It is not Russia or China, it is Facebook. They are not external attacks, it is the destruction of the system from within the system. As a result of greed, so far more powerful than fear. At stake, the most valued values, privacy, democracy, children’s health, the safety of all. A monopoly that has half of humanity as a client and as raw material their personal data can achieve a power that exceeds any known limit, of totalitarian relevance.
Only the results and the stock market price count. Nothing more. There is no other strategy. The future of the company is limited to ensuring that profits and market value will continue to grow. When it is verified that the younger generations begin to drop out, nothing prevents giving more gas to the car, although the risk for all increases. This is what has happened on Facebook, ready to favor political radicalization and tolerate racist hate speech, the smear of vaccines, conspiracy theories, the apology of anorexia, and even incitement to violence, if they serve to maintain and even increase the number of users.
It has not been discovered by any parliamentary or police investigation, but by the company’s own employees who have leaked internal documents, known as the Facebook Papers, in which experiments and analysis on moderation systems and the construction of algorithms are collected, which almost always end up favoring the most extreme ideas, especially those of the extreme right. Facebook has already been portrayed with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company that used private data of the clients of the social network without their authorization, at the service of Donald Trump’s electoral campaign in 2016.
It was only a tiny part of Mark Zuckerberg’s shady and fabulous business, erected into a power that dictates the law on its own. The company has an arbitration and decision system, a true internal and private justice system, which decides when to censor or moderate messages and how the algorithm that performs such functions is organized. It is about double-barred justice, with a rigorous code aimed at ordinary mortals and a more permissive one for celebrities; abundant resources to moderate the messages in the United States, where it is most monitored by the public powers, and the greatest neglect, probably malicious, for countries such as India, Myanmar or Ethiopia, where it is an instrument of radicalization and even promotion of cleanliness ethnic and civil strife.
Zuckerberg is no exception. The entire happy globalization of the last 30 years is based on the primacy of profit over security. There is no outside enemy for the next war. The enemy is at home and is counting on our cooperation.
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