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It seems incredible Facebook is only 14 years old. The firm’s penetration of the planet, since it was created by some Harvard students in their dorm, has been simply astonishing; there are more active users of the social network across the world than there are followers of Christianity. Yet for all that turn-of the century talk of Silicon Valley as a liberating force for society, this single technology giant has come to symbolise the most rapacious form of modern-day capitalism.
Facebook has had a terrible year, stumbling from one scandal to another. It stands accused of many misdeeds from tax-dodging and allowing dark forces to undermine democracy through to having a pernicious effect on the mental health of teenagers. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we created are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth,” confessed Chamath Palihapitiya, the firm’s former vice-president of user growth, last year. “Bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really bad state of affairs.” Yet many people seem oblivious to the dangers.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, once touted as a possible US President, has been desperately trying to deflect criticism and deter regulation, determined not to abdicate his domination of the company – he is both chairman and CEO – in the face of fierce investor criticism. Last month, he claimed the firm was cracking down on the dissemination of fake news but insisted they could not solve such problems alone. “Bad actors don’t restrict themselves to one service, and we shouldn’t approach the problem in silos,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. Yet a series of investigations exposed the limpness of their weak efforts – and now shocking evidence has emerged of how they sought to discredit critics and deflect attention.
The New York Times has revealed that while Zuckerberg was busily saying sorry and the firm was presenting itself as a force for global good, his colleagues had commissioned an aggressive lobbying campaign to discredit critics. One tactic was to link Facebook’s foes to George Soros, the Jewish financier and philanthropist routinely targeted by the far-right with vile anti-semitic conspiracy theories. “It is disappointing to see how you have failed to monitor hate and misinformation on Facebook’s platform,” responded Patrick Gaspard, president of the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations. “To now learn that you were active in promoting these distortions is beyond the pale.”
So Zuckerberg has been back in the spotlight defending himself again; he is having to deny he knew about smears or anti-semitic narratives and has put a new recruit, one Nick Clegg, in charge of a review of lobbying. But the platform’s sinister effect reaches beyond democracies in the West. Take recent events in Nigeria. In June, at least 11 men were butchered or burned to death in Plateau State, a region riven with ethnic violence. Now police say tensions were inflamed by images circulated the day before on Facebook that claimed Fulani Muslims were slaughtering Christians from the Berom minority. “Fake news on Facebook is killing people,” said Tyopev Terna Matthias, spokesman for the police.
A BBC investigation found some of the most incendiary images did not even come from Nigeria and had nothing to do – as claimed – with mayhem in another district of the state. One widely-shared video showing a man’s skull sliced open was six years old and had come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Jos South was not under attack. But because of those images they saw, the next day, roads were blocked. People died. Vehicles were burned. So many people died.” said Matthias.
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