SHADES OF THE GUPTAS

Call it lobbying, state capture or corruption ... whichever, in an election year South Africans should be very wary of Facebook’s casual amorality

If you think SA’S government was alone in effectively putting itself up for rent to private interests, like those of the Gupta family, this week’s Facebook leaks should act as a tonic for any such naiveté. The fact is, large companies have been trying to compromise policymakers for years. In the US, it even has a quaintly polite name: lobbying. At home, we tend to refer to the practice, or at least the particular flavour of it brewed by a venal former president and his pastiche of cartoon villain sidekicks, as state capture.

Now, this new insight into Facebook’s practices stems from documents filed in a California court in response to a 2017 case against Facebook by app developer Six4three — first reported by Computer Weekly and the British newspaper The Guardian, with investigative journalist Duncan Campbell.

The e-mails reveal Facebook’s sprawling lobbying operation across the world — including the UK, India, the US, Brazil and Europe. While the original documents, seen by the FM, don’t specifically mention SA, it would be an exception had this country not experienced similarly surreptitious meddling.

Perhaps the most telling revelation, indicative both of Facebook’s power and its willingness to abuse it, is its alarming interaction with Ireland’s former prime minister Enda Kenny.

In one memo, Marne Levine — then Facebook’s vice-president of global public policy and now its VP of global partnerships — boasts that her company has formed a “great relationship” with Kenny, who, it says, has offered to use Ireland’s position as the president of the EU for six months to influence the other countries

This is a company entirely comfortable with manipulating personal data for a few cents