Artikkel - Matei Norbert Balan

There are two famous blonde men whose faces most of us would use as target practice right now: Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Both of them rose to power through deception made possible by Facebook.

A day after Mark Zuckerberg first appeared in front of the US Congress, in April 2018, I was in downtown Oslo, getting coffee with a friend. We were arguing whether using your own personal drinking straws, instead of the single-use ones, which most of the bars have to offer, really makes a difference for the environment, while regularly checking our phones. Fresh Tweets about Mark Zuckerberg's Congress hearing came every thirty seconds. The whole internet was dissecting what Mark had said, how he had said it and whether his head should have been removed from his shoulders for it.

"Listen to this," my friend said, "some Senator asked Zuckerberg what they're doing about the Russian thing. He said that they're looking into it." We both laughed it off. A social media tycoon giving outrageous answers to direct and clear questions. Nothing new there, right? Almost two years have passed and none of that seems so funny anymore.

Things are crystal clear now. Kremlin led Troll Farms meddled in the 2016 US Presidential Elections by using fake news and misleading ads on Facebook (among other popular platforms, such as Twitter or YouTube). And even though the involvement of Kremlin in Brexit is still a matter of suspicions and speculations, we do know that Facebook played a central role in that too, not as a direct accomplice, but rather as a fertile ground for propaganda. As the last volume of the report put together by the Select Committee On Intelligence of the US Senate states, "Targeted influence campaigns are far more effective and cost-efficient than blanket dissemination of propaganda. They are also more deceptive-and substantially harder to identify and expose."

We were all victims of these "targeted influence campaigns", not only the American or the British citizens, and almost all of us fell for them. It's a hard thing to swallow that every argument we have ever had with someone, whether it was online or not, about Hillary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS, or about refugees killing and raping their way through England, was the exact desired result by those who launched these outrageous stories out there. As the same US Senate report states, "The overwhelming majority of the content disseminated by the IRA (Internet Research Agency - Ed.) did not express clear support for one presidential candidate or another. Instead, and often within the context of the election or in reference to a candidate, most IRA content discreetly messaged narratives of disunity, discontent, hopelessness, and contempt of others, all aimed at sowing societal division." In other words, every time we fought amongst ourselves they won. And by we I mean all of us who weren't in the whole scam of destabilizing nations and outright ruining people’s lives.

Things haven't really changed since then. Some pessimists, or maybe, in this case, we could just call them realists, might say that the situation is getting worse. Mark Zuckerberg recently had to appear in front of the US Congress again, in October, to answers some questions on the cryptocurrency project that has been under the scrutiny of lawmakers for months. He ended up having to answer some of the same old questions. Only this time he wasn't so well prepared.

In one instance Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez confronted Zuckerberg about the fact-checking on political advertisements, asking him whether he saw a potential problem with that or not. After Zuckerberg answered that "lying is bad", Ocasio-Cortez pressured him:

"Ocasio-Cortez: So you won’t take down lies or you will take down lies? It’s a pretty simple yes or no?"

Zuckerberg: Congresswoman, in most cases, in a democracy, I believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians they may or may not vote for are saying and judge their character for themselves."

This exact attitude, Mark Zuckerberg's attitude, is one of the many reasons we, the clients of Facebook (we are clients since we pay for their services with our personal data, which I would argue is more valuable than actual money), are so divided as a society.

When we hear Mark Zuckerberg shifting the blame for the dissemination of fake news to those who are deceived by it, and we settle on thinking that maybe he's right, we are again the losers of an ongoing war that's operating on such low frequency.

Both Brexit, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal; and the 2016 US Elections, with the Russian government being (as proven over and over again by the Muller investigation) directly involved in the outcome, were some of the most important battles of the last decade. And we didn't even know that we were part of them until it was too late.

Quoted in the US Senate report, John Kelly, founder and CEO of the social media analytics firm Graphika, noted that "After election day, the Russian government stepped on the gas. Accounts operated by the IRA (Internet Research Agency - Ed.) troll farm became more active after the election, confirming again that the assault on our democratic process is much bigger than the attack on a single election.".

So, dramatic as it may sound, this war is far from over, it is ongoing, and we can feel its ripple effects all over the world, from Norway to China, from the United States to Russia. Nothing is what it seems anymore and we quite frankly can not trust our eyes like we used to.

We share and like your concerns: why Trump and Brexit are battles that we all lost