数字大都市，人们聚集在一起，进行大量的人际交往，有好的也有坏的。

In the life of physical cities, the attraction of being close to others can lead to remarkable durability. Industrial towns sprouted along the Great Lakes in the 19th century because of the advantage of being close to water transport—especially once canals linked the lakes to the Atlantic. Great Lakes shipping is not the economic force it once was, yet millions of people remain in cities like Chicago and Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo. Interpreting that durability is tricky. Suppose a team of researchers were to approach a few thousand midwesterners and ask them, for the sake of experiment, to spend a month in southern California. The subjects of the experiment might find the experience surprisingly enjoyable, yet nonetheless return home because of the friends, family and professional contacts who remain in the Midwest. The choice to return could reflect the unique value created by midwestern cities. But it might instead mean that midwesterners are stuck in a bad equilibrium: that well-being would go up if only they could agree, collectively, to decamp to sunnier climes.

在实体城市的生活中，亲近他人的吸引力可以带来非凡的持久性。工业城镇在19世纪沿着五大湖发展起来，因为靠近水运的优势——尤其是在运河将五大湖与大西洋连接起来的时候。五大湖航运已经不像过去那样是经济力量了，但仍有数百万人居住在芝加哥、底特律、克利夫兰和布法罗等城市。解释这种持久性是很棘手的。假设一组研究人员接近几千名中西部人，为了做实验，让他们在南加州待一个月。实验对象可能会发现这种经历令人惊讶地令人愉快，但由于朋友、家人和专业人士仍然留在中西部，他们还是会回到家中。回归的选择可以反映出中西部城市创造的独特价值。但这可能意味着中西部人陷入了一种糟糕的平衡状态:只要他们能够集体同意移居到阳光更充足的地方，幸福感就会上升。

Friends, Romans朋友们,罗马人

Such things occur outside idle thought experiments. Guy Michaels, of the London School of Economics, and Ferdinand Rauch, of the University of Oxford, studied the fortunes of Roman-era towns in Britain and France. When the empire foundered, those fortunes diverged; the French political order was less disturbed by the collapse than the British, and more towns continued to function in France than in Britain. As a result, new towns arose more readily in Britain than in France when, in later centuries, the advantages of proximity to navigable water became apparent. Between 1200 and 1700, populations grew much faster in towns with access to the coast than in those without. Britons benefited from having their urban network “reset”, while the French were stuck liking and sharing the towns their Roman ancestors occupied.

这样的事情发生在无聊的思维实验之外。伦敦经济学院的盖伊•迈克尔斯和牛津大学的费迪南德•劳赫研究了英国和法国罗马时代城镇的命运。当帝国衰落时，这些财富就分散了;与英国相比，法国的政治秩序受到的破坏要小得多，在法国继续运转的城镇也比在英国多。结果，英国的新城镇比法国更容易出现。在后来的几个世纪里，邻近通航水域的优势变得明显起来。在1200年到1700年之间，有通往海岸的城镇的人口增长速度要比没有通往海岸的城镇快得多。英国人受益于城市网络的“重置”，而法国人则受困于喜欢和分享他们的罗马祖先占领的城镇。

Such ruts are hard to spot in real time, and there may well be net value in a Facebook-like network. Were Mark Zuckerberg to turn off his creation, another, similar platform might be propelled to dominance. But the Facebook era could instead be the product of unique, fleeting historical circumstances. In that case, a sunnier social-network ecology might be achievable—if only the citizens of Facebook could be nudged to seek something better.

这样的车辙很难实时发现，而且在类似facebook的网络中很可能存在净值。如果马克•扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)关掉他的发明，另一个类似的平台可能会被推向主导地位。但Facebook时代可能是独特的、转瞬即逝的历史环境的产物。在这种情况下，一个更阳光的社交网络生态也许是可以实现的——只要Facebook的公民能够被敦促去寻找更好的东西。

This article appeared in the Finance and economics section of the print edition under the headline "What would happen if Facebook were turned off?"这篇文章发表在印刷版的财经部分，标题是“如果Facebook被关闭会发生什么?”