How Dangerous Do You Think Facebook Is To Democracies?

On Monday, the Financial Times published a letter from George Soros calling for Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sanderberg to be removed from controlling Facebook:

Mark Zuckerberg should stop obfuscating the facts by piously arguing for government regulation ("We need more regulation of Big Tech," February 17).

Mr Zuckerberg appears to be engaged in some kind of mutual assistance arrangement with Donald Trump that will help him to get re-elected. Facebook does not need to wait for government regulations to stop accepting any political advertising in 2020 until after the elections on November 4. If there is any doubt whether an ad is political, it should err on the side of caution and refuse to publish. It is unlikely that Facebook will follow this course.

Therefore, I repeat my proposal, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg should be removed from control of Facebook. (It goes without saying that I support government regulation of social media platforms.)

I hope that works-- before the election. Watch this video interview with a former Trump campaign executive that was posted by the BBC in 2017 that explains how the Trump campaign used Facebook to worm his way into the White House.

Q: What were Facebook and Google and YouTube people actually doing here; why were they here? (at Trump's digital campaign headquarters)

A: They were helping us... They were basically our hands-on partners as far as being able to utilize the platform as effectively as possible... When you're pumping in millions and millions of dollars to these social platforms, you're going to get white glove treatment. So, they would send people to the Project Alamo to ensure that all of our needs were being met. Without Facebook, we wouldn't;'t have won. Facebook really and truly put us over the edge. Facebook was the medium that proved most successful for this campaign.

Last month, a Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, made a similar claim, namely that Facebook out Trump in the White House.

Bosworth, a close friend of the firm's chief Mark Zuckerberg, made the remark in an internal memo last week.

Mr Bosworth said Mr Trump was not elected because of "misinformation," but "because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser. Period."

...Bosworth's note discussed many of Facebook's high-profile scandals, including alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Mr Bosworth told staff that it was not foreign interference that helped Mr Trump get elected, but his well-planned campaign.

"So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected?" questioned the long-time employee. "I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks."

Political manipulation through Facebook is probably here to stay and by "here," I mean the planet earth. ZDNet Tuesday: "Facebook has called out the Singapore government for its use of the country's Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act to block access to a page on the social networking platform. The move goes against an earlier pledge that the legislation will not be used to censor voices, says the US internet giant. Singapore's Ministry of Communications and Information on Monday instructed Facebook to block access to the States Times Review page, after the latter repeatedly refused to comply with previous directives issued under POFMA. The 'disabling' order, outlined under Section 34 of the Act, requires Facebook to disable access for local users. The order came two days after the ministry served a directive for the STR page on Facebook to be tagged a 'Declared Online Location.' This required the author of the page, Alex Tan, to publish a notice on the page stating it had 'a history of communicating falsehoods.' The order, which was to take effect from February 16, was not complied with, prompting the directive for Facebook to block access to the page. The page is no longer accessible in Singapore... In defending the decision to issue the disabling order against the STR page, Minister for Communications and Information S. Iswaran said the government needed to 'act swiftly' against falsehoods amidst the coronavirus outbreak. 'Because if we don't, then these falsehoods can cause anxiety, fear, and even panic,' the minister said Tuesday during a media doorstop."

Republican oligarch Michael Bloomberg has been spending a million dollars per day on manipulative Facebook ads that seem to be working very well for him.