Permissible Deviance: Privacy Violations and Facebook’s FTC Fine

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Global Research, July 29, 2019

It was something of a shrug moment.  One of the world’s largest digital platforms had been fined $5 billion for privacy violations by the Federal Trade Commission, claiming it had violated its 2012 order.  The FTC order also requires the company “to restructure its approach to privacy from the corporate board-level down, establishing strong new mechanisms to ensure that Facebook executives are accountable for the decisions they make about privacy, and that those decisions are subject to meaningful oversight.”

On a certain level, being fined $5 billion seems astonishing.  It is two hundred times more than next ranked fine ever imposed on a technology company.  In many an instance, it could sink a company.  Not Facebook, an entity that raked in just under $56 billion last year in profits. Call it an economy of permitted wrong doing, a regime of tolerable violation.  As the sociologist Émile Durkheim posited, the phenomenon of deviance is far from pathological and aberrant: it is, rather “an integral part of all healthy societies”.  

Leaving the matter of health to one side, the continuing casualty in this entire affair remains privacy, ignored, abused and held in a kind of formalised contempt.  As The Washington Post editorialised, “The problem is that the nation lacks a strong privacy law, and Congress is sitting on its hands.”

With each wave or cycle of criticism, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in his ineffably asocial manner, promises his own variation of a grand strategic pivot to that rather withered concept of privacy.   In March, he wrote about his “privacy-focused vision for social networking”.  Various anodyne observations make the meat of the announcement. “Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”  He also noted the caution people had shown towards having a permanent record of online engagement.  “Many people prefer the intimacy of communicating one-on-one or with just a few friends.”

Significant to Zuckerberg’s message is that everything can become a commodity for regulation, because business makes it so. It’s not that he himself cares much for privacy; he knows, however, that people and institutions do, which means he can deliver a service, treating it as part of the marketable armoury of the enterprise.  He acknowledged “that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform – because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing.”  Never fear: “we’ve shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.”

“The Personal Information of Millions”: As Facebook Ire Grows, U.S. Senator Says Zuckerberg ‘Ought to be Subpoenaed’

Digital pundits attempting to understand Facebook’s marketing strategy are generally of one mind on this: the market incentive gallops through first; principles limp on later.  Bhaskar Chakravorti of the Fletcher School at Tufts University finds little to commend the Facebook packaging in all of this, a vain attempt to deem the change as a “revolutionary solution to his company’s widespread problems with privacy, facilitating fake news and understand deals to share user data.”  Furthermore, changes promise to be slow.

The company’s optimism for change did not sway the FTC, unconvinced by the lack of tempo in the Zuckerberg reform agenda.  The Commission insists that it is bringing in a structural dimension to the changes, an externally mandated one that propels necessary reform.  “Unprecedented new restrictions” are being imposed on Facebook’s business operations.  The entity must create “an independent privacy committee within the company’s board of directors”.

The perennially slippery Zuckerberg is supposedly brought within the chain of accountability.  “He must certify Facebook’s compliance with [the] FTC order – exposing him, personally, to civil and criminal penalties.”  Each quarter would see him “review material privacy risks”.  Nor can he dabble with the membership of the independent privacy committee or assessor.

The confident language of the FTC order belies an assortment of problems that marred their effort to right Facebook’s data breaches.  Even the FTC itself was, to some extent, tainted, given that the investigation was assisted by Chris Hughes, himself a former dorm mate of Zuckberberg from Harvard days and Facebook worthy.  Hughes has his own suggestion for government regulators which have their own compromising flavour of market-before-principle: break up the company, reverse the acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram and any future acquisitions. “Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook but our government can.”  The sense that Hughes is sporting his own agenda is hard to suppress.  

The devil lurking in the omitted detail here is that of any stinging enforcement: lawyers representing Facebook had threatened the FTC that it would “cease settlement talks and send the matter to court”, something the Commission has little appetite for.  Yet another jot for Durkheim’s theory of permissible deviance. 

The lawmakers have done little to suggest that changes on the statute books are coming any time soon, leaving states such as California to take the lead in an untidy field.  “We’ve been talking for what, two years about a privacy bill?” put Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, earlier this month.  “Haven’t seen one, don’t know if we’ll ever see one.”

Most prefer indignation as a substitute.  Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward Markey, for one, was not impressed by the FTC formula.  “The settlement is also notably deficient in its lack of new safeguards that would effectively prohibit similar privacy violations in the future.” 

Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley was of similar mind.  “This settlement,” he lamented, “does nothing to change Facebook’s creepy surveillance and its own users & the misuse of user data.”  Even more critically, the issue of accountability was not put forcefully enough.  “It utterly fails to penalize Facebook in any effective way.”  Business as usual, and just to make the point, Zuckerberg made money on the day news of the fine broke.  Privacy breaches do pay.

*

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Featured image is from Legal Loop

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Dr. Binoy Kampmark, Global Research, 2019

https://www.globalresearch.ca/permissible-deviance-privacy-violations-and-facebooks-ftc-fine/5684896


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"The Great Hack" The Most Important Documentary Of Our Time?

By Kayleigh Dray

Note from Tom - Please make time to watch this documentary and place your comment below, recommend it to your friends and colleagues. Go to Netflix’s  and search for "The Great Hack"

July 26, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  We are all, to some degree, aware of the shadowy connections between Cambridge Analytica (CA), the US election and Brexit. And we all know that CA did ‘something bad’ with our data. However, unless you have a degree in tech, it can be hard to understand why so many people believe that social media – specifically Facebook – is manipulating our opinions, our lives, and our society.

Thankfully, Netflix’s The Great Hack is here to help us understand how “the dream of a connected world” tore us apart.

The documentary – directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim – focuses on three principal characters. There’s British journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who famously exposed CA’s ties to the Trump and Brexit campaigns (and has been the target of much online harassment ever since). There’s New York professor and privacy campaigner David Carroll, who attempts to recover his stolen data from CA.And then there’s former CA employee Brittany Kaiser, whose explosive testimony helped Cadwalladr to uncover the truth – and whose blurred role as victim/villain of the piece easily makes her one of The Great Hack’s most compelling characters. 

The opening scenes of The Great Hack make it very clear that the film aims to help us better understand how our data is being manipulated and essentially kept from us by Facebook. And it does so initially by disputing a popular conspiracy theory: that Facebook is somehow ‘listening’ to our conversations.This is not the case, Carroll says, no matter how much it may feel as if it is. Instead, Facebook gives “any buyer direct access to [our] emotional pulse” because it allows them to monitor – and, subsequently, influence – our behaviour. How?

It’s a very good question – and one which can be answered with another.
Have you ever taken a personality quiz?

It was recently reported that data has surpassed oil as the most valuable resource on earth. However, as suggested by The Great Hack, Cambridge Analytica was quicker than most to recognise the potential profit in harvesting personal data. Indeed, the company appealed to clients by claiming they could provide 5,000 data points on every single American voter – and, as the documentary goes on to claim, it was able to deliver on this promise through the tried-and-tested method of Facebook personality quizzes.It’s a format that pretty much anyone who uses Facebook will be familiar with: a seemingly innocuous string of questions, which reveal something unique – or not so unique – about you as an individual. However, there was more to these particular quizzes than first met the eye. Because, using psychological research, including the OCEAN score (which examines five key personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), the folks at CA were able to use the results of these quizzes to build psychographic profiles of social media users.

Even more disturbing? According to The Great Hack, those of us who took such a quiz inadvertently allowed CA to scrape data from our entire friend network (yet another reason to monitor our security settings) and handed them the keys to millions of people’s personal information in the process.As Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer confirmed in 2018: “In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people – mostly in the US – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.”
As reported by Cadwalladr in 2018, CA used this data to influence the Trump and Brexit campaigns. Millions of adverts, explains the documentary, were targeted at all voters – but specifically at a group which has since been dubbed ‘The Persuadables’.
Right-wing votes were assured Trump voters, staunch liberals firmly in the Hillary Clinton camp – a ‘Vote for Trump’ ad sent to either of these groups would be a waste. Instead, CA used their harvested data to identify the people who were on the fence. Or, to put it more bluntly, the people whose minds could be changed.
With this data in hand, CA set to work on making personalised ads, with the aim of exploiting these individuals’ insecurities, worries and prejudices. And they did this “until [The Persuadables] saw the world the way we wanted them to see it”. 

Cadwalladr was one of the first to suspect that CA may have had information on millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. She, along with many others, believed that the information was used “to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements” – and so she set out to prove this. Her investigation took her from triumphant Brexit campaigners, to Trump, to Cambridge Analytica. The links seems indisputable, but she needed first-hand accounts to back up her claims.One such account came in the form of Christopher Wylie, a former CA employee who had worked with Aleksandr ‘Dr Spectre’ Kogan to obtain the data – and whom Cadwalladr convinced to come forward to reveal his role in the whole affair.
“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles,” he told her, after bravely agreeing to go on the record. “And [we] built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

Wylie’s testimony was not enough, however, and so the documentary’s focus switches to Kaiser.

Kaiser was 21 when she began her career as an intern on the Obama 2007/8 campaign, helping to run its Facebook page. Later, she became the director of business development for Cambridge Analytica – and set to work on the company’s Trump and Brexit campaigns (which she has since described a “weapons-grade communications tactic”). Her star rose quickly, and she found herself enjoying the many perks that came with her job – something which is underlined throughout the film with shots of her boarding private planes to expensive hotels in far-flung locations. We even learn that Steve Bannon – formerly Trump’s campaign manager – handed Kaiser the keys to his luxurious townhouse.However, when the company’s shady dealings were exposed by Wylie, Kaiser decided she’d had enough of “making excuses for old white men”. It was then, and only then, that she decided to testify against them as part of a parliamentary inquiry – and, without giving too much away (spoilers ever our watchword here at Stylist), Kaiser’s story reaches sky-high levels of drama as it unfolds on screen.

What the documentary does well – very well, in fact – is what many newspapers and tech reports have so far failed to do: break the Cambridge Analytica story down, so that it’s far more accessible (and understandable) for the average Jo Bloggs. In doing so, it forces us to recognise the value and importance of our personal data – which is no small feat. After all, it can be hard to sum up any interest in data harvesting when it feels as if every single website is doing so (do YOU accept ‘Cookies’ without a second thought? Exactly!).But, while The Great Hack gets a lot right, it gets a lot wrong, too. It lacks the cinematic panache of the critically-acclaimed Fyre, and, while it engages with the debate surrounding data mining and fake news on a surface level, it fails to dissect or scrutinise the details it uncovers (when filmmakers sit down with Kaiser, they take her version of the facts at face value – and allow her to present herself as something akin to a human rights activist, without ever challenging her on the decisions she made prior to joining CA).

Instead, the documentary focuses on painting a damning picture of Cambridge Analytica – the indisputable villain of this particular story – and insists that the company is solely to blame for Trump and Brexit. Which is, obviously, incorrect.CA may have exposed voters to a carpet bomb of biased ads and news reports, but it didn’t force them to check those ballot boxes. They weren’t bullied, or threatened, or coerced into making the choices they did. Their agency was not wrested from them.
It has always been up to us to read beyond the headlines. To do more than skim through the comments on Facebook. To do our own research, to ask questions, to challenge our opinions. To, above all else, form a more well-rounded view of the world – one which allows us to see past the fakery and the falsities when they are forced under our noses by politicians, shady institutions and social media trolls.

As former NY Times editor Trish Hall previously explained to Stylist: “We are much more inclined to believe statistics that support our point of view – something that scientists call the confirmation bias – and we’re very energetic in demolishing those that do not.“If we are going to become more cohesive and more able to move the world forward,” she continued, “then we need to understand other points of view. We can do that [by seeking] out media with which we do not agree.”
It is up to us to break the bubble. Because – while we can slap legislations on Cambridge Analytica, and while Facebook may have since updated its privacy laws – we will never be able to get at the whole truth if we allow ourselves to exist within echo boxes of our own making. People will always share their opinions, and we will always be exposed to fake news. And, unless we make smarter, savvier choices about the media we consume, we will always be susceptible to manipulation.
Unless we recognise this enormous responsibility, democracy will die – not with a bang, but with a whimper. And that, friends, is The Great Hack’s most important takeaway.

Kayleigh Dray is editor of Stylist.co.uk, where she chases after rogue apostrophes and specialises in films, comic books, feminism and television. On a weekend, you can usually find her drinking copious amounts of tea and playing boardgames with her friends. 
 

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Banned by Facebook for Telling the Truth

By Israel Shamir

January 24, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -    Harvard scientists insisted last year we had been visited by guests from a galaxy far, far away. Well, almost. The suspected spacecraft Oumuamua first drew close to the earth, but then it accelerated, sped by our planet and disappeared somewhere into Deep Space. What went wrong? Why did the little green men of Vega, the brightest star in the Lyra constellation, gave up what was presumably their original plan to visit us Earthlings? Could it be they read our internet communications, watched our TV shows, checked our newspapers and chose to postpone the actual encounter until a better times?

One can understand them. We have really made a mess of our communications. We humans need to discuss things in order to make correct decisions, and the field for discussion shrinks rapidly. At first, we lost the media.

Once, the newspapers competed, leaders had differing views, the pundits argued, the parties called for various actions. They vied for our pennies and votes and tried to convince us. Not any more. Now they know better what’s good for us. They do not care about circulation, they do not have to sell newspapers, for the advertisements are paid for by the rich, anyway. Once, minorities had been excluded from discussion; now, it is majority that is banned.

There is not a single newspaper in the US that supports the views of the US President. Nobody defended him when he was accused, brazenly, in-your-face, of being a Russian agent. Nobody supported him when he called to bring the troops home from Syria. Nobody came to his aid when he mulled parting with NATO. There are tens of millions of men and women who voted for him, but he has only his Twitter account at his disposal.

The media accuses Trump of paying too little attention to Israel’s needs. Israel needs US troops in Syria and in Germany, US jets in Spain and Qatar, US ships in Italy and the Gulf. Israel needs the US to lead NATO to contain Russia. If Israel needs it, the US should provide, says Daniel Shapiro, the ex-ambassador. Not a single American newspaper, not a single US statesman cared to reply that President Trump had been elected by the American people to do what is needed for them, not for Israel.The US is not an exception. Millions of French people support the GJ, but not a single newspaper, not a single TV channel gives them a platform. They are called anti-Semites for they are revolted by Danny Cohn-Bendit and Bernard-Henri Levi, who are Jewish. They are also called homophobes because they want to ban same-sex “marriage”. They are being attacked by the bankers’ storm-troopers, the Antifa, and no media defends them.

Millions of Brits support Jeremy Corbyn, but all the mainstream media is against him, even the state-supported BBC, even the Labour Guardian. Corbyn is accused of anti-Semitism, for Corbyn speaks for the workers and against the bankers. Nobody defends him and there is no mainstream media to speak for him.

Only the minor Russian RT channel provides, up-to-a-point, some alternative views, defending the American, British and French people’s sovereignty, but they can’t do much. Paradoxically, RT does not broadcast in Russian and its English-language broadcasts can’t be seen in Russia. The rest of the Russian media doesn’t differ much from the Western variety.

The mainstream media from Tokyo to Paris to Los Angeles speaks in one voice. All other opinions had been pushed out of mainstream discussion. It is good that we have the internet and sites like Unz Review that allow us to express our views. The problem is with delivery. How can we deliver to the public? The real mainstream media has so many more views and viewers! For them, hundreds of thousands or even millions of views are not unusual.

We need our social networks to deliver the ideas and exchange opinions, to inform readers of our publications, to convince and rally. In over-populated, nuclearized world, with family and neighbourhood ties torn, there is no substitute for these networks. And Facebook and Twitter could help us. Google could help us.

Alas, they betrayed us, too. The social networks, by their bans and de-platforming took away from us the last possibility to communicate. An aging baby-boomer who dwelt in many countries under many rulers, I am taken aback by the new totalitarianism that crept in under the guise of new technology. Even in the grim days of Stalin and McCarthy the authorities exercised less mind control than does Mr Zuckerberg and his ilk.

And not only for politics. They want to draw and implement their agenda on all topics disregarding our views.

Facebook hates when men and women have wholesome sexual relations. This is taboo for them. Men are supposed to abuse women. Women are supposed to complain #MeToo style. Alternatively, men may lust after men, and women after women. They actually ban normal relations between the sexes.

I have been banned and my post removed by Facebook moderators for saying that French women are among the best. This is sexism and it goes against the community standards, they said. Can’t you, Mr Zuckerberg, keep your hands off other people’s communications? Allow me to have my own (highly favourable) opinion about French women! Oh no, he can’t.

I have been banned and my post removed for mentioning a Durham University editor who was fired for saying ‘women don’t have penises’. This is offensive to transgenders and goes against Facebook norms.

Facebook and Twitter censorship is insistent, annoying and discourse-distorting everywhere, but the Russian-language Facebook has been subject to particularly severe censorship. FB moderators for the Russians are mainly Ukrainians with a grudge against Russians. Apparently this is the condition by white they are chosen. They remove and ban practically every Russian reference to the Ukraine and its affairs, and never remove or ban Ukrainian insults. Russian poets, classic and modern, are being banned; what appears to these bumpkins as ‘PC rules’ are being enforced ruthlessly.

They ban people for allegedly non-PC posts and comments made years ago. Two years ago a man had quoted in his own FB blog a poem by Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate, and two years later this quote was found and the man banned for a month.

Or an even better example. In 2006, a Russian philologist gave a lecture about origins of Russian language in a Moscow Bilingua café. In 2015, the lecture was posted by a user in Facebook. This week in 2019, it was removed and the user was banned.

Russians have no tradition of PC, for good or for bad. They do not hesitate to mention negroes or mulattos, Gypsies or Jews. They are not aware these words are considered insulting by the new lawgivers. They call the Ukrainians khokhol, or “forelock”, after traditional Ukrainian haircut. Khokhol had been used in Russian language for years, usually with positive or neutral connotation. A modern nicknames for Ukrainians are ukr or ukrop. Until now, nobody considered these nicknames insulting, like chico, okie and tex are not slurs. But for Zuckerberg, all such words call for ban.

I do not know of a Russian FB user who hasn’t been banned for at least a month. Thus, it is not just censorship, but a whole re-education program of the kind usually associated with Chairman Mao and his times.

Zuckerberg and his trained beasts actually decided to mould public discourse of Russian civilisation in their own shape and image. Poor Russians who survived such re-education by the Bolsheviks in 1920s and by anti-Soviets in 1990, are now being processed through the fine mesh of SJW talk. When the Soviets were disbanded, the Russians were promised freedom of speech. Where is this freedom of speech?

FB bans for posting links to the sites they do not like. I have been banned for posting a link to Unz.com. Links to RT and Sputnik are removed, too. Last week, FB removed and banned 500 accounts with 850,000 followers for publishing links to RT and Sputnik. A friend of mine, Mr Oleg Tsarev, a former member of Ukrainian parliament, a contender for Ukrainian presidency and the chairman of the Donbas parliament, had his account with two hundred thousand followers, and Mr Zuckerberg scrapped it without an explanation.

I asked my FB friends to report whether they ever were banned, and if yes, for what reason. Here is a shortlist of their responses: for speaking against Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Quisling; for discussing Shevchenko, the Ukrainian 19^th century poet; for mentioning forelocks; for posting picture of Putin; for speaking about victims of Ukrainian shelling of Donbas; for using such words as ‘pederast’ or ‘lesbian’; for saying women are more emotional than men; for posting a still from an Almadovar film; for arguing against a Ukrainian historian who claimed Jesus and Buddha were Ukrainians; for defending the Russian Church; for criticizing the leading pro-Western liberal Mr Gozman; for arguing against NATO manoeuvres in the Baltic states; for speaking against discrimination of ethnic Russians in the Baltic states.

And now for Israel and Jews. This is a major cause of FB bans. It is next to impossible to refer to Israel on Facebook – without being banned. I have been banned and my post removed for posting links to my own articles on Unz.com . A ForeignPolicy.com link to an article telling of Palestinian church land sales to Jewish settlers had been removed, too. The Haaretz newspaper links were almost always removed and banned.

For instance, Haaretz informed its readers that a Palestinian mother of a teenager killed by Israeli soldiers had been imprisoned for 11 months for an angry post in Facebook. I was banned for reporting that to Facebook readers as for ‘hate speech’. Killing the woman’s son and imprisoning the mother is surely ‘love deed’, but telling of that is sheer hate.

Russian mainstream media steers away of Israel. The Russian editors are not necessarily Jews, but there are enough Jews in every newspaper to stop a critical item. If there are no Jews, every editor feels it would be safer for him to avoid the topic. Facebook is the only possible conduit for free information regarding Israel. Alas, it is equally partial. My friends anti-Zionist Jews have been frequently banned for their “anti-Semitism”. My FB blog with its few thousand followers and viewers allows the Russian readers to learn of Israeli developments. My audience is many times smaller than that of the mainstream hasbara. Can’t you tolerate even such a small window of free speech and real news, Mr Zuckerberg? Apparently he can’t.

In a really shameful episode, Facebook accepted the orders of Israeli military censors. In November 2018, a band of Israeli spies in Arab dress was stopped in Gaza Strip. The Israelis succeeded in escaping while their commanding officer, a high-ranking Druze, was shot dead. It transpired that the Israeli team had spent a few days or more in Gaza, pretending to be members of an international humanitarian relief organisation while actually spying and preparing the ground for shelling Gaza.

They were criminals since the laws of war expressly forbid combatants from using the Red Cross (and other relief organisations) as their cover. Israelis disregard this rule and do use Red Cross ambulances as their troop carriers. (Marwan Barghouti, a potential Palestinian Mandela, was kidnapped by such a fake ambulance.) Gaza security people managed to collect all the photos of the criminals and posted them online offering a million dollars for information leading to their full identification and apprehension. Israeli military censors forbade Israeli media and foreign journalists based in Israel from publishing the photos. However, a Jewish American dissident Richard Silverstein broke the ban and published the photo.

I tried to repost it, but shamefully, Facebook removed and banned the photo. It blocked the photo even in Messenger. I could not believe my eyes: I have placed the photo in Messenger, and it immediately disappeared! What is Facebook, then? Is it an international body – or an outpost of Israeli hasbara?

It is our luck that the Western Union does not (yet) belong to Mr Zuckerberg, otherwise we’d get even letters from our family censored by his sidekicks.

It is paramount to save social networks from Zuckerberg diktat. It should be a public facility, protected by law; it should be possible to appeal every block and ban in the court; no arbitrary decisions should be made. Censorship in peacetime is unacceptable; it is against the US Constitution, too. If we want to save mankind from destruction, we must open communication channels, and keep them open. And then, perhaps, the next scout from Vega will visit us.

P.S. In real time. While this article was being written, another post of mine has been blocked: “This post goes against our Community Standards, so no one else can see it.” This was repost of a link to Haaretz interview of Benny Morris, an Israeli New Historian, who predicts that soon “the [Israeli] Jews will remain a small minority within a large Arab sea of Palestinians, a persecuted or slaughtered minority, as they were when they lived in Arab countries. Those among the Jews who can, will flee to America and the West.”

Apparently life goes against their Community Standards! Shouldn’t people be allowed to read what one of the most important Israeli historians has to say? It is a pretty grim text. Morris expresses regret that Jews didn’t ethnically cleansed the whole of Palestine in 1948, and remove all non-Jews; and he says there is no chance for peace settlement at all. He also says that Trump won’t last a year in the office, and with his departure, Netanyahu will also go under.

In the comments to the article, an (apparently American) reader comments: “do America a favor and go elsewhere, we have enough racist bigots here already.”

P.P.S. Richard Silverstein has been banned for his publication in Facebook, and put up a vigorous fight against the ban.

Israel Shamir has written extensively on public affairs, primarily relating to the Israel/Palestine conflict and Russia, including three books, Galilee Flowers, Cabbala of Power and Masters of Discourse. He describes himself as a native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, who he moved to Israel in 1969, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war, afterwards turning to journalism and writing.


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Losing Users: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Problems

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Global Research, November 02, 2018

His detractors and enemies have been waiting some time for this, but it must have given them moments of mild cheer.  Facebook, the all-gazing, accumulating system of personal profiles and information, poster child, in fact, of surveillance capitalism, is losing users. At the very least, it is falling to that mild phenomenon in business speak called “flat-lining”, a deceptively benign term suggesting that the fizz is going out of the product. 

This week, Mark Zuckerberg has been more humble than usual.  The latest figures show that 1.49 billion users hop on the platform daily; monthly active users come in at 2.27 billion.  While both figures are increases from previous metrics, these fall shy of those bubbly estimates Facebook loves forecasting: 1.51 billion in the former; 2.29 billion in the latter. 

“We’re well behind YouTube”, he observed; in “developed countries”, Zuckerberg conceded that his company was probably reaching saturation. 

While security features of Facebook had improved, there was at least another twelve months before the standard was, in his view, up to scratch.

The user market in North America is flat, while in Europe, FB has experienced a loss of 3 million daily active users.  The process was already underway after 2015.  The moment your grandparents start using a communications product with teenage enthusiasm, it’s time for a swift, contrarian change. But social media, as with other forms of communication, is a matter of demographics and class.   

YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat have been beating down doors and making off with users.  A May study from the Pew Research Centre found that half of US teens between the ages of 13 and 17 claim to use Facebook.  But YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are bullishly ahead with usage figures of 85, 72 and 69 percent respectively. To locus of this move is as much in the type of technology being used as behavioural change, with 95 percent of teens claiming to have access to a smartphone. A mind slushing statistic stands out: of those, 45 percent are online constantly in numb inducing ecstasy.   

The company, in an effort to plug various deficiencies in the operating systems, has been busy hiring content moderators, a point that has not gone unnoticed by users.  This, in of itself, is a flawed exercise, and one imposed upon the company in an effort of moralised policing.  Various legislatures and parliaments have gotten itchy in passing legislation obligating Facebook and similar content sharers to remove hate speech, extremist subject matter and state-sponsored propaganda.  (Where, pray, is that line ever drawn?).  

Facebook: Colonialism 2.0. Managing Public Perception. The Pinnacle of Social Engineering

This raises a jurisdictional tangle suggesting that local parliaments and courts are getting ahead of themselves in gnawing away at the extra-territorial nature of tech giants.  This year, a German law was passed requiring social media companies to remove illegal, racist or slanderous content within 24 hours after being flagged by users or face fines to the tune of $57 million.  Such legislation, while localised in terms of jurisdiction, has international consequences.  Content otherwise permitted by the US First Amendment will have to be removed for offending regulations in another country.   

This is a far from academic speculation.  Canada’s Supreme Court in June last year ruled that Google had to remove search results pertaining to certain pirated products.  The natural consequence of this was a universal one. 

“The internet has no borders – its natural habitat is global,” claimed the trite observation from the majority.  “The only way to ensure that the interlocutory injunction attained its objective was to have it apply where Google operates – globally.”   

This precipitated a legal spat that proceeded to involve a Californian decision handed down by Judge Edward J. Davila, who turned his nose up at the Canadian judiciary’s grant of the interlocutory injunction.  To expect companies such as Google to remove links to third-party material menaced “free speech on the global internet.”  The emergence of a “splinternet” – one where online content is permissible in one country and not another – has been given a dramatic shove.  Police, in other words, or be damned. 

By the end of September, an army of some 33,000 labouring souls were retained by Facebook for the onerous task of sifting, assessing and removing errant content.  But this whole task has come with its own pitfalls, a preoccupation of danger and emotional disturbance.  Those recruited have become content warriors with a need for a strong constitution, a point that has presented Zuckerberg with yet another problem.   

Former moderator Selena Scola, who worked at Facebook from June 2017 till March this year, has gone so far as to sue the company for post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing content depicting graphic violence “from her cubicle in Facebook’s Silicon Valley offices”.  Scola, through her legal counsel, claims that the company did not create a safe environment, instead working upon the practice of having a “revolving door of contractors”.  Moderators, according to the legal suit, are “bombarded” with “thousands of videos, images and livestreamed broadcasts of child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide and murder.”  

Facebook ushered in a remarkable form of dysfunction between users, and the actual platform of communication.  This is very much in the spirit of a concept that lends itself to a hollowed variant of friendship, one based on appropriation, marketing and a somewhat voyeuristic format.  If you can’t make friends in the flesh, as Zuckerberg struggled to do, create facsimiles of friendship, their ersatz equivalents.  And most of all, place the incentive of generating revenue and profiles upon them.  Facebook is not merely there for those who use it but for those who feel free to be used.  This point is all too readily missed by the political classes.

Facebook makes everyone a practitioner, and creator, of surveillance, and anybody with a rudimentary understanding of totalitarian societies would know what that does to trust.  Split personalities and hived forms of conduct manifest themselves.  Unhealthily, then, the number of users globally is still increasing, even if it is dropping in specific parts of the world.  Much like the Catholic Church, reliance is placed upon the developing world to supply new pools of converts. 

Zuckerberg’s company faces investigations from the European Union, the FBI, the FTC, the SEC and the US Department of Justice.  Such moves are not necessarily initiated out of altruism; there is the prevailing fear that such a platform is all too readily susceptible to manipulation (the horror, it seems, of misinformation, as if this was ever a new issue).  Fake ads can still be readily purchased; campaigns economic with the facts can still be run and organised on its pages.  But to attribute blame to Facebook for a tendency as ancient as politics is another distortion.  Not even Zuckerberg can be blamed for that. 

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Dr. Binoy Kampmark, Global Research, 2018

https://www.globalresearch.ca/losing-users-mark-zuckerbergs-facebook-problems/5658733


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