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Has Facebook become too powerful?The mass closure of Facebook sites on the eve of the recent royal wedding in the United Kingdom begs the question whether the time has come for the establishment of independent, powerfully popular social networks in the face of apparent political interference and a misuse of corporate power.
In an insightful article for openDemocracy, Aaron Peters writes that there “has been much debate as to what impact the Internet in general and ‘social media’ in particular will come to have on our politics. It is clear that in developing countries, particularly those of the 'Arab Spring', many of the tools of the 'network society’ all had major roles to play. The role of SMS and e-mail in particular – tools not present until the last decade in these countries and rare enough in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries until the 21st century – was massive and cannot be understated.
“Social media (socially co-produced media that is “many-to-many” and is horizontal in distribution rather than vertical) such as Facebook and Twitter allowed Tunisians to inspire Egyptians, and Egyptians to inspire Wisconsinites. With these new tools, news of events were easily shared – undermining the established intermediaries of information within the mainstream media that has tended to reproduce the lines of governments and powerful corporations.”
Facebook – surrendering power to the powerful?
Peters points out that there already have been privacy concerns with Facebook for quite a while – particularly since its founder Mark Zuckerberg hired Beltway Security experts in December 2009 to maximise profits from passing on user data to companies such as Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft.
The royal wedding in the United Kingdom, however, may “have marked a bellwether moment for Facebook and its willingness to compromise users, their privacy and their ability to freely associate and organise." Guy Aitchison put it: "Profiles are being deleted without warning or explanation. In the last 12 hours, Facebook has deleted over 50 sites. It may well be that these groups are technically in violation of Facebook’s terms of agreement, which state that participants in social media must not make use of a 'fake name'. But the timing – on the royal wedding and May Day weekend – is deeply suspicious.
"We don’t know for certain, but this purge of online organising groups could be linked to the wider crackdown on protest by authorities in Britain.
"Either way, it is a scandalous abuse of power by Facebook to arbitrarily destroy online communities built up over many months and years. These groups provide a vital means for activist groups to communicate with their supporters.
“While these profiles were technically in breach of terms of use, only British anti-cuts (a reference to UK government economic austerity policies) profiles were taken down during the 12-hour period. This all being within the broader context of an offline repression of dissent that involved dozens of ‘pre-emptive’ arrests on charges as Kafkaesque as Conspiracy to cause a public nuisance".
"There were also raids on squats in London, Bristol and Brighton, heavy-handed policing of public assemblies in Glasgow and Bristol and nearly a hundred more arrests on the day itself in and around central London for crimes such as having placards in bags and potentially offending royalist and homophobic sensibilities. “
Peters argues that it appears Facebook might have had contact with elements within the British establishment, be it the Home Office or the London Met. Given that these profiles could have been pulled on a technicality anyway, Facebook might have been quite willing to collaborate in shutting down these accounts, denying activist groups the ability to quickly organise around an event the authorities were determined to see pass off without the slightest possibility of protests or disruption.
“If this is the case, and there has been interference from a political authority of some kind, then this simply can’t be permitted to set a precedent. Whilst it is possible to claim that these accounts were deactivated en masse following a concerted malicious campaign by right-wingers 'reporting' the accounts using the capacity offered to users by Facebook, this seems implausible given the broader context,” he writes.
He points out that Facebook is a year away from floatation on the stock market and will persistently reiterate the point of technical issues. ” However, even if it is the case that accounts were closed on a technical basis at the request of state authorities, Facebook still needs to be given a powerful enough incentive to resist pressure from the police and national security services in the future.
“As a multinational corporation, Facebook has a duty to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights outside the framework of national law, be it British or otherwise. Indeed, the declaration applies to all humanity: Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”
Peters argues that the ‘burden of proof’ upon the state should be extremely high if it wants to curtail people's right to exercise fundamental freedoms to associate and assemble through social media (if, indeed, they should be permitted that right at all).
The need for distributed and non-corporate social networks
“Regardless of who authorised or contacted Facebook with regard to these sites, it is nevertheless a highly significant event that has shown that social media is too precious to allow corporate monopolies to arise," writes Peters.
“In recent months, we have seen its ability to empower the powerless, from the occupations of Wisconsin’s Capitol building to events in Egypt and Tunisia, and the highlighting of arrests of dissidents such as Ai Wei Wei in China.
“Social media has to go open source now and move from a client-server model run by a multinational corporation as is the case with Facebook and Twitter, to distributed, self-hosted and open-source models such as Thimbl, Diaspora," he notes.
“During the golden age of hacking some 20 years ago, the Internet was powerful. Now, with two billion users globally, it is popular. Within the context of Facebook listing for its Initial Public Offering next year, our mission is to render the Internet and social media powerfully popular. This requires us to start using and building viable alternatives that are in every sense of the word ‘ours’, meaning that they are commons-based in production, distribution and ownership.
“We have an opportunity to ensure that a once-in-centuries technology is not held hostage by money or governments, and that a historically unprecedented means of democratic and non-hierarchical communication is not compromised. These tools are making the ‘people’ increasingly powerful; let’s keep it that way,” Peters adds.
(Aaron Peters is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London investigating the changing nature of social movements and political contention in the "Network Society". As co-editor of "Fight back!" and a student activist, he is interested in the role of new technologies and online organising in the anti-cuts movement. )
