Democracies are at the mercy of social media industry

In the war on disinformation, the enemy can be hard to determine. Journalists, politicians, governments, and even grandparents have been accused of enabling the spread of online falsehoods.

While none of these groups is entirely innocent, the real adversary is more mundane. As Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified late last year, social media’s own algorithms are what makes disinformation accessible.

Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has grown from a students’ social networking site into a surveillance monster that destroys social cohesion and democracy worldwide. Facebook collects troves of user data – including intimate facts, like body weight and pregnancy status — to map the social DNA of its users. The company then sells this information to anyone – from shampoo manufacturers to Russian and Chinese intelligence services – who wants to “micro-target” its 2.9 billion users. In this way, Facebook allows third parties to manipulate minds and trade in “human futures”: predictive models of the choices individuals’ likely will make.

Around the world, Facebook has been used to sow distrust in democratic institutions. Its algorithms have facilitated real-world violence, from genocide in Myanmar to the recruitment of terrorists in South America, West Africa, and the Middle East. Lies about election fraud in the United States, promoted by former president Donald Trump, inundated Facebook in the lead-up to the January 6 riots. Meanwhile in Europe, Facebook enabled Belarusian strongman Aleksandr Lukashenko’s perverse efforts to use migrants as weapons against the European Union.

In the Czech Republic, disinformation originating from Russia and shared on the site has swamped Czech cyberspace, thanks to Facebook’s malicious code. One analysis done by my company found that the average Czech citizen is exposed to 25 times more Covid-19 vaccine disinformation than the average American. The situation is so dire, and government action so inept, that Czechs rely on civil society — including volunteers known as the Czech Elves — to monitor and counter this influence.

Efforts to mitigate Facebook’s threat to democracy so far have failed miserably. In the Czech Republic, Facebook entered into a partnership with Agence France-Presse (AFP) to identify harmful content. But with just one part-time employee and a monthly quota of only ten dubious posts, these efforts are a drop in the disinformation ocean. The “Facebook files”, published by The Wall Street Journal, confirm that Facebook takes action on “as little as 3-5 per cent of hate speech.”

Facebook has given users the ability to opt out of custom and political ads, but this is a token gesture. Some organisations, like Ranking Digital Rights, have called for the platform to disable ad targeting by default. That is not enough. The micro-targeting at the root of Facebook’s business model relies on artificial intelligence to attract users’ attention, maximise engagement, and disable critical thinking.

František Vrabel is CEO and Founder of Semantic Visions, a Prague-based analytics firm that collects and analyzes 90% of the world’s online news content.