Technology / Social Media
Powerful ... and with a dangerous 'dark side'

How Facebook is breaking democracy in Sri Lanka ... behind the scenes of an emergency social media shutdown

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

How Facebook is breaking democracy in Sri Lanka ... behind the scenes of an emergency social media shutdown

The 8-day Facebook shutdown in Sri Lanka earlier this month is not a mere emergency response to local communal violence. The demagogues and their digital minions of the current “Good-Governance” government knows first hand the power and thus the danger of Facebook. The ongoing surveillance by the CID and police to identify and block anti-government Facebook pages, accounts and groups is seen as a witch hunt in the guise of controlling #hatespeech.

This month’s cover story of WIRED magazine is a massive expose on the dangerous schemes inside Facebook. It tells the story of America’s blue-eyed boy, Mark Zuckerberg and how his incompatible desires of building a monopoly on open communications has turned Facebook into a flawed, insecure and ultimately corrupt social media.


“The Big Brother is watching”

Trump and Sirisena

You can’t help noticing the many similarities between Donald Trump’s and Maithripala Sirisena’s presidential campaigns. While Trump tweeted out a daily stream of what was on his mind, the real election game was being played out of sight, on Facebook. And while Barack Obama was the first politician to employ Facebook’s targeted influencing as a planned campaign strategy in 2012 with the support of Facebook itself, Team Trump took it to a whole new level by using “Psychographic Profiling” of some 50 million Americans directly... and possibly up to 200 million more.

In simple words, politicians used Facebook to collect private data of its millions of users, then used that data to profile them, and manipulate those individuals’ thoughts and actions. A modern day psychological warfare (what is called psyops).

All this happened during 2014-16. Cambridge Analytica, the company which was banned by Facebook last week, was using Facebook to manipulate voters through targeted misinformation, #FakeNews, sensational storytelling, and fear mongering. Cambridge Analytica admitted they tested their product in other countries with weak laws on data protection. Could they or somebody else have used Sri Lanka as a test bed in the run up to the 2015 presidential elections? Given the current revelations, it’s not beyond belief.

While Hillary Clinton, like Mahinda Rajapaksa, was spending millions on television and print advertisements, Trump and Sirisena were miles ahead on Facebook. Golden Horses, Highways made out of Diamonds, Trillion Dollar Foreign Bank Accounts were becoming “acceptable” truths on Sri Lankan Facebook. The naive “first time” voters who were abundant on Facebook, the tense Muslims, the disappointed Tamils, the insecure Sinhalese and political party fanatics must have been easy targets through simple psychographic analysis.

Post Truth Era

The key role played by Facebook in Trump and Sirisena winning their elections is obvious. By the time Clinton called for “Fact Checking”, and the overconfident-turned-desperate Rajapaksa campaign started sharing the socioeconomic facts, it was too late. The world was already in a dangerous “Post Truth” mode where facts and common sense didn’t matter anymore. Personal beliefs and emotions are now the driving forces of public opinion and public policy making. Ironically the Clintons and the Rajapaksas have only themselves to blame for creating this mess in the first place.

The Colombo journos became the new supreme judges. They dramatically wrote the verdict on exactly who killed who, who stole what, and who bribed who to the last detail. Facebook was their primary distribution channel. No wonder these days, the same people are valiantly trying to safeguard their Weapon of Mass Control, The Facebook, from any form of regulation. “Innocent until proven guilty” is now a joke. An edited video, a photoshopped image, a meme, a blog post, a comment is all that is needed to prove anything. Facebook became the supreme court of Sri Lanka.

Demons of Facebook

Facebook had and probably still has a small team of inexperienced youth to manipulate your News Feed. Depending what is “Trending” and what is not, this team boosted or withdrew content at their discretion, manipulating the shared reality of millions. And it was this very practice that led to the WIRED Magazine expose.

This then answers the central question, “Can Facebook control what we see, hear and read?” The answer is YES, they can, and they have been doing exactly that. And it’s not just their algorithms, actual people with human flaws such as political bias have been doing it all along. It’s no longer a conspiracy theory.

Welcome to the Dark Side

Facebook is no longer the place where we meet our friends. That romantic period was gone. Facebook is not even the advertising platform where you can target sell your products. It’s crowded and you need big “ad spend”. Facebook is now another “eye-in-the-sky” watching over you. The Big Brother. It knows everything about you and your loved ones. It knows where you live, where you go, what you eat, what dress you buy, what business you do, and every little detail about you.

It even knows the things you like and dislike, things that make you happy or sad and things that make you angry, your weak points, your deepest fears and secret desires. With that kind of power, it can call an entire nation to revolt against a government. It can create an echo-chamber of hate. It can divide people based on their fears. It can call angry mobs to fight against their rivals at a specific location at a specific time. It can spread violence like wildfire.

Threat to Democracy Elections nowadays are decided by a small percentage of voters. Less than 5% of the six million Facebook users is enough to change the president of Sri Lanka. That’s a direct threat to democracy. Because whoever has more money and influence can use Facebook to access the vulnerabilities of voters and then change their decision through mass psychological manipulation. Facebook is not about Freedom of Speech or the Right to Information. It’s the political weapon of choice of the rich, powerful and evil people who will do anything to come to and stay in power. As an advertising platform, its main goal is to manipulate reality for clicks, a goal that is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Surely we deserve better than an advertising algorithm selecting our leaders for us. (I’m on Facebook… still. I’ve gone through the life stages of a Facebook user from being a show-off to an ‘opinion maker’, to now the Facebooker who is simply “not bothered”. I’ve had my fair share of Facebook tussles with friends and strangers. I’ve made friends and lost friends. I had run successful and unsuccessful, paid and organic campaigns on Facebook, and have stopped keeping up with its algorithms. The addiction is long gone.) Sri LankaFacebookCambridge AnalyticaDonald TrumpDemocracy