Illustration : D. R.
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The examination of the decisions of moderation of the social network by an ad hoc court an unprecedented fact which inaugurates a new stage in the great adventure of social media and imposes a new standard.
On May 5, 2021, the Supervisory Board of Facebook, an authority made up of 19 eminent experts on various legal issues, online censorship, freedom of expression and disinformation, endorsed the decision taken by Mark Zuckerberg, in January 2021. , to prohibit the former President of the United States, Donald Trump from expressing himself on Facebook, believing him to be responsible for having created chaos, by inciting his supporters of extremist movements to invest the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The former American President “used our platform to incite a violent insurrection against a democratically elected government”, justified then the boss of Facebook. Installed by Mark Zuckerberg with the mission of examining Facebook’s most important moderation decisions and making recommendations on its moderation policy, the Supervisory Board confirmed the initial choice of the platform but handed over the responsibility of deciding the Trump’s final fate in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and his team.
“By applying a vague sentence and sending this matter back to the Council to resolve it, Facebook is seeking to shirk its responsibilities”, wrote the body in a press release accompanying its decision.
Arguing that the choice to block Trump finds no basis in Facebook’s community standards and violates the principles of free speech, the council criticized the platform’s general approach to restraint by world leaders, saying the considerations awareness should not be given priority when it is necessary to avoid significant damage.
In an act of defiance, the council instructed Facebook to make its own decision within the next 6 months on whether Trump should be permanently banned from the platform. By refusing to give Facebook a blank check, has the newly installed Supervisory Board sought to give the image of an independent supervisory body in its decisions?
The fact that its members were chosen by Mark Zuckerberg and that his work is funded by the company, leaves room for doubt and gives the impression that Facebook, faced with a torrent of criticism regarding its moderation policy, and in particular as far as world leaders are concerned, would try to hide behind a scapegoat.
Because indeed, statesmen and politicians have had for many years, all the latitude to publish content that clearly violates the rules of the social network in terms of disinformation, harassment and hate speech, without Facebook moving. the little finger, asserting the public’s right to know what its leaders are saying, even in cases where their statements could be prejudicial.
“We allow people to share this content to condemn it just like we do with other problematic content, because it’s an important part of our discussions about what is acceptable in our society,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post. Facebook during the 2020 US presidential election.
- Repair the sharing machine to avoid regulatory intervention by States
At the eighth “All Things Digital Conference” in 2008, Mark Zuckerberg, a young CEO with a relaxed look of a company that already has nothing to do with the startup launched 4 years earlier in a dorm room, argued that Facebook’s vocation was to help people share information, ideas, parts of who they are, things they are passionate about and to open up in a way that they are comfortable with each other. The more people share, he said, the more connected the world and the more open it will be. Share, share, there will always be something left, Zuckerberg seemed to be saying.
When a few years later, the social network is confronted with the many criticisms on its privacy protection policy, on the opacity of its management of personal data and on its black box algorithms, Mark Zuckerberg retorts with concise sentences that the The world had passed into the era of post-private life, that anonymity no longer existed or that the separation between private and public spheres no longer made sense. Very quietly, thanks to its millions, then billions of users, Facebook continued its upward odyssey, while developing an increasingly complex rhetoric about its mission to connect humanity to make it better.
And while the company continued to grow at a dizzying pace, exploiting all the springs of the extractive model of capturing value, the virtual network where people spent more and more time, aided in this by designers experienced in the dark. design and manipulation techniques developed by captology specialists, has insidiously transformed reality. The bubble filters studied by Eli Pariser have locked everyone in their fragmented vision, favoring extremism, preventing any consensus. A violent and polarized world of “post-truth” is inaugurated by the election of Donald Trump at the end of 2016.
Faced with the onslaught of hate speech, online harassment and incitement to violence, manipulation by fake news and other astroturfing techniques, Facebook finds itself in an untenable position, forced to make more decisions. in addition to difficult on how to balance expressions.
His hell crystallizes around the Cambridge Analytica scandal which ends up tarnishing the company’s reputation and drags Zuckerberg before American government bodies. Heard seven times by the US Senate since September 2018, the boss of Facebook has undoubtedly preferred to set up self-regulation to escape a toughening of the law.
The “muzzling” of Donald Trump, unthinkable ten years earlier, is a strong signal to other world leaders tempted to follow the path opened by the former US President. The Modi, Bolsonaro, Dutertre and Erdogan had better watch out! No doubt also that, overwhelmed by the situation, the boss of Facebook had to reassess his objective of an open and connected world, preferring an objective, apparently more attainable, of giving people the power to create communities and bring closer.
“Around the world there are people being left behind by globalization and movements to pull out of the global connection. There are questions as to whether we can create a global community that works for everyone, and whether the way forward is to connect more or reverse the course. The most important thing we can do at Facebook is to develop social infrastructure to empower people to create a global community that works for all of us, ”Zuckerberg wrote in February 2017.
The creation of the Supervisory Board as an internal self-regulation body for Facebook, supports this ambition to build a global community, and responds to Mark Zuckerberg’s fear of seeing States get involved in the regulation of the social network. But more and more voices are being raised to demand that social media be treated, like publishers, to whom the regulatory standards specific to this segment of activity apply. No more no less.
- One more step towards the world state?
Some see in the creation of this Supervisory Board, the embodiment of a legislative power, a regal attribute that was lacking in the Facebook super state, already provided with a population of 2.8 billion inhabitants-users and a currency , the Libra. Independent of the legislative power that are the rules of the Facebook community, it is both the guarantor and the regulator.
The mixed reception of this Facebook novelty raises fears that Zuckerberg wants to pose as the “leader” of a new world order, in which Facebook would become the main intermediary between citizens and politicians.
A science fiction scenario in which a supranational power would exist above and beyond nation-states and which, thanks to its digital interface, would place itself at the center of people’s lives and interpose itself between them and everyone else. rest: friends, news, the world.
In fact, by percolation, Facebook has already largely infiltrated our lives, with statistics to support it, and has disrupted entire areas of human activity including the media and now politics.
The iconic company of the age of surveillance capitalism that sociologist Shoshana Zuboff describes as “a new economic order that uses human experience as free raw material for the purposes of business practices” already has the data set. most comprehensive on human behavior, according to the MIT Technoly Review and will not hesitate to take advantage of it, shaping our behaviors on a large scale.
The Coronavirus crisis, which is pushing us more and more towards increased virtualization of our exchanges, has taught us that we are never just one step away from a science fiction scenario. In this case, it would rather be a scenario à la “Her” by Spike Jonze where the hero would be called “The big Other”, to use the term used by Zuboff to designate “this computational, ubiquitous, sensory and interconnected infrastructure carrying ‘a deeply undemocratic vision of human relations’.
It would suffice to reverse the dystopia, by imagining another disaster scenario in which a major failure would affect Facebook’s servers, to realize the conditioning at work. This scenario would update this somewhat worn-out joke where we would see in the streets desperate people holding up photos of themselves, in exotic corners of the world visited in the past, begging passers-by to affix a like or little heart …
In a world in crisis or in mutation, this still remains to be discovered, it is important that we can ask ourselves the questions that are worth asking. One of them, crucial, is whether we are all going to work for an intelligent machine or whether there will be intelligent people around the machine, with the concern of preserving our imprescriptible parts of humanity, in the face of the news. boundaries of power.
Through Monia Zergane.
Journalist
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