John Naughton, Opinion, London, 29 Apr 2018<\/p>\n
T<\/span><\/span>he most significant moment in the US Senate\u2019s interrogation of Mark Zuckerberg came when Senator Lindsey Graham asked the Facebook boss: \u201cWho\u2019s your biggest competitor?\u201d It was one of the few moments in his five-hour testimony when Zuckerberg seemed genuinely discombobulated. The video of the exchange<\/a> is worth watching. First, he smirks. Then he waffles about Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft \u201coverlapping\u201d with Facebook in various ways. It\u2019s doesn\u2019t look like he believes what he\u2019s saying.<\/p>\n Eventually, Senator Graham cuts to the chase and asks Zuckerberg if he thinks Facebook<\/a> is a monopoly. \u201cIt certainly doesn\u2019t feel like that to me,\u201d the lad replies.<\/p>\n Laughter ripples through the room, as well it might. Here, at last, was something that every senator at the hearing understood. What\u2019s less clear is whether they grasped the scale of the problem the company poses to society. For Facebook is a new kind of monopoly. We\u2019re accustomed to the idea of companies becoming dominant in some jurisdictions. But we have never before encountered a corporation that has a global monopoly. Because wherever you go on the planet these days, Facebook is the only social-networking game in town. It has no serious competitors \u2013 anywhere.<\/p>\n The implications of this are only now beginning to dawn on us. In the past two years, we have woken up to Facebook\u2019s pernicious role in western democratic politics and are beginning to think about ways of addressing that problem in our bailiwicks. To date, the ideas about regulation that have surfaced seem ineffectual and so the damage continues. But at least liberal democracies have some degree of immunity to the untruths disseminated by bad actors who exploit Facebook\u2019s automated targeting systems \u2013 provided by a free press, parliamentary inquiries, independent judiciaries, public-service broadcasters, universities, professional bodies and so on.<\/p>\n Other societies, particularly the developing countries now most assiduously targeted by Facebook, have few such institutions and it is there that the company has the capacity to wreak the most havoc. We\u2019ve had intimations of this for a while, notably after it became clear that Facebook was a medium for anti-Muslim hysteria in Myanmar, hysteria that was subsequently translated into full-blown ethnic cleansing. One of the key figures in all this was the ultra-nationalist Buddhist monk, Ashin Wirathu, who used Facebook to broadcast his views<\/a> about the Rohingya after he was banned from preaching by the\u00a0government.<\/p>\n Wirathu compared Muslims to mad dogs and posted gruesome pictures of dead bodies that he claimed were killed by Muslims \u2013 with predictable consequences. United Nations officials now say that social media has had a \u201cdetermining role\u201d<\/a> in anti-Rohingya Muslim violence in Myanmar, which the UN itself has called \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d. For \u201csocial media\u201d, read Facebook, because there\u2019s no competition to it in\u00a0Myanmar.<\/p>\n But now we\u2019re discovering that the platform is playing a similar role in other developing countries, thanks to a terrific piece of reporting<\/a> by Amanda Taub and Max Fischer of the New York Times<\/em>. In a way, the headline \u2013 \u201cWhere Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match\u201d \u2013 says it all.\u00a0The illustration over the online edition\u00a0of their report is a video of a Buddhist mob setting fire to Muslim-owned\u00a0shops and\u00a0homes in Digana, Sri Lanka, last month.<\/p>\n Taub and Fischer\u2019s reconstruction of Sri Lanka\u2019s descent into the current cyclone of hatred and violence is based on interviews with officials, victims and ordinary users caught up in online anger. It reveals, they say, \u201cthat Facebook\u2019s newsfeed played a central role in nearly every step from rumour to killing\u201d. Facebook officials, they say, \u201cignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact\u201d. Facebook itself says in response that it tries to remove inflammatory content as soon as it can.<\/p>\n Which brings us back to the significance of Facebook being a global monopoly. Already, the company\u2019s market in the west is reaching saturation, so most of its future growth has to come from increasing its penetration into the less-developed parts of the world. That\u2019s why it\u2019s been pushing its \u201cfree basics\u201d services, which give owners of cheap smartphones who cannot afford internet data limited free connectivity, so long as they use the Facebook app.<\/p>\n The result is that many of these new users are understandably convinced that Facebook is <\/em>the internet. And so it becomes their sole source of online information. But it also makes them uniquely vulnerable to hoodlums such as the guys who started the rumour that kicked off some of the Sri Lankan violence \u2013 that Muslim pharmacies in Sri Lanka were stockpiling pills aimed at sterilising the Sinhalese\u00a0community.<\/p>\n Fake news affects elections in the\u00a0west, but in the rest of the world\u00a0it costs lives. And Facebook is\u00a0often a carrier of it.<\/p>\n What I\u2019m reading<\/strong><\/p>\n Better reds<\/strong> Sorry bunch<\/strong>
\nOne of the most impressive books I\u2019ve ever read is Francis Spufford\u2019s Red Plenty<\/em><\/a>, an account of the Soviet era told as a combination of Russian-style fiction and social science. And I\u2019ve just found a terrific record<\/a> of a seminar on the book put together by the political scientist Henry Farrell and some of his colleagues. It\u2019s a worthy tribute to an extraordinary work.<\/p>\n
\nAs we slowly get to grips with the implications of the internet, inventor\u2019s remorse is beginning to take hold. The best articulation of that sentiment I\u2019ve seen thus far is The Internet Apologises<\/a>, a collection of interviews with some of the more prominent people \u2013 Jaron Lanier, Ellen Pao, Ethan Zuckerman etc \u2013 in the evolution of the technology. Read it and weep. Hindsight is the only exact science. Alas.<\/p>\n