Why the UK condemned Facebook for fuelling fake news
If there remained any doubt that Facebook’s business practices intentionally compromise users’ privacy and recklessly undermine democratic norms, it was put to rest on Monday, when the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the British House of Commons issued a 108-page report, titled Disinformation and ‘ fake news’. The committee’s chair, Damian Collins had outwitted Facebook’s legal team when he summoned American app developer Ted Kramer to Parliament. Kramer’s company, Six4Three, was embroiled in a lawsuit with Facebook, and the documents that he had access to were obtained during the discovery process. Their contents are incorporated into Monday’s report, which gets at its nominal subject — the dissemination of propaganda and intentionally divisive content on social media — by unmasking the ways that Facebook has facilitated it.
The report reveals that Facebook executives conspired to bait Android phone users into agreeing to hand over their text messages and call logs during a software upgrade. Facebook’s public-relations strategy, according to the report’s authors, was “to make it as hard as possible for users to know that this was one of the underlying features of the upgrade of their app.” Additionally, a VPN app that Facebook bought, which ostensibly intended to keep users’ browsing activities from being tracked, was actually sharing their web wanderings with Facebook, so that the company could “gain insights into the products and services people value, and build better experiences.” Those insights included identifying the apps and services that were popular among Facebook users, which gave the company a predatory advantage: it could either acquire those apps, as with WhatsApp and Instagram, or shut them down, as with LiveRail. This leads Collins and his colleagues to wonder if Facebook might be exposed to a racketeering lawsuit in the US. Historically, the rico Act has been used to go after mobsters, not tech platforms. But, in the report, the authors call Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his team “digital gangsters,” so there’s a certain logic to it.
The chicanery of Facebook executives, combined with their allegiance to profit over people and their continued insistence that Facebook is a neutral platform, created the conditions through which propaganda has been disseminated online. Facebook was also used to influence the Brexit vote. In detail, the commission explains why it believes an obscure Canadian company called Aggregate IQ harvested Facebook users’ profiles in order to “precisely target” them with pro-Leave messages.
Calling out Facebook for its bad faith and disingenuousness only goes so far. Last October, after the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued its interim report, the British government accepted only 3 of its 42 recommendations. It remains to be seen what it will do this time, after an 18-month inquiry entailing 4,350 questions, 170 written submissions, and 73 witnesses has unearthed incontrovertible evidence that propagandists intent on undermining social cohesion were largely enabled by the arrogance, irresponsibility, and rapaciousness of the executives of a single company.
(Condensed from an article which appeared in The New Yorker)