Terence Corcoran: Politicians are gunning to regulate Facebook — over a scandal caused by politicians
It’s hard to feel much sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg as the regulatory world gears up for his historic appearance Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington before members of the bloviating inquisitors at different Congressional committees. As we all know, Facebook, the Internet giant Zuckerberg created, has been painted as the villain in what is now headlined around the world as “the Facebook data scandal.”
Once the tech giant CEO gets through his opening remarks, the politicians will engage in their usual ritual grandstanding takedown of their star witness, posing aggressive questions and making sure they extract a sufficient quantity of grovelling and admissions of wrongdoing. Then they will move on to their core objective: more regulation.
Unfortunately, Zuckerberg seems all too willing to take the fall for the Facebook data scandal. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility,” he says in his prepared notes for his Congressional appearance, “and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”
Well, let’s to cut to the chase: No, Facebook is not responsible for what happened in the Facebook scandal.
Does nobody see the supreme irony in all this — in Zuckerberg being hauled before politicians to answer for the fact that politicians and their operatives around the world are at the heart of the Facebook data breaches and voter manipulation? We all seem ready to sit back and allow lawmakers to take a bigger role in controlling the internet — so as to protect us from lawmakers and other power seekers who are apparently ready to abuse the internet.
In his many media appearances and now before Congress, Zuckerberg comes across as a squishy and naïve liberal blinded by his own simpleminded belief in “community” and “bringing people together” and “social justice” and all the other good things he believes, perhaps rightly, that Facebook fosters around the world.
Another less liberal CEO than Zuckerberg, one less willing to grovel before the politicians and the media, could justly turn the tables on his accusers. Facebook is not among the international community of data raiders, algorithm creators, fake-news generators, voter manipulators, privacy-breachers and opinion-warpers who emerged from the shadows in recent weeks via the Cambridge Analytica affair.
Facebook, after all, has not been guilty of breaching the privacy of 87 million users for political gain. That guilt belongs to the politicians and/or their various backroom organizations whose inner workings were apparently exposed and certainly sensationalized by Christopher Wylie, the 28-year-old Canadian who last month testified before a British House of Commons committee.
Wylie, who also fed key media companies his story, does not come across as the most credible of witnesses. But he has turned the world against Facebook, mostly by claiming to have evidence of purloined data and nefarious activities by the various political hacks he says he once worked for.
Described by a New York Times columnist as “a pink-haired, nose-ringed oracle sent from the future to explain data,” Wylie claimed he has evidence of his former employers’ malfeasance in various political campaigns, in facilitating Russian interference in U.S. elections, in Trump’s victory and the Brexit vote and maybe even politics in Canada.
As Wylie tells it, his former employer, Cambridge Analytica, bought and used improperly circulated Facebook data to manipulate voters. Analytica denies most of Wylie’s allegations, and much of what he has claimed seems like self-aggrandizing speculation. Even his wording is suspiciously non-categorical and leaves lots of wiggle room. On the use of data and funding by the Leave side in the British Brexit referendum, Wylie hedges: “I think it is completely reasonable to say that there could have been a different outcome in the referendum had there not been, in my view, cheating.”
At this point, though, it is irrelevant whether Wylie is a truth-saying oracle or an unhinged young man parading his delusions of power and influence before the media and government committees. The world has listened and now the real victim of the scandal, Facebook, is being paraded in public for punishment.
Facebook is also a proxy for Silicon Valley. A weekend Financial Times report outlines the objective, which is to use privacy issues to bring Facebook and other internet operations under greater government and regulatory control. According to European activist Max Schrems, says the Times, “we risk shifting power over our lives from laws made by elected officials to a self-appointed Silicon Valley cabal.”
Right now it looks as though the opposite is afoot, with lawmakers taking power over Silicon Valley. And squishy liberal Zuckerberg is ready to go along with more political regulation by the politicians who pose most of the risks of data abuse.
In a media conference call last week, Zuckerberg said he was ready to accept Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), said to be the most comprehensive data privacy laws in the world, with corporate fines in the billions of dollars against companies who breach regulations. “I think regulations like the GDPR are very positive,” said Zuckerberg.
Facebook, in other words, will submit to politicians whose electoral back offices are responsible for creating the Facebook data scandal.