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| Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook meets with CDU leader, Angela Merkel, of Germany |
According to Newsweek:
"Facebook said on Thursday it suspended 30,000 accounts in France as the social network giant steps up efforts to stop the spread of fake news, misinformation and spam. The move, which comes 10 days before the first round of a hotly contested French presidential election, is among the most aggressive yet by Facebook to move against accounts that violate its terms of service, rather than simply respond to complaints. Facebook is under intense pressure in Europe as governments across the continent threaten new laws and fines unless the company moves quickly to remove extremist propaganda or other content that violates local laws. The pressure on social media sites including Twitter, Google's YouTube and Facebook has intensified in the run-up to the elections in France and Germany."
With EU state governments threatening to hold Facebook and Google liable for controversial content shared on their networks, Facebook and Google have all the finance-based motivation they need to knock down all the anonymously-held accounts that veer in an anti-establishment political direction. After all, such accounts are more likely to cross the boundary lines set up by the EU state governments than others, based on their anonymity and their content.
Call it damage mitigation.
But note how Facebook and Google are calling anonymous accounts "fake". The making of a verbal-cognitive connection like this - between anonymously-held accounts and such accounts being conceived to be "fake" - should definitely raise eyebrows. After all, how many political works have been authored anonymously throughout history? Would they have retained the same power if, at that time, the public conceived these works to be "fake"?
We are really comparing apples to oranges, here though; the better question, in terms of era-for-era equivalency, is perhaps "were readers repelled historically when a writer was called a heretic?" because in both cases the question is whether the content could be trusted based on subjective analyses of the producer of that content. In one instance, we are looking at whether the writer understood a basic, widely-accepted truth and was therefore safe to consider sane; in the other, we are looking at whether the writer submitted his name. It is bizarre that, in this supposedly much more "Enlightened" age, here we are reverting back to looking at the characteristics of the content producer rather than the content itself - and we are actually attacking content that would have passed under the radar in the previous age. Works produced by anonymous people were never attacked solely for the producer's anonymity.
But the situation is even scarier, because here's the thing: Facebook and Google have a tool that they can use to do much more than just reduce problems due to their understanding of liability for the content hosted. They can also use this tool to pursue any socio-political ambitions they may have, just as the Church did when calling a content producer a "heretic". The question is: would they?
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| Merkel and French En Marche leader Emmanuel Macron hold a discussion |
It just so happens that Facebook and Google share the same socio-political objectives that the EU governments pressuring them to act do. As US-based companies, Facebook and Google deny all this for obvious reasons (US legal), but time and again the politics of these companies have shown through in their enforcement of policy and public actions.
It is important to understand what is really at stake here, as the comparison goes beyond any power the Church had as a censor labeling a content producer a "heretic"; today, because public lives are so closely connected to the sharing of data on platforms like Facebook and Google that the one who controls the sharing of data more like a person in history who owned all the mechanical gears, wood pulp and ink in the state, and thus had the power to determine whose stories went to the press and whose stories did not. An eye-opening parallel.
