Facebook's double standards and double standards : Bashar Zuaiter

Facebook's problems have become larger and broader than Facebook itself and exceed its capabilities, which requires decision makers to intervene to impose new mechanisms for managing and monitoring such giant platforms, and to search for ways to limit their side effects.

Siva Vidhyanathan is one of the most prominent social media specialists and critics at the same time. His famous book Anti Social Media is a title in this field. The book is considered a gospel in criticizing social media platforms, and highlighting their disadvantages to users, especially with regard to psychological and social aspects.

Away from his aforementioned book, Vidhyanathan recently published an article in the Guardian trying to answer a question: why Frances Hogan, the former director of Facebook's integrity team, succeeded in pitting the American public against Facebook by leaking internal documents exposing the reluctance of the company's executives to Decisive action to tackle the side effects of Facebook apps? Her former colleague Sophie Chang, a cryptographer, who defected from Facebook in April, failed.

Vidhyanathan's answer lies in the different approach that Hogan and Chang have taken in their campaign against Facebook in both form and content. Away from the form, in which Hogan invested well in accordance with the principles of public relations and pressure groups, as she paved the way for her campaign well before revealing her identity, the content is what interests us here, and interests the reader in the Arab world and other regions of the so-called third world.

In terms of content, Hogan struck a chord that no family, whether in the United States or abroad, can afford to overlook: a chord that primarily affects the mental health of their sons, and daughters in particular. The applications of "Facebook", as the studies of its specialized internal team show, clearly affect the mental abilities of children. In Vidhyanathan's words, the impact of "Instagram on the prevalence of eating disorders, self-harm and suicide among teenage girls" is an issue Americans understand well and stand "particularly against". What the leaks revealed, that the majority of the girls included in the internal Facebook study had indicated that Instagram had contributed to making their bad impression of their bodies worse, brought shock to many parents around the world, especially the Western world.

There is no doubt that this information, if confirmed by future studies, will raise concern among families in various parts of the country. Of the 1 billion active Instagram users, 71 percent are under the age of 35. There is something like the migration of generations, as the Facebook platform has become for older users, while Instagram has become the playground for teenagers and young adults, which gives Instagram a special importance that puts it under scrutiny.

What Hogan raised was at the center of the circle of Western public opinion, and it is undoubtedly a biased opinion of his urgent issues. This was proved by Chang's leaks, which focused mainly on another segment, namely "the fates of people outside the United States." Zhang's defection followed what she posted on her Facebook page as a long farewell note criticizing the company for ignoring or denying how easy and successful it is for authoritarian leaders and governments to hijack Facebook's services to undermine or overthrow democracies.

“In my years at Facebook, I have found several apparent attempts by foreign political entities to misuse our platform on a large scale to mislead their citizens, and these have been covered globally on several occasions,” Zhang wrote (adapted). Zhang cited problems in Azerbaijan, Honduras, India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador. Chang has shown how countries like Azerbaijan and Honduras, which are important enough to Facebook to grow its users and grow engagement rates, are not important enough for Facebook to curb the spread of manipulated fake accounts that support the narrative of authoritarian leaders. In other words, according to Vidhyanathan, "What matters to Facebook from these countries is their clicks, and it doesn't put much value on people's lives in those countries or their freedoms."

Facebook executives did not care about disinformation and fake news campaigns in third world countries, as did Western public opinion, as issues of freedom and democracy no longer have that luster with the escalation of identity politics that reinforced nationalist tendencies and the rise of right-wing and conservative currents that see the other as a potential enemy Therefore, their fates and destinies are no longer of such importance.

In fact, this trend was also confirmed by Hogan's leaks to the Wall Street Journal, the so-called "Facebook Files", where she indicated that the "Facebook" administration did not do what was necessary to combat disinformation and false news campaigns outside the United States as it did inside it And this attaches the "Facebook" company the accusation of working with double standards, a behavior that contradicts the simplest ethics in which "Facebook" has always sung.

This includes not only third world countries, but even many countries belonging to the Western world. For example, a study revealed that the majority of information content about COVID-19 is not verified at 56% while the percentage for the same content in English is 26%. This means that Europeans are less protected from misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic than Americans. The study also revealed that Italians are the least protected from misinformation with a lack of information prevention measures at 69%, followed by the Portuguese at 58%, while the French came in third place with 50%.

If Facebook's indifference to combating disinformation campaigns is so evident in Western languages, we can imagine what that might be when it comes to Eastern and Asian languages. And if this matter comes in light of a topic that occupies the top priority of the world today, which is the Corona epidemic, then let us imagine what it would be like with some of the most controversial issues at all, such as the Palestinian issue and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Facebook used to deal with clear double standards with Palestinian content, so that Facebook is seen as waging a digital war against this content under allegations that have no moral basis, such as that Palestinian content incites terrorism and hatred, as if Israeli content incites love. Peace and harmony.

It seems that Facebook's problems have become larger and broader than Facebook itself and beyond its capabilities, which requires decision makers to intervene to impose new mechanisms for managing and monitoring such giant platforms, and to search for ways to limit and prevent their side effects. It goes without saying that such mechanisms should be in accordance with the formula of "supra-state" institutions such as the United Nations and others, in which many official and non-official bodies participate.