The New York Times investigation reveals that Facebook hired the Republican opposition-research firm Definers Public Affairs to discredit critics of Facebook, linking them to the billionaire liberal donor George Soros. Facebook also allegedly lobbied a Jewish civil rights group to condemn criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.
Siva Vaidhyanathan talking:
this Times investigation took more than six months. It required the work of more than five reporters and a team of researchers. It delved very deeply into former Facebook employees and current Facebook employees and their testimony about what went on inside the company and, just as importantly, in Washington, D.C., over the past two years.
Now, over the past two years, we have had this barrage of revelations about Facebook. The big picture is, Facebook is impossible to govern, impossible to control. And Facebook had explicitly encouraged, for instance, all of our personal data to go out to third parties and fourth parties and fifth parties, like Cambridge Analytica. We can’t even know where all this data went. That was one scandal. The other scandal is, Facebook is susceptible to—beyond susceptible. Facebook amplifies all sorts of misinformation, propaganda, disinformation, much of which came from Russia trying to mess with American democracy. But a lot of it comes domestically, too, comes from domestic hate groups, comes from political operatives who seem a bit more mainstream.
Within all of this—right?—Facebook, we know, has been scrambling to make sense of it, has been declaring itself innocent and ignorant, for months and for years. Mark Zuckerberg has seemed stunned by the sort of cognitive dissonance that his—that this thing he created, that was supposed to unify the world and make us all treat each other better, has turned out to do just the opposite.
What the Times report showed is, first of all, that, in fact, Mark Zuckerberg has been checked out for more than two years. He’s just not on top of the daily operations. He has let other people handle the reactions to these revelations, and those other people include his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. But there’s a whole team of people, including a number of lobbyists, who either work directly for Facebook or have been contracted for Facebook. And they have been—and this is what’s really mind-blowing—they have been distributing the same kinds of propaganda that have been undermining faith in American institutions and American democracy, the same kinds of propaganda that have been distracting us, the same kinds of propaganda that had generated violence in other parts of the world, the same kinds of propaganda that link critics to George Soros, right? Facebook has basically employed a company to engage in the very sorts of propaganda, anti-Semitic and otherwise, against its critics—its critics on the Hill, its critics in the public sector, its critics in the technology world, its competitors, like Twitter and Google. It’s really stunning that Facebook was so foolish and clueless. But I think, more than that, it shows how desperate the leadership of Facebook is.
So, while Zuckerberg has been checked out, really doesn’t know what’s going on, Sandberg has been engaged in all sorts of nefarious machinations, leveraging her political and cultural capital, which is substantial, right? She is one of the most connected people in American corporate life, having worked in the Treasury Department of the Clinton administration, having worked for Larry Summers, having worked at Google, having written several best-selling books, you know, being friends with every major media figure in America. She has tremendous pull. The person she has most pull with, it seems, is Chuck Schumer, the senator from New York, the most powerful Democrat in the Senate.
The second revelation that was really shocking was that Chuck Schumer approached my senator, Mark Warner, and said, “You need to back off of Facebook. Facebook is a friend of the Democrats. Sandberg is a friend of the Democrats. You need to go easy on it.” Now, fortunately, my senator cares more about the fate of the republic than he does campaign donations from Facebook, which he wasn’t likely to get anyway. So, he’s been able to make a stand and ignore Schumer. Not every senator is willing to do that. But I think we can safely assume that because of Schumer’s implications, Schumer’s connections with Facebook, his dependence on Facebook, and the fact that Schumer’s daughter works for Facebook, we probably can’t count on reasonable legislation, regulation coming out of the U.S. Senate anytime soon.
these problems have been building for five years. They’ve known about many of these problems for longer. Social media scholars like myself have been tracking many of these problems since at least 2011. And Facebook has never taken it seriously. We know now, from the Times article, that Facebook has put a tremendous amount of energy into distracting us and confusing us and flooding the media ecosystem with more propaganda to get us all messed up about what’s really happening.
it will probably be as effective as the independent review board that was supposed to clean up Uber. I mean, look, the fact is, Facebook can’t fix itself. It’s too big: 2.2 billion people post things to it regularly in more than a hundred languages. If you’re going to host 2.2 billion people, a good number of them are going to mean to do harm to other people, right? Because we don’t have that many great people in the world. So, what is Facebook going to do about that? Well, it can’t. It’s too big. It can’t filter. It can’t edit. It just can’t deal. That’s one of the problems.
Then you have its algorithms, which are explicitly designed to amplify things that generate strong emotions—like hate speech, like calls to genocide, like conspiracy theories, right? And if you argue with any of that stuff, if you go on Facebook and you see something like wacky telling you that like vaccinations cause autism or something, and you argue back and you say, “Oh, that’s wrong. It’s going to hurt children that you’re spreading this news. And here are some real scientific sites,” the very act of arguing with crazy stuff on Facebook amplifies it, makes it go farther. You can’t argue with the crazy on Facebook. It is an upside-down world.
So, the scale of it—2.2. billion people in a hundred languages—the algorithm and amplification, and the fact that it has this powerful advertising system, that can target and put messages, all kinds of coercive messages or powerful messages, in front of just the right people, just the susceptible people, whether that is selling shoes, selling tires, selling political candidates or selling bigotry, it is so powerful. And everybody who is launching a nationalist movement, a bigoted movement, a hate movement or an authoritarian movement knows it. You could not invent a better propaganda machine for that process than Facebook itself. There is no way to fix Facebook. There is no way to fix it internally without completely undermining everything that it is, because the problem with Facebook is Facebook.
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Siva Vaidhyanathan
author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.
— source democracynow.org | Nov 16, 2018