Real News (6/25/20)
The FBI investigated and arrested Michael Avery for posting on Facebook about a Black Lives Matter protest. We talk with a tech industry whistleblower about “snitch apps” and how law enforcement uses technology to “protect” you. Subscribe to our page and support our work at https://therealnews.com/donate.
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Facebook Is Out Of Control. If It Were A Country It Would Be North Korea
Zuckerberg is not Kim Jong-un. He’s much, much more powerful.
By Carole Cadwalladr
The Guardian (7/5/20)
There is no power on this earth that is capable of holding Facebook to account. No legislature, no law enforcement agency, no regulator. Congress has failed. The EU has failed. When the Federal Trade Commission fined it a record $5bn for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its stock price actually went up.
Which is what makes this moment so interesting and, possibly, epochal. If the boycott of Facebook by some of the world’s biggest brands – Unilever, Coca-Cola, Starbucks – succeeds, it will be because it has targeted the only thing that Facebook understands: its bottom line. And if it fails, that will be another sort of landmark.
Sometimes you don’t realise the pivotal moments in history until it’s too late. And sometimes you do. It’s not quite yet too late. Just almost.
Because this is a company that facilitated an attack on a US election by a foreign power, that live-streamed a massacre then broadcast it to millions around the world, and helped incite a genocide.
I’ll say that again. It helped incite a genocide. A United Nations report says the use of Facebook played a “determining role” in inciting hate and violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya, which has seen tens of thousands die and hundreds of thousands flee for their lives.
I often think about that report. When I watch documentaries showing Facebook employees playing ping-pong inside their Menlo Park safe space. When I took a jaunt to the suburban Silicon Valley town earlier this year and strolled down the “normal” street where Mark Zuckerberg lives his totally normal life as the sole decision-maker in a company the like of which the world has never seen before. When I heard that Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist who has done so much to warn of Facebook’s harms, had been sentenced to jail. When I read the Orwellian defence that our former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg wrote last week. “Platforms like Facebook hold a mirror up to society,” he said.
Facebook is not a mirror. It’s a gun. Unlicensed …