To fight a pandemic, we must reach everyone in this tightly knit global economy with the best medicines, treatments, and strategies. Before even those things are possible, we must propagandize the truth of the disease and the science behind the vaccines. Facebook has failed miserably to aid us in this fundamental struggle.
And Facebook has been exposed as a bad actor on a wide variety of fronts. The company’s platform is used by drug cartels, human traffickers, and numerous conspiracy theorists spreading misinformation about everything from elections to vaccine safety. Illustrating its willingness to cover up such behavior, Facebook shelved a first quarter report this year because it showed that the most viewed post falsely suggested that a doctor died because of taking the vaccine. The flurry of controversy surrounding the Wall Street Journal’s publication of “The Facebook Files” led to former Facebook data product manager Frances Haugen testifying before Congress: “Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, [and] weaken our democracy” because the company “put their immense profits before people.” This is certainly true.
However, the nature of such controversies demand revolutionaries counter the ruling class’s efforts to misdirect public outrage. As investigative journalist Jonathan Cook wrote in Counterpunch, Haugen’s testimony about Facebook is being used to confine the battle to a ruling class fight. Cook points out the way Haugen is being used by Democratic operatives against Republican interests. And he adds that little of what we are learning here is new—most of what Haugen is telling us has been generally known for some time and has been explored by documentaries like “The Social Dilemma.” That film shows what IT folks tend to know. Companies like Facebook, yes, but also Google, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc., employ vast armies of data engineers to feed our addictions to social media, reshape our behaviors and mine our data for sale to the highest bidder.
These companies work mostly “free” to the user because the platform itself is a loss leader—the real profits come from the sale of our information, which is obviously used to sell us other products. We all know Alexa’s always listening because we see it in our ads. In the most general sense, corporations mine our information to control our behavior, right down to our political behavior. Social media keeps us in groups (silos) of like-minded people, building greater and greater ideological walls between members of our class.
Still, fighters in our class make remarkable strides using Facebook alongside other social media platforms to organize, raising awareness about water privatization, the war on immigrants, evictions, homelessness, and police brutality. And our class fighters also challenge the social media platforms’ biases and contributions to the problems we face, ranging from depression and body image disorders to social division itself. When Zuckerberg pledged to police Facebook by restricting posts by political groups, grassroots organizers fought back. The musician who leads the digital rights group Fight for the Future, Evan Greer summed up the problem in an interview with Politico: “The decision about what is or isn’t political is a very political decision in and of itself.”
With the Democratic Party supporting Haugen in a global campaign against Facebook, the current effort to reform Facebook is an effort to reform social media that plays into the pre-existing political divisions. The House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee has taken it up, which draws comparisons to the original antitrust wave of the late 19th century. That struggle within the ruling class sought to break up companies that had grown too big for competition. That meant one thing in an expanding industrial economy, something not possible today.
With automation replacing more and more jobs, eliminating a place in the system for more and more workers, the best intentions for reform must face the fact that all corporations are compelled to increasingly place profits over people. The ruling class has no other choice to maintain its power, and the enormous wealth accumulated by the rich as a result of the pandemic shows more incentive than ever to keep stoking division and spreading misinformation, no matter how many get hurt.
To fight this growing fascism, revolutionaries must call out companies like Facebook for spreading bad information, but we must strategize around the reality that their competitors will do the same thing. They are compelled to by the laws of corporate interests. Only an end to the profit motive can stop this—an end to the devaluing of people’s rights by a private property system that no longer needs them.
Our class recognizes that these social media tools can be used to promote a vision of a new society, and we talk about these ideas more than ever before. That truth is a ray of light. If we accompany that discussion with a scientific understanding of the forces using those tools against us, we can strategize how to overcome the alliance of corporations and government building fascist control over us. As the scientists behind this data engineering continue to fall into the ranks of the new class replaced by automation, our ranks will grow. Together, with a shared understanding of what’s new about this struggle, we can fight forward toward a healthy society where people finally have the power to put people first.
Published: December 2, 2021
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