In 2016, we did not know. We were innocent. We still believed social media connected us and that connections were good. That technology equaled progress, and progress equaled better.
Four years on, we know too much, and yet, it turns out, we understand nothing.
We know social media is a bin fire and that the world is burning, but it is like the COVID-19 pandemic. We understand in outline how bad things could get, but we remain hopelessly human. Relentlessly optimistic. Of course, we believe there will be a vaccine because there has to be.
In Facebook’s case, the worst has already happened. We have just failed to acknowledge it, failed to reckon with it and there is no vaccine coming to the rescue.
In 2016 everything changed. As for this year? Well, we will see.
We have already been through the equivalent of a social media pandemic — an unstoppable contagion that has sickened our information space, infected our public discourse, silently and invisibly subverted our electoral systems. It is no longer about if this will happen all over again. Of course, it will. It has not stopped. The question is whether our political systems, society, democracy will survive — can survive — the age of Facebook.
We are already through the looking glass.
In 2016, a hostile foreign government used Facebook to systematically undermine and subvert an election in the US. With no consequences. Nobody, no company, no individual or nation state has ever been held to account.
Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg says Black Lives Matter and yet we know US President Donald Trump used his creation’s tools to deliberately suppress and deny black and Latino people the vote. With no consequences.
Though we know the name “Cambridge Analytica” and were momentarily outraged by Facebook’s complicity in allowing 87 million people’s personal data to be stolen and repurposed, including by the Trump campaign, a US$5 billion fine was paid, but no individuals were held to account.
That is just in the US.
In the UK, there is an even bigger reckoning that has not come. If it was not for Facebook, there would be no Brexit. The future of the kingdom, with its 1,000 years of continuous history, has been set on its course by a foreign company that has proved itself to be beyond the rule of parliament.
Who in the UK understands that? Almost no one.
The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, perhaps, which last week reported its astonishment that no attempt had been made to investigate foreign interference in the EU referendum. Maybe Dominic Cummings, the man who sits in 10 Downing Street by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s side.
Cummings understands the role that Facebook played in Brexit. He wrote about it. In excruciating Cummings detail.
He described the deliberate use of misinformation targeted at unknown individuals in an election operation the scale of which had never been seen before. He deployed more than 1 billion Facebook ads, at a cost of pennies per view, he said.
He does not talk about this now, of course, and though the committee said that media companies “hold the key and yet are failing to play their part,” it also added “DCMS [the British Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport] informed us that [REDACTED].”
The fact is that we now know how the platform was systematically abused by the Leave campaigns. We know that loopholes in laws were deliberately exploited, and we know that these actions were proved to be illegal and “punished” by “regulators,” whose “regulations” have been exposed to be not worth the paper they are written on.
Will Facebook be used to subvert this year’s US presidential election? Yes.
Will Facebook be held to account? No.
Are we looking at a system shock that will change the US for ever? Yes.
Because Trump will either win the election using Facebook or he will lose it using Facebook. Both ways spell disaster.
Interviewed by a Fox News reporter, Trump refused to say if he would leave the White House if he lost the election.
The US, the idea of the US, is on the brink and at the cold, dead heart of the suicide mission it has set itself on, is Facebook.
Facebook and the US are now indivisible. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, these are now the bloodstream of US life and politics. A bloodstream that is sick.
And so the world is sick, because US capitalism has been the vector that has brought this infection across the globe. Algorithmically amplified “free speech” with no consequences. Lies spread at speed. Hate freely expressed, freely shared. Ethnic hatred, white supremacy, resurgent Nazism all spreading invisibly, by stealth beyond the naked eye.
For Trump, the band is back together.
Former Cambridge Analytica head of product Matt Oczkowski has launched a new firm, Data Propria, which had been working with former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, and Trump has tested his limits.
Can he place ads that feature Nazi symbols? Yes. (Taken down, but only after accruing millions of views.)
Can he spread lies about mail-in fraud? Yes.
Can he threaten Black Lives Matter protesters with violence? Yes.
Will he be able to use Facebook to dispute the election? Watch this space.
In a world without consequences, the bad person will be king and an aggressive multinational company whose business model is threatened by the bad person’s opponent is, at best, conflicted; at worst, complicit.
This week, Zuckerberg was forced to deny that he had a “secret deal” with Trump.
“A ridiculous idea,” he said.
It was an uncanny echo of the “pretty crazy idea” he cited in November 2016 when it was first suggested fake news on Facebook might have played a role in electing Trump.
It was not crazy. It was true.
We know this because of the painstaking work the FBI and US congressional committees did in investigating foreign interference in the US election. Work that has not even been begun in the UK.
That was not an accident we discovered this week. It was because of another populist who did not want the truth to come out: Johnson.
Facebook is at the center of this, too. It is Facebook that enables hostile nation states like Russia to attack us in our homes. A geopolitical war being fought in front of our noses, in our pockets, on our phones.
This is Facebook’s world now and we live in it. If you are not terrified about what this means it is because you have not been paying attention.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under