UNO News Net: The day Facebook’s boyish California charm ran out

By Charlie AngusOpinion

Tues., Nov. 27, 2018

This week in London, legislators from around the world held an unprecedented inter-parliamentary investigation into Facebook’s role in undermining democratic electoral systems through the manipulation of their platform.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to be the key witness. But he was a no show, saying he was too busy to attend. This decision says a great deal about the international power of Facebook and even more about their corporate indifference to democratic accountability.

Richard Allan, a Facebook vice president, testified next to an empty seat for CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a British parliamentary committee hearing Tuesday on the spread of online disinformation and data breaches. (Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

It was ironic that the Facebook hearings were held at Westminster, the birthplace of modern parliamentary democracy. It is a system that has seen many challenges and a few truly existential threats over the centuries, but it has never seen anything quite as insidiously powerful as Facebook.
While the world was chatting away on the platform, we were unknowingly signing over incredible power of data to billionaire frat boys in Silicon Valley. What is deeply concerning about the vulnerability of electoral politics to information warfare is not just how fragile our democratic electoral processes suddenly appear, but the smug indifference of data-opolies like Facebook, Google and Amazon to the consequences of their power and reach.
When news of the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal first broke, it was presented as simply a case of a privacy data breach, although on a massive scale. But when the Canadian and U.K. parliaments began to investigate, it turned out to be a rabbit hole of international data mercenaries using dark ads and psycho-analytic manipulation of voters on an unprecedented scale.

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The idea that that the Brexit referendum, the most important U.K. vote in recent memory, could have been upended by a couple of data mercenaries was almost beyond comprehension.
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What was even more disorienting was the glib indifference from Facebook to what was becoming a massive corporate scandal. Perhaps the data gurus at Facebook thought democratically elected legislators were too dim to understand the complex algorithms required to make Facebook the dominant platform for news, information and communication.
And in fairness, it is extremely difficult for parliamentarians to understand the power of the machine Facebook has built. We strive to explain it in terms of individuals and personal data, without being able to comprehend the power of algorithms that can change the outcome of elections or shape conversations all over the world. The ability of well-organized actors with bad intentions to weaponize this platform has led to horrific consequences, like the genocide perpetrated in Myanmar.

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Much of the legislative scrutiny of Facebook has been focused on issues like protecting privacy rights and dealing with the proliferation of fake news. But these are mere symptoms. The disease is allowing companies like Facebook and Google to have such unchecked power.
So how do legislators deal with a company that treats domestic jurisdiction as irrelevant? Max Read of New York Magazine has described Facebook as “a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.” What we can see in our three-dimensional world as parliamentarians is a corporate culture of indifference and irresponsibility and this is something that legislation and regulation can address.
Zuckerberg’s decision to flip the bird to an international parliamentary investigation may be the moment when Facebook’s boyish, California charm finally ran out. Its unwillingness to address the implications of the misuse of its platform has put an international legislative response on the agenda. And that response is coming.
What became clear in the meetings in London is that Facebook may be too big for one single jurisdiction, but coordinated international action can put in place legally binding digital rights for citizens. The next steps will be stronger legal protections, but also antitrust scrutiny and serious reporting obligations for the tech platforms so that our weakened democratic immune systems may fully recover from the poison of misinformation.
Charlie Angus is the MP for Timmins-James Bay and the NDP critic for Ethics and Indigenous Youth. His committee is concluding a study on digital platforms.