Fintan O’Toole: There is unease about openly saying Facebook a potent enemy of democracy

One of the reasons live broadcasting remains so important is that it is the only medium in which you can hear subjects being evaded in real time. I had that experience last Friday, listening to an interview on the BBC World Service with the great Philippines journalist Maria Ressa who had just been announced as the joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ressa and her colleagues at her news organisation, Rappler, most of them young women, embody the true values of journalism. They have continued, at great personal risk and cost, to expose and hold to account the murderous regime of Rodrigo Duterte.

In the interview, Ressa was describing her work from 2016 onwards: "We demanded an end to impunity of Rodrigo Duterte and this brutal drug war... And the other one is just as powerful: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook."

Facebook is embedded in western capitalist culture. It is too much a part of 'us' to be our enemy

I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of listeners would have shared my expectation of the immediate follow-up questions. Why are you talking about Zuckerberg and Facebook? Are you really equating a social media company and its founder to a vicious political regime?

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But there was no follow-up at all. It was obvious that Ressa wanted to talk about Facebook – and even more obvious that the BBC didn’t want to talk about it. The interviewer just cut her off, moved on and never came back to the subject.

Yet Ressa was not being wildly eccentric or wandering off on a tangent. She wanted to talk about Zuckerberg’s impunity because Facebook’s logo is imprinted all over the Duterte story.

In an interview with Carole Cadwalldr, who did so much to expose the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Ressa called Duterte's election in 2016 "the first of the dominoes to fall" that year – the next ones being the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump.

Ressa was one of the first journalists anywhere to experience and understand Facebook’s facilitation of the corruption of democracy. Duterte had a vast misinformation operation run almost entirely on Zuckerberg’s platform.

After his election, Facebook then became the medium through which Ressa and other journalists, human rights defenders and opposition politicians, were branded as criminals and traitors, harassed and threatened. She asked Zuckerberg directly (at a lunch in San Jose in 2017) to stop this.

But of course he didn't. As the whistleblower Frances Haugen told the US Senate last week, the company "knows ways to make Facebook and Instagram safer and won't make the necessary changes because they have put their immense profits before people".

Democracy in the US and Europe [...] is being undermined from within. The barbarians are not at the gates; they are firmly lodged in the high places of the city

Yet, even in announcing the awarding to her of the peace prize, the Nobel committee was coy about actually mentioning the names of Zuckerberg or Facebook: “Ms Ressa and Rappler have also documented how social media is being used to spread fake news, harass opponents and manipulate public discourse.”

This is perfectly accurate and also perfectly evasive. Just as in that BBC interview, there is a palpable unease about saying too openly that Facebook is a potent enemy of democracy.

Why so? Because Facebook is embedded in western capitalist culture. It is too much a part of “us” to be our enemy.

This is part of a wider problem. For generations, there has been a story about the division of the world. On one side, there are the tyrants and dictators and gangsters in public office. On the other, there is “the free world” of liberal democracy.

This binary mindset persists and it contributes enormously to Facebook’s impunity. It is okay for Ressa to say that one of the people she has to fight against is Duterte, because after all he is foreign and savage and uncouth. But it is not okay to say that the other is Zuckerberg because he is none of these things.

This way of thinking is, for western democracies, potentially fatal. Democracy in the United States and Europe is not threatened from without. It is being undermined from within. The barbarians are not at the gates; they are firmly lodged in the high places of the city.

Facebook's monetisation of disinformation, conflict and verbal violence is insidious because it is cosy, familiar, mundane

The United States has experienced, just this year, an attempted coup by an outgoing president. The European Union has at least two member states – Poland and Hungary – that are a long way down the road to authoritarianism.

The “free world” has unleashed its very own threats to democratic freedoms and it has given control of the technologies that amplify those threats to morally illiterate frat boys. But it is still much more comforting, in public discourse, to see those hazards as external.

Facebook’s monetisation of disinformation, conflict and verbal violence is insidious because it is cosy, familiar, mundane. It is where billions of people do the nice, ordinary stuff that keeps families, friends and communities in touch with each other. It is not just part of “us” – increasingly it defines what “us” means.

This distorts our perception of danger. Can evil really appear in the bland corporate logo of an anodyne F against a soporific blue background? Can the ranting and snarling of a Duterte really be enabled by the vapid insipidity of a Zuckerberg?

As Ressa has been trying to warn the western world for the last five years, it does and it is.