by
Thomas Knapp
On
October 11, Facebook announced the removal of 559 pages and 251
accounts from its service, accusing the account holders of “spam
and coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
The
purged users stand accused of posting “massive amounts of
content … to drive traffic to their websites” with suspicious
“timing ahead of US midterm elections.”
Facebook
admits to “legitimate reasons” for such behavior — “it’s
the bedrock of fundraising campaigns and grassroots organizations.”
Not to mention the operations of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and a bunch of
other users/pages which weren’t purged.
Facebook
also admits that it has previously “enforced this policy against
many Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate
…”
In other
words, Facebook’s administrators are meddling in politics —
including the 2018 US midterm elections — in the name of preventing
meddling in politics.
Who
benefits from the meddling? It doesn’t seem to fall along
“left/right” lines in particular. The victims come from across
the political spectrum — from Reverb Press on the left, to Right
Wing News on the right, to the libertarian Free Thought Project —
some with millions of Facebook followers.
The
primary thread connecting victims of the purge seems to be that they
are critics and/or opponents of the American political “mainstream”
or “establishment.”
In a
sense, this is nothing new. Even before Internet “social media,”
the old guard “mainstream media” tended to draw fairly narrow
lines on either side of the perceived political “center” or
“consensus” and avoid coloring (or publishing e.g. reader letters
that colored) very far outside those lines. One might support or
oppose a tax increase, or even a particular tax, but opposing
taxation in general? Why, that was just crazy and not worthy of
consideration — or of column inches.
The
Internet and social media threatened to change that. In fact, they
DID change that … for a little while, at any rate. But now
Facebook, Twitter et al. are part of the establishment, and they’re
starting to act like it.
How can
we fight that trend?
Some
would have us classify social media as “public utilities” or
something of the sort and regulate them as such. But who would
regulate them? The very establishment in question.
On the
other hand, it’s becoming clear that these companies are already
looking more and more like extensions of the state — and the
establishment the state serves — than like bona fide “private
sector” actors.
What is
to be done? From where I sit, the only real option is to see if the
next generation of “social media” — sites/services like
Diaspora, Mastodon, Minds, MeWe, Gab, et al. — can supersede
Facebook and Twitter in the same way that Facebook and Twitter
superseded print and television news and the more centralized/static
site model of the older Internet.
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