If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.
The Atlantic November 15th
“If we are going to have one nation under God — which we must — we have to have one religion… One nation under God, and one religion under God.”
Former Trump era National Security Advisor (and former Lt. General/pardoned felon) Michael Flynn at a November 13th ReAwaken America tour-stop in San Antonio, Texas
"Facebook said it was looking out for our children and weeding out online trolls, but in reality was creating misery and divisiveness for profit… We are not people to Mark Zuckerberg, we are the product and we are being used against each other out of greed." Ohio Attorney General David Yost in a Press Release as he filed a major lawsuit against Meta/Facebook on November 15th.
Promulgating vigilantism as “patriotism,” encouraging domestic terrorism, creating and then living by false narratives, spreading unprovable and society/life-threatening conspiracy theories, fostering notions of incumbent (white) political entitlement, undermining legitimate authority, marginalizing or completely eliminating opposing voices and votes, placing false blame, defaming and degrading caring individuals and leadership, attempting to seize political power by negating election results, slamming the door to compromise, making teaching truth illegal, mocking and rejecting science, elevating seditionists and murderers to hero status, crushing free speech, truth and non-Christian religious freedoms, refusing to obey or enforce laws that are contrary to “the way I see it,” fabricating individual rights and then demanding them, legitimizing violence and searing ethnic, religious and racial hatred as acceptable political expression… and making billions and billions of dollars from this massive democratic unraveling… America 2021 et seq.
Would the strategies enabling pockets of screaming extremists, well-funded and better armed, to usurp what the majority of Americans really want of the nation and impose the above realities have been so successful without social media? The truth began pouring out when former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, blew the whistle against Meta/Facebook to major media (the Wall Street Journal, CBS’ 60 Minutes, etc.) and in testimony before Congress and the UK Parliament. More whistleblowers followed, and Meta’s stock plunged. See also my October 11th Which is the Next Big Tobacco - Petroleum or Facebook blog.
Haugen noted how the minimal and often short-lived Facebook efforts to counter damaging posts were cast to look as if they were genuine and massive internal efforts to control the problem. In fact, she noted, Facebook thrived on fomenting conflict and lies, because those efforts generated the most eyeball time that maximized ad revenues. She also confirmed that Facebook, especially its Instagram component, knew that its posts were seriously undermining the self-images and self-confidence of pre-teen and teenaged girls… but did nothing to contain that growing psychological harm.
“Ohio's Attorney General filed a lawsuit [the first post-Haugen testimony] against Meta… on Monday [11/15], accusing the company of violating federal securities law by failing to disclose internal research about its platforms' harmful effects on children to investors… The case was filed on behalf of the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System and Facebook investors, who collectively lost more than $100 billion in market share since employee-turned whistleblower Frances Haugen first leaked internal documents to the Wall Street Journal, AG David Yost said.” YahooNews, November 15th.
But if Facebook’s/Meta’s efforts against damaging distortion and disinformation were minimal in its English-language posts, efforts in other languages and in other nations were/are, for the most part, non-existent. Writing for the November 16th Los Angeles Times, Brian Contreras and Maloy Moore express the general frustration of those organizations who are trying to contain this Meta malignancy: “It was October 2020, election conspiracy theories threatened to pull America apart at its seams, and Jessica González was trying to get one of the most powerful companies in the world to listen to her… It wasn’t going well… After months of trying to get on their calendar, González — co-chief executive of media advocacy group Free Press — had finally managed to secure a meeting with some of the Facebook employees responsible for enforcing the social platform’s community standards. The issue at hand: the spread of viral misinformation among Latino and Spanish-speaking Facebook users.
“Across the country, a pipeline of misleading media had been pumping lies and half-truths, in both English and Spanish, into local Latino communities. Sometimes the misinformation mirrored what the rest of the country was seeing: fear-mongering about mail-in ballots and antifa vigilantes, or conspiracy theories about the deep state and COVID-19. Other times it leaned into more Latino-specific concerns, such as comparing candidate Joe Biden to Latin American dictators or claiming that Black Lives Matter activists were using brujería — that is, witchcraft… Much of the fake news was spreading on social media, via YouTube, Twitter and, pivotally, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. All three [of the latter] are owned by the same umbrella company, which recently rebranded as Meta.
“‘The same sort of themes that were showing up in English were also showing up in Spanish,’ González recalled. ‘But in English, they were either getting flagged or taken down altogether, and in Spanish they were being left up; or if they were getting taken down, it was taking days and days to take them down.’
Free Press had briefly flagged the problem in July 2020 during a meeting with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. González had spent the months since trying to set up another, more focused conversation. Now, that was actually happening… In attendance were Facebook’s public policy director for counterterrorism and dangerous organizations, its global director for risk and response, and several members of the company’s policy team, according to notes from the meeting reviewed by The Times… Yet the talk didn’t go as González had hoped.
“‘We had a lot of specific questions that they completely failed to answer,’ she said. ‘For instance, we asked them, who’s in charge of ensuring the integrity of content moderation in Spanish? They would not tell us the answer to that, or even if that person existed. We asked, how many content moderators do you have in Spanish? They refused to [answer] that question. How many people that moderate content in Spanish are based in the U.S.? .... No answer… ‘We were consistently met much the same way they meet other groups that are working on disinformation or hate speech: With a bunch of empty promises and a lack of detail.’
“Free Press wasn’t alone in finding Facebook to be a less-than-ideal partner in the fight against Spanish-language and Latino-centric misinformation. Days after the election, it and almost 20 other advocacy groups — many of them Latino-centric — sent a letter to Zuckerberg criticizing his company’s ‘inaction and enablement of the targeting, manipulation, and disenfranchisement of Latinx users’ during the election, despite ‘repeated efforts’ by the signatories to alert him of their concerns.’” If takedown efforts were failing within the Latinx community in the United States, efforts in other non-English-speaking nations were virtually non-existent.
Just as falsely crying “fire, fire” in in crowded theater does not fall within the notion of First Amendment protected speech, so much unbridled dissemination of democracy-destroying false messaging must also be banned. Meta and its social media brethren must be held seriously accountable, even if that accountability decimates the shareholder values they have built by supporting terrorists, liars and democracy destroyers to make lots and lots of money.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it does appear that we have come to a fork in our nation’s democratic path: Meta or a working democracy… they are mutually exclusive as configured today.
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