Facebook is damaging democracy

Foreign Policy (Washington DC)

Facebook has finally conceded that it may have had an influence on the US presidential election, says Christina Larson. Good. Now the social network should examine its impact on Asia, its biggest user base, where “it inadvertently shapes the media consumption of hundreds of millions of people” – with sometimes dangerous results. Take Myanmar. Since 2011, there has been a huge increase in the number of people in the country using Facebook. This has been great for entrepreneurs, but also a gift to demagogues such as Ashin Wirathu, a monk known as the “Burmese bin Laden”, who has incited anti-muslim hatred on dozens of inflammatory Facebook pages, which still haven’t been taken down. Cambodia has the opposite problem. There, Facebook is an invaluable campaigning tool for human rights activists – or at least it was until October, when the company selected Cambodia, and five other states, as pilot countries to test a new format under which public content would no longer appear alongside people’s personal posts. This had the unintended effect in Cambodia of driving a lot of traffic away from activist blogs, at precisely the moment political repression in the nation was stepping up. The experience of both countries speaks to the need for Facebook to be more responsive to local concerns. The company’s old mantra, “move fast and break things”, is “a lot less appealing when the things being broken are people”.