Facebook, Vladimir Putin's Best Buddy

Recently, at the request of Roskomnadzor, the Russian government’s internet monitor, Facebook erased an event page created by two Russian dissidents for a peaceful demonstration on January 15 2015 supporting leading opposition figure Alexei A. Navalny (above, courtesy Wikimedia). The page can be seen around the world, just not in Russia. Fat lot of good that does. 

Navalny is one of Putin’s most prominent and vocal critics, currently on trial for alleged embezzlement and fraud. The prosecutors have said they will call for a ten year prison sentence. Judge Yelena Korobchenko will announce the trial verdict on January 15 2015. He started out as an anti-corruption blogger and is now leader of Russia’s Progress Party. Last year he was convicted on another charge and sentenced to 5 years. The sentence was quickly commuted to a suspended one, but then Navalny was arrested again, facing more dramatic charges, and placed under house arrest. This is business as usual for Putin; he gets rid of opponents by trumping up charges against them, seizing their assets and sending them to jail.  

The rally on January 15 is purely in support of Navalny. Ergo, Facebook is directly supporting a corrupt regime. And it’s business as usual for Facebook, which has taken down thousands of pages at the behest of governments; 29 Russian pages in 6 months (only 4 last year in the same period) and 1,773 in Pakistan, up from 162 in the previous six months. But it leaves pages that bully and trash young kids until they commit suicide.

Since I learned that Facebook was a sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2014, along with the likes of Koch Industries and the National Rifle Association, nothing it does surprises me but it increasingly disgusts and alarms me. I don’t know how much Zuckerberg has to do with these decisions but it’s still his business.

Anyone who can create a business as successful as Facebook has my admiration for sheer creativity and gutzpah. But when what you do with your business actively enables corrupt governments admiration turns to disgust and more.

One of the greatest advantages of and most beautiful thing about social media is how it unites people who need group support to be able to protest injustice; how it can be used to bring down a corrupt regime, even peacefully. It’s great for Zuckerberg; it adds an aura of social responsibility to Facebook and makes people want to use it even more. It makes good business sense and it’s decent. But surely a business can’t have that and collusion with a regime as corrupt as Putin’s government and not be affected?

Whether it is affected or not the social consequences are terrifying. In response to the understandable outrage around the world, a New York Times editorial made the point that Facebook isn’t a government; it’s a corporation, so it’s not bound to care about freedom of speech or civil rights. When it does business in a country and earns significantly from that business, it makes business sense to not break the law and risk losing all that lovely moolah. Right now the law in Russia is that rallies (which Roskomnadzor calls ‘unsanctioned mass events’) with more than 3 people are illegal. Hallo apartheid era South Africa. No doubt if Facebook had been around then it would have taken down all ANC pages.

The NYT editorial is right. Facebook owes nobody anything. It’s not a government, so it’s not morally bound to preserve and protect human rights.

But here’s the problem. When a government has huge control over people’s lives there’s always some way of fighting against it. Facebook’s control has developed from Zuckerberg’s insight into how easy it is to manipulate us through our need to connect and our voracious narcissistic tendencies. He’s always seen his ‘subjects’ as idiots. When a corporation has this kind of control then starts colluding with corrupt regimes, who’s going to stop it? We have no socially developed means to counter the ill effects of control that knows no boundaries and has no ethics at all.

Facebook, once mostly a tool for broadening our minds, making connections all over the world and liberating the repressed, is now also a tool for destroying freedom. Don’t take it personally, it’s just business.

I take it personally. What’s to be done? Somebody sarcastically said we get what we ask for. If everybody wasn’t so narcissistically fascinated with themselves and ‘sharing’ every intimate detail of their lives, Facebook wouldn’t have any power over us. So if we don’t want the ill effects we can boycott it. At first I thought, I don’t agree. People can post blogs etc. exposing Facebook for what he is, dismantling the myth that Zuckerberg's the good guy. But the best way to counter unethical Facebook policies is to use it to post original stuff, protect privacy, never subscribe to another site from it and desist from ever clicking on an ad.

Then I gave it a bit more thought and realized that Facebook doesn’t give you the option to block your friends from giving your information away. Which they do every time they subscribe or even just log in to another site with their Facebook details. Gotcha!  

My sarcastic friend also added that it’s none of our business what happens in Russia. That one I definitely disagree with. Not feeling outraged when somebody else suffers isn’t a good thing, which you discover when you’re under threat and somebody who isn’t directly affect by whatever is threatening you says “it’s not my business” and walks on.

Besides, this particular action doesn't directly affect anybody outside of Russia but the driving principle, that corporate money is more important than people's freedom, does affect us all because it underpins all of Zuckerberg's policies, one of which is sponsorship of US conservative politicians. And whether we live in America or not we do need to worry about that. Everything’s connected these days.

I presume the rally will happen. I hope nobody gets arrested and that Alexei Navalny doesn’t spend the rest of his life in jail on more trumped up charges and eventually get his freedom when he’s been destroyed. He doesn't look like a man who'll let himself be destroyed.

Like Mikhail Khodorkovsky (above, courtesy Wikimedia), once Russia's wealthiest man, imprisoned for ten years on trumped up charges, assets seized and now a reformed man. Recently released and living in Zurich, he works towards overthrowing Putin.

As for whoever is making the final decisions on Facebook – and Zuckerberg has to be a part of that – they and he won't suddenly develop integrity. From this point they'll sell more of their soul - and ours - to the devil. I can't think of adjectives strong enough to describe what I think of Zuckerberg for letting this happen. All I can hope is that he gets what he deserves. Loss of business because he and all corporate giants can toss off “don’t take it personally it’s just business” and you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of them all of the time. Not forever. I hope.

The Face of America to Come? Facebook, AFP and the Koch Brothers

I recently found a magazine from 1955. It brought up the image of a world so peaceful in comparison to this one and I’m not talking about war and physical bloodshed. I’m talking about visual advertising. The ads in the magazine are so simple in delivery and the psychology behind them is psych kindergarten. In the 50’s understanding of psychology was pretty rudimentary. People were still having lobotomies and shock treatment for depression.

Between then and now understanding of psychology has gone way beyond psych kindergarten, and of course the advertising industry capitalized. Their understanding of psychology graduated into sociopathic. Baser instincts, fear, paranoia, vulnerability were all targeted. So were children. So were mothers. And fathers. And siblings. And grandparents. The poor, the wealthy, the in-between. Nobody escaped. If you had half a brain you knew how much your capacity to choose was affected. You had to work hard to maintain independence of mind. Some people never did and died victims of the advertising industry, none the wiser. May they rest in peace.

The sociopathic targetting still happens. It’s still impossible to live in a city, having access to TV and the internet, and be in touch with what’s going on around you, without being barraged with the clamoring of thousands wanting your attention and/or your money and having no compunction about how they get it. 

But get too much of anything that intrudes on peace of mind and we develop blocks. Anybody sensitive to sound who lives on a noisy city street will attest to that. You just don’t hear it after a while. Ironically, in a world where the advertising industry still punts ‘new and improved’ as the biggest marketing advantage, it’s lost its own edge. There’s nothing new about the concept of new and improved, so advertising gets noisier and more invasive in a desperate attempt to fulfill its promise to individuals who pay for it, and exponentially less effective. Their victims are now their clients, who are the slow ones. They haven’t realized that the advertising industry’s greatest success now is conning them into believing advertising still works as well as it did back in the day when astute understanding of psychology was used so effectively as an exploitation tool.

Take Facebook. How many ads appear on your homepage? Ever clicked on one? Do you even notice them anymore? And most ironic of all, as Catherine Rampell pointed out in the Washington Post the algorithms that Facebook and Google et al use to measure what we’d be interested in are so rudimentary it’s laughable. These tech, megalomaniac giants, that’s all they can do with all their brilliance? I guess they haven’t found a way to measure when a person likes something out of sarcasm.

CNN anchor Ali Velshi once said what’s all the fuss about Facebook ads? We get Facebook for free, so to have a few ads on a page is a small price. Stop whining, he said, and block them out. And that’s the beauty about it all. When things get annoying we block them out.

Facebook’s success lies in its capacity to retain members, garner new ones and deliver advertising to clients. I wonder how truthful the stats are about that so-called capacity. I wonder how long it’s going to take before investors realize that.

But that’s all about what we can see. What about the stuff we can’t see? We place a lot of trust on privacy policies that assure us our data is only used to deliver ads to us of products we’re likely to want. But this is a global monopoly. Zuckerberg didn’t have the greatest ethics when he was a student, so the idea that he’d have developed integrity as he’s amassed massive power is beyond a joke. 

FaceBook is a megalomaniac giant that has exploited our most vulnerable aspect - the need to be connected – and very cleverly. We may not respond to ads as much as FB likes to tell its investors, but we do now all kind of feel that unless we expose ourselves to the nth degree to as many people as possible we're isolated. And if we’ve got friends, we can’t control our privacy because every time they sign up through Facebook onto a new site to comment or just belong they give away their friends’ data. And their friends don’t get asked. Courtesy FaceBook’s privacy policy.

The problem isn’t what we can see; it’s what’s hidden and how much escapes us because we still inherently trust and because we want to be connected. And now FaceBook has turned conservative. Ostensibly because Zuckerberg is angry at President Obama for NSA invasive activities. If ever there was a pot calling the kettle black it’s Zuckerberg in this.

Facebook recently sponsored CPAC, which represents and backs the most conservative political element in the US. Along with the billionaire Koch brothers, who’s mouthpiece is Americans For Prosperity (AFP). According to Mother Jones they sank $411 million dollars into trying to block Obama from being re-elected in 2011. AFP is working hard to ‘persuade’ Americans that anything Obama is ruinous for the US, particularly Obamacare. The ads they’ve put out have no truth, which makes a thinking person, well, think. Unfortunately they’re not targeting us. They’re targeting the unthinking, the paranoid, the fearful, the prejudiced. 

And their message succeeds. Imagine how much better AFP and the Koch brothers can do if they join hands with Mark Zuckerberg. All that data. And people worry about the NSA?

The Power of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon et al

When a megalomanic dynasty falls apart I celebrate. What about Google, Apple, Facebook et al? The megalomaniac seems pretty appropriate. We think of them as being just massively creative, but when creativity is used to accumulate power and control it gets another name: greed. The greed that drives the eWorld isn't a beautiful thing or a strength, it's an inner monster that strips people of their humanity. 

What does a company need to monopolize the world for? Because companies are about people, right? How much money can an individual spend in a day on things that they can actually use?

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon et al run roughshod over whoever is in their way. Remorseless, relentless. But we idolize them - because they make billions by producing bright toys and using brilliant PR to convince us we need them? Because they work incessantly to evade responsibility and to increase their control over us?

Accumulating, accumulating. Meanwhile, the middle class in the US fights for survival; around the world children are sold into forced labor; women are sold as sex slaves. There's a lot that these companies could do if they really applied themselves but they don't. 

Celebrity-corporate individuals call themselves philanthropists and get mega strokes for donating a million here, a million there. But it's chump change to them.

It’s hard to imagine now what the world would be like if Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple fell off the face of the earth. But I guess a few years before Gaddaffi was tossed out it was hard for Libyans to imagine what life would be like living free of him. 

Too much power corrupts. Not because power in itself is a bad thing, but because anybody who wants that much power is inherently weak, not strong.

Google and Facebook Ads - The Advertising Industry is a Joke

Ali Velshi, CNN's articulacy maestro, said not too long ago in response to people bitching about how many ads there are on Facebook and Google products that he couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Facebook is, after all, free. We don't pay for it so we have absolutely no right to complain about how it makes money.

If we want to pay, then we can bitch and moan as much as we want. Just block the ads out, he said, impatiently, adding that he's got so good at it he doesn't ever notice any ads on any web pages. Ever.

I wonder if any Facebook and Google execs were listening. Probably not. Probably too busy figuring out how to squeeze more info out of us so they can persuade themselves they're succeeding in persuading us they love us when they show ads on topics we seem to be interested in. I also wonder what sort of ads would show on my gmail if I was doing research into child porn or Hezbollah activity in Syria or gun sales in the US.

I think Ali's right that we're lucky to have so much for free, but I still hate ads. I recently found a magazine dating back to 1955. The ads were so innocent and non-intrusive. The psychology was simple, nothing massively manipulative. The pics were adorable. I doubt the advertising industry was very big back then.

Now it's a greedy monster that feeds on your children's minds and everybody's vulnerability.  But, for all the money spent on it and the degree to which it imposes on us, how effective is it really?

I'm sure at some point, when the industry was at its peak, it was 100% effective. Advertisers ruled the world, no doubt about it. Even now, often ads are gorgeous. Entertaining. Moving. There's one of two young kids in some Latin country. They're about ten years old. The boy's crazy about the girl. When she' bullied he rescues her and gets beaten up for it. But he doesn't care. He gets the girl. It steals your heart; beautifully scripted, acted and shot. I've watched it a gazillion times and I'll watch it willingly again and again. It's a really good short film.

But I can't for the life of me tell you what product it's supposed to be advertising, and I couldn't care less. When I come across an ad that I don't like I switch off. Either literally, or, like Ali, in my mind. I just block the son of a bitch out. So either way advertising doesn't work on me.

Somehow I doubt that Ali and I are alone in this, and I often wonder to what extent. And whether the advertising industry realizes it has saturated the world and is starting to eat itself up. More to the point, whether the clients paying for ads realize it. This industry has got so good at selling itself that everybody seems to have lost the plot and nobody is noticing that it lost its edge a long time ago. Case in point are the web page ads that have a lot of flash crap and moving bits. They're annoying, they interrupt your concentration. You're more likely to want to get rid of them - and the site - than to click on them.

They're probably fun to design, though. The ad industry doesn't serve its clients, it serves itself. Obviously web owners and Google and Facebook haven't figured that out yet. It amuses me no end to think that the latter go to such lengths to snag me into buying something. There's one tiny little factor they've left out of their algorithimic equations; I have a mind and I still use it. And they don't know how to read it.

Zuckerberg and Facebook; a Tale of Ingenuity, Vision, Power and Greed

The story of Facebook is more and more looking like a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. Once upon a time a country was created out of virtually nothing by an idealistic young man who thought it would be a good idea if friends could meet up in cyberspace and share their lives.  Share their friends, even, meet new people. Everything was rosy as first. His subjects didn’t realize they were his subjects at all, and they got free connection to all their friends. Fun was had by all in this land of plenty. 

But of course the creator realized he could make money out of it – and who could blame him? Even creators have to live. He was clever about it, and money started to flow as the country grew beyond even his wildest dreams. Soon it had a gigantic monthly population – close to a billion, or so its PR machine said.

But by then the beauty of the original dream had begun to significantly dim as the money and the power went to the creator’s head. World dominance is a seductive thing, so is a giant bank account, and who doesn’t dream of Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange? But the subjects realized this country wasn’t any longer so much about connecting friends, it was about how to use friends – anybody’s friends - to sell something, or shove something down your throat, whether you wanted to hear about it or not.

And it sure wasn’t free at all, they paid with their privacy. The homepages got busier and busier, with targeted ads, whether you wanted them or not. Imposters flourished because there was inadequate security; the country became a breeding ground for exploitation. 

And those figures of almost a billion daily users a month – convenient for drawing advertisers and thus investors - well, they turned out not to be totally provable, as anybody can have as many accounts as they want and the creator hadn’t set up a monitoring system. Strange, considering how creative he was. You’d think he’d have known how to put that in place. There was no system to differentiate between real, active users and automatic updates happening, either.

Apart from that, subjects began to be disillusioned, and the exponential growth of the country began to slip. Rumors abounded about the creator once saying at college that anybody who trusted him with their personal information was a “dumb fuck”. And a film was made about a young kid in college who he allegedly stole the idea from in the first place. Who in real life he paid out millions in a settlement. 

One subject allegedly said of him that he “…turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary, and an incredible altruist." (Wiki) Well, that subject won a Golden Globes best screenplay award for the abovementioned film, so perhaps a little bias is understandable. Perhaps he really meant it, even though his script portrayed the creator in not such a great light. Hindsight is easy when you’re clutching an award. But other subjects were saddened at the loss of the real opportunity for the creator, to make plenty money for himself, as he deserved for his ingenuity, but never to lose sight of his original goal, that this would be about friends connecting, and thus to become an icon for his generation and generations to come in a world where exploitation is so easy. To be happy with some money and not want to dominate the world. 

The story doesn’t have an ending yet. But the moral – a kind of double-edged thing - is pretty clear. Power corrupts, and people don’t like being exploited. You can’t start something with a philanthropic idea and, when it attracts millions because of its inherent philanthropy, turn it into something where you use everybody, and think that people aren’t going to notice and object. We’re not all dumb fucks.

For other opinions, read Janet Tavakoli at the huffingtonpost.com, and Somini Sengupta at nytimes.com.