<nettime> Carole Cadwalladr: A digital gangster destroying democracy: the damning verdict on Facebook (Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

From our "we always thought it, but now we know" Dept. ...

Original to:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/a-digital-gangster-destroying-democracy-the-damning-verdict-on-facebook


A digital gangster destroying democracy: the damning verdict on Facebook
Parliament’s report into fake news raises many questions, but will the 
government act?
By Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian, Mon 18 Feb 2019


Facebook is an out-of-control train wreck that is destroying democracy 
and must be brought under control. The final report of parliament’s 
inquiry into fake news and disinformation does not use this language, 
precisely, but it is, nonetheless, the report’s central message. And the 
language it does use is no less damning.

Facebook behaves like a “digital gangster”. It considers itself to be 
“ahead of and beyond the law”. It “misled” parliament. It gave 
statements that were “not true”. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has treated 
British lawmakers with “contempt”. It has pursued a “deliberate” 
strategy to deceive parliament.

In terms of how lawmakers across the globe need to think about Silicon 
Valley, the report is a landmark. The first really comprehensive attempt 
of a major legislative body to peer into the dark heart of a dark 
economy of data manipulation and voter influence. And to come up with a 
set of recommendations that its chair, the Conservative MP for 
Bournemouth, Damian Collins, says must involve “a radical shift in the 
balance of power between the platforms and the people”.

The scale of the report – it drew from 170 written submissions and 
evidence from 73 witnesses who were asked more than 4,350 questions – is 
without precedent. And it’s what contributes to making its conclusions 
so damning: that the government must now act. That Facebook must be 
regulated. That Britain’s electoral laws must be re-written from the 
bottom up; the report is unequivocal, they are not “fit for purpose”. 
And that the government must now open an independent investigation into 
foreign interference in all British elections since 2014.

Cambridge Analytica was already on the committee’s radar when the 
scandal broke in March last year. But, over the ensuing weeks and 
months, it interviewed an extraordinary cast of characters to drill down 
into the underlying machinery of the new political power structures. And 
the result – a doorstopper of a report covering multiple interconnected 
issues – damns Facebook not just once or twice but time and time again.

It includes a new set of internal Facebook documents published today – 
from Six4Three, a software development company involved in a bitter 
legal dispute with Facebook – that show how Facebook was wheeling and 
dealing with users’ data. How it traded access to their friends’ data 
with companies prepared to buy its advertising. And how Facebook shut 
off access for others because it viewed them as “competition”.

At one extraordinary point, the report references the “Racketeer 
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act”, or RICO, the tough US laws 
drawn up to tackle the mob and organied crime. Could Facebook’s actions 
towards developers be viewed as RICO offences, the committee asked a 
Facebook executive. He said no. The report holds the possibility open. 
Certainly, the emails between executives carry more than a whiff of 
extortion. “Communicate in one-go to all apps that don’t spend that 
those permission will be revoked,” says one email. “Communicate to the 
rest that they need to open on NEKO [mobile ads] $250k a year to 
maintain access to data.”

But it’s the sections concerning foreign interference that are perhaps 
the most damning. The report accuses Facebook’s chief technology 
officer, Mike Schroepfer, of giving a statement to parliament about 
Russian interference that “we now know … was simply not true”.

And it’s the government that stands to be most embarrassed. It has 
remained almost silent on the subject in the face of an accumulation of 
evidence detailed here and which the report pulls no punches about: it 
is as urgent an issue of national security as the poisoning of Sergei 
Skripal.

In one of the most striking sections, it notes that the government’s 
response to its interim report, a stunningly dry and boring document 
that dodged all the main issues, drew little attention in Britain. In 
Russia, though, it was another story. The report pulled the stats from 
parliament’s website though and found that more people in Moscow (19.8% 
of visitors) had read it than those in London (17.8%).

And it tears apart the government’s official response that it has “not 
seen evidence of successful use of disinformation by foreign actors, 
including Russia”.

But it’s the section on AIQ that perhaps goes to the heart of the 
problem of why the government is so allergic to investigating any of 
this. AIQ was the Canadian data firm that worked for Vote Leave and the 
chapter on its activities raises crucial questions that lead directly to 
key members of the government.

The campaign directors of Vote Leave include a government minister 
(Michael Gove) and Theresa May’s political secretary (Stephen 
Parkinson). And the committee commissioned external investigators to 
examine a repository of code uncovered by Chris Vickery, a cybersecurity 
analyst. The report throws up a whole new load of questions about its 
work: potentially sharing data between multiple Brexit campaigns and 
suggesting a far closer relationship to Cambridge Analytica than it has 
previously admitted.

There are dozens of critical issues covered in the report’s 110 pages 
and scores of recommendations. The still ongoing mystery of the DUP’s 
donation to the Leave campaign, the government contracts with SCL, 
Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, the continuing questions about the 
shell companies behind the now dissolved company, the mysterious outfits 
still running Facebook ads promoting Brexit.

But there’s only really one question: will the government act on this 
report or bury it?


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