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The other day I booked a restaurant through its online reservations system. I promptly received an e-mail confirming the booking and that was that. Until, that is, a few days later, I googled this same restaurant to check the address and instead I got a window pop-up to inform me that I had a table reserved at this restaurant, on this date, at this time, with these many people. Argh! How?! What?! Why?!

I’m sure there’s a perfectly technological and reasonable explanation for this information spewing, but for a moment there, I got creeped out. There’s a fine line between my gadgets helping me to manage my life and my gadgets doing things that I don’t tell them to.

This is not unlike the realisation that the world woke up to this week, essentially, that Facebook is the Big Brother watching us.

Christopher Wylie, that 28-year-old Canadian with pink hair whom you might have come across while zapping away the news, bravely spilled the beans on how the political consulting company he used to work for, Cambridge Analytica, controversially ‘harvested’ personal data from about 50 million Facebook users and used it to help their strategies for election campaigns.

Wylie was spurred to talk out of guilt that these methods – although, as such, not completely illegal (because the law still has to catch up with online regulations) – are fraudulent and are influencing the weird outcome of elections around the world and destabilising the politics of the west.

Before we understand what Cambridge Analytica did, we have to understand how Facebook subsists. Yes Facebook is free, but the shareholders and its owner Mark Zuckerberg are rich. So where do they get their money from?  They get it by:

a) keeping us glued to our screens and making us Facebook addicts

b) collecting information about us through, for example, the ‘Likes’ we click and the posts we share and our browsing habits (which is that ‘harvesting’ business that Wiley mentioned)

c) convincing advertisers to pay lots of money to Facebook so that they reach us, the naïve Facebook users, with adverts specifically targeted at us.

Facebook is the invasion of the people who want to buy power at whatever cost

By way of example, on my Facebook, no adverts of high-heeled shoes ever pop up, because through my clicks and likes – Facebook knows that I simply love flats. Similarly, no cinnamon cupcake company will ever send their wares my way because I am allergic to cinnamon and I am sure that somewhere I’ve written that and they take note. Instead, I get adverts of colourful hammocks or salty crisps or Converse shoes. But of course, your Facebook adverts will be totally different, depending on what you like.

Cambridge Analytica took that a step further. In 2013 a British academic created a questionnaire app for Facebook users. The 270,000 people who answered it automatically gave Cambridge Analytica access to their 50 million Facebook friends. Cambridge Analytica used the information about all these people not to advertise shoes and crisps but to direct political news (or fake news).

So for example, if they know that I am a fireworks enthusiast I might start getting fake news in my feed, saying that a political party Cambridge Analytica is working to get elected fervently supports fireworks, while on the other hand the opposing party is all set to stamp out fireworks.

Scaremongering, dissemination of misinformation helped to influence Facebook users, and possibly the way they ultimately voted.

This method was used for Brexit and the Trump election. In Malta, blogger Manuel Delia has claimed that similar mechanisms were used by the Labour government at least since March 2015, although the extent of which is not yet known.

Essentially this means that whatever thing we write or put up on Facebook, we are handing over to the owners of Facebook to later manipulate us with it as they please and to elect the governments that pays more, as opposed to the governments that want the best for society more. It is George Orwell’s prophetic 1984 all over.

If this is not enough to raise bumps on our skin and scamper out of Facebook as fast as we can, I don’t know what is. I clocked off last December and absolutely have no regrets. It does not mean that I am a social media recluse: I am very much active on Twitter and Instagram (sadly even the latter belongs to Facebook). But I very much fear that Facebook is rotting the soul of humanity.

I chanced to be in court last week when Magistrate Francesco Depasquale was giving out a sentence on a libel case. Before he delivered the sentence, he read out a quote from my favourite Italian author and philosopher, Umberto Eco:

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.” 

As much as I love Eco, on this one I tend to disagree. I think Facebook is the invasion of the people who want to buy power at whatever cost.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti

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