Message From The Editor: The Net Is Closing On Facebook

It has been a tumultuous fourteen days for Facebook. Late last week, the market value of the Surveillance Capitalist monolith was reduced by an astonishing $120 billion as a result of slower growth in user numbers and advertising revenue, and lowered profit forecasts. That represents a drop of 20%. If the starting base weren’t so high it’d be seen as catastrophic.

Indisputably, however, it is very bad news indeed, because it is a sign that sentiment has started to turn against the company. Who knows where that will end?

What followed that collapse may, in the long run, be worse still. On Sunday, the UK parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued the first of two reports, based on its enquiry into ‘fake news’. There was cold comfort here for Facebook investors. The Committee was devastating in its judgement on the company, citing its “complete lack of moral responsibility” and the shocking “absence of moral leadership.” Which is what Hot Press, and other media – most notably The Observer newspaper in the UK – have been saying for a long time. The world, it seems, is finally catching up.

LEGALISTIC FIG-LEAF

Throughout the DCMS enquiry, Facebook’s Oligarch-in-Chief, and dominant shareholder, Mark Zuckerberg, refused to travel to London to answer questions from Committee members. Instead, he sent lower-level representatives to do the dirty business for him. The chairman of the Committee, Tory MP Damian Collins, was not impressed.

One of those representatives, Simon Milner – the now ex-Head of Policy for Europe – lied to the committee by claiming that Cambridge Analytica had not used Facebook data in the campaign they ran on behalf of the Pro-Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum. This brazen deceit was exposed in interviews carried out by Carol Cadwalladr, for The Observer, with two whistleblowers: Christopher Wylie (who was central to Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of Facebook data) and Shahmir Sanni (heavily involved in the BeLeave youth pro-Brexit campaign).

The next senior Facebook representative in the dock, Chief Technology Officer Mike Schöpfer, was also deliberately economical with the truth. He was asked about the source of Brexit-related advertising, and potential links to Russia.

“We did look several times at the connection between the IRA (the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency – Sub Ed) and the EU Referendum,” he told members of the Committee, “and we found $1 of spend. We found almost nothing.”

Now, however, evidence has been released by US Congress suggesting that ads that were targeted at UK Facebook users were indeed paid for in roubles. This occurred prior to the final 10-week duration of the official campaign – the timespan which is ‘regulated’ by the Electoral Commission.

There is no doubt whatsoever that Facebook knew about this Russian advertising spend. Rather than coming clean about it, they chose denial, with the quasi-legalistic fig-leaf that it was outside the regulated period. They were hoping, of course, that the truth would never be revealed. Too bad.

“Time and again, Facebook chose to avoid answering our written and oral questions to the point of obfuscation,” the report states. But it is becoming clearer that this is unlikely to wash for very much longer. People are now onto the Surveillance Capitalist megalith’s game. They can hide, but they can’t run. The net is closing.

COMPUTER HACKING

The unvarnished truth is that Facebook has colluded in the subversion of democracy in the US and the UK. It has done so knowingly, and it has profited from this fundamentally treasonous activity by taking payments for disseminating black propaganda, in the form of advertising.

Facebook’s posturing about ‘communities’ and not wanting to censor people is just so much bullshit. If this were about freedom of expression on individual Facebook pages, that’d be one thing – you might have a degree of sympathy. But this was about revenue. They knew what was happening. They preferred to snigger all the way to the bank.

But that’s not all. The committee also uncovered Facebook-related evidence of computer hacking in Nigeria, corruption in the Caribbean and what they describe as “the really interesting links between Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and Hillary Clinton.” On top of which, there’s the use in India of fake images and doctored videos on WhatsApp, which have triggered mob violence, and inspired a bloody carnival in which over 20 Indians have been lynched.

This is deep shit and Facebook is in the middle of it.

The report gives examples of the ‘dark ads’ run by the Leave campaign on Facebook – details of which were extracted from the company only after huge resistance. These ads are racist. They are deceitful. And they were used to target people who had shown – on their own Facebook pages – a vulnerability to believing toxic effluent of this nature.

Meanwhile, Shahmir Sanni has revealed that Facebook ads were deliberately run by ‘Leave’ during the three day period after the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, despite the fact that a moratorium had been agreed. Facebook accepted them. Once again, no matter how wrong or unfair they knew it to be, they took the money.

The implications of all of this are very serious, not just for Facebook, but also for all ‘social media’ companies. In effect, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s report says: ‘We now know what has to be done’.

The report offers a series of potentially far-reaching recommendations. It calls for “algorithmic auditing”, in which context the secrets of the tech companies’ “black boxes” would be prised open. It also calls for a new regulator – in effect, a digital version of the UK’s telecoms regulator, Ofcom – that would make companies legally liable for harmful or illegal content.

ILLEGAL ACTIVITY

On one crucial issue, the language used in the report is very clear. “Social media companies cannot hide behind the claim of being merely a ‘platform’, ” the report states categorically. “That is not the case; they continually change what is and is not seen on their sites, based on algorithms and human intervention.”

Or to put it in more familiar terms, they are content curators. They are editors. Observing this, Hot Press has long argued that they should be treated in the same way – and be legally liable in the same way – as other media businesses.

In an interesting twist on this, the report suggests that a new category of Tech Company be created, which would be neither Platform nor Publisher, but which would impose on tech companies the “clear legal liability to act against harmful or illegal content.” Failure to do so would invoke criminal sanctions.

The Swiss data expert Paul-Olivier Dehaye, who testified before the committee, was quoted in The Observer describing the report as a ‘comprehensive critique’ of all social media companies, but especially of Facebook. “It looks like the cops are finally arriving,” he said.

All of this represents progress. But it makes one glaring omission seem all the more extraordinary. There are leading Tory politicians, including the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Michael Gove, and the recently resigned Foreign Minister, Boris Johnson, who were directly involved in illegal activity. What they oversaw amounts, in effect, to electoral fraud. But so far, there has been little or no attempt made to hold them accountable.

It is as if the fear of being denounced in the right wing press as attempting to undermine Brexit is enough to pervert the course of justice. But these liars, these charlatans – these election-fixers – may yet get their comeuppance.

Here’s hoping. Nothing would be more deserved.