57 Billion Friendships

Zuck is Under Pressure

Here’s how bad things are for Cambridge Analytica right now. Emails leaked showing that their suspended CEO Alexander Nix used racial slurs to refer to potential clients. That particular detail would be enough to get a person fired but it wasn’t even the lede of the story where it broke. Because of the sheer volume of terrible news about Cambridge Analytica, it got lost in the shuffle.

Cambridge Analytica’s troubles are nothing compared to the PR dumpster fire that Facebook has created for itself. It’s one thing to be a nefarious data firm that probably won’t exist anymore once the various criminal and government investigations they’re not under have ended. But Facebook is a publicly traded behemoth with billions of users around the globe. Facebook will survive but whether or not they can recover remains an open question. Given the public outrage I can see them going the way of MySpace, Yahoo, and AOL in the blink of an eye.

Just how bad is it?

• #DeleteFacebook has entered the public consciousness. Several media outlets have run stories instructing users how to delete their Facebook accounts. WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton, which Facebook purchased in 2014 tweeted “It is time. #deletefacebook” When asked to respond to #DeleteFacebook Mark Zuckerberg admitted “It’s not good.”
• Wall Street is doing their own version of #Delete Facebook. Facebook has lost nearly $50 billion in value since last week’s news broke and as of Friday morning Zuckerberg’s apology tour hadn’t stopped the bleeding.
• Mozilla has stopped running paid ads on Facebook and there’s a growing call for other companies to follow suit.
• Both Congress in the US and Parliament in the UK are calling on Zuckerberg to personally testify before them rather than sending other Facebook staff. Calls for Facebook to be regulated have also gone global and even Zuckerberg said that he’s “not sure [Facebook] shouldn’t be regulated.”

As I wrote earlier this week we have 50 million reasons to be angry at Facebook — 57 billion if you want to include the number of friendships Cambridge Analytica had data on. Facebook has continually failed to protect its users’ data and privacy, but failing to protect us from Cambridge Analytica, a firm whose leadership bragged to potential clients about their ability to trap politicians with bribes and prostitutes, and who may have broken multiple US election laws to help elect Donald Trump, is a huge breach of the public’s trust. I’m angry at Cambridge Analytica, their financial backers and their clients but what I keep coming back to is that this happened on Facebook’s watch.

Tech companies have allowed their platforms to be weaponized by companies like Cambridge Analytica, Russian trolls, the so-called alt-right and Donald Trump. They’re the recurring problem in many of our political and social ills. Hostile actors have use social media to recruit followers, target their enemies and fund their activities. I’m convinced that the key to stopping all of these anti-democratic political movements is by cutting off their ability to exploit the platforms.

Post-Charlottesville we’ve made a lot of inroads. In the immediate aftermath of the Unite the Right rally the public was able to pressure crowdfunding companies to kick alt-right figures off of their platforms, cutting off a funding stream. Discord, the preferred chat tool of the Frog Squad, has been purging alt-right servers from it’s platform for months, cutting off an organizing channel. YouTube and Medium have done the same, cutting off both an amplification network and revenue stream. Finally, Twitter has taken aggressive action to ban bots and trolls after alt-right figures used the platform to spread conspiracy theories about Parkland student survivors.

We need systemic solutions to systemic problems. Calling on tech companies to make those changes, and calling on governments to further regulate them is working. Facebook is on the defensive with no hope of a quick PR fix. We need to keep our foot on the gas pedal. Tech companies will only cooperate if pressured to do so by the public. This week we finally reached the societal tipping point.
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Hindu Mysticism and the Alt-Right
by David Lawrence

The alt-right – a movement that attracts racist cranks from a variety of far-right philosophies – has, in its search for pseudo-academic and mystical underpinnings, revived a number of esoteric thinkers and fascist gurus of the 20th century, the ideas of whom have gained an unprecedented reach through alt-right publishing houses and websites.

Through these thinkers the broad alt-right has appropriated elements of Hindu philosophy and developed a lore that shares certain ideological commonalities with Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) today. The movement commonly invokes, often semi-ironically, an almost-New Age mythos that stretches from the semi-divine origins of “Aryans” to the end of the world itself.

Read the full article here.

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Research/Projects

• A new, extensive literature review from the Hewlett Foundation titled Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A review of the scientific literature carefully parses the often tangled themes found within current discussion of politics and social media, providing an overview of what we do and do not yet understand about the relationship between the two. Read the full review here.
• The most recent episode of the brilliant ‘Why We Argue’ podcast, which forms part of the University of Connecticut’s Humility and Conviction in Public Life project, features an interview with Shanto Iyengar, a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Professor Iyengar has written extensively on news media and political communication in contemporary democracy and here he discusses his current research focus on political polarization and political affect.

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ICYMI

• The Sophisticated Use Of Our Data Has Gone In A Dark Direction – So What Now?
  (Huffington Post, by HOPE not hate’s Matthew McGregor)
• We’re taking steps to protect against future interference in our political conversation by state-sponsored propaganda campaigns (Tumblr)
• Tennessee legislature kills resolution condemning neo-Nazis as terrorists (The Hill
• Denounced by his party as a Nazi, Arthur Jones wins Illinois G.O.P. congressional primary (NY Times)
• YouTube bans firearms demo videos, entering the gun control debate (Bloomberg)
• Alt-right is dying, but powerful conservatives are mainstreaming its ideas (Salon)
• There’s an online harassment campaign underway against people advocating for diversity In comics (Buzzfeed)
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Coda

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