The political power of Facebook

international | politics / elections | other press Sunday October 17, 2021 21:40 by 1 of Indy

This article by Thierry Meyssan on Voltairenet.org raises important questions about the political power of Facebook and echos statements made elsewhere how the Big Tech companies have now far more political power than our politicians who can be wiped out in a matter of hours by in the public sphere by Social Media orchestrated campaigns. The current wave of wokeism is just one manifestation of that.

Rarely mentioned but addressed in this article is the sheer amount of information that companies like Facebook have and the resources and data they have which is extremely powerful and useful in any sort of political campaign or objective.

People need to wake up to the fact that political power has already transferred to these entities and is a very dangerous situation and very much part and parcel of the ongoing creeping global totalitarianism

The VoltaireNet articles starts off thus

In the global imagination, Facebook would be a responsible social network that allows everyone to connect confidentially while censoring messages contrary to local laws. In practice, it is quite different. Facebook collects information about you for the NSA, censors your opinions and mints its own currency. In a few months, this company has become one of the most influential players in world politics.

Facebook as a social network

The most important political player on the Internet is the social network Facebook. As of January 1st, 2021, it had 2.85 billion monthly active users and 1.88 billion daily active users worldwide. The social network routinely censors posts that include nude photos, sexual activity, harassment, hate speech, forgeries, spam, terrorist propaganda or violence using particularly crude and unfair artificial intelligence. It shuts down accounts that it deems dangerous, either because they have been censored several times or because they are linked to enemies of the United States.

Facebook is a huge company that includes Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal, Novi. It employs over 60,000 people.

Facebook as a bank

Facebook now issues its own currency as a state, the Libra. It is backed by a basket of currencies composed of 50% dollars, 14% yen, 11% Serling pounds and 7% Singapore dollars [1].

By becoming a bank whose currency is progressively accepted by Internet sales sites, Facebook is building a parallel economy, both virtual and global, that is larger than the economy of many states.

Facebook and its users

Facebook calls on its users to detect accounts that violate its rules. It opens a file on each of its informants and notes them [2].

Facebook, which claims to treat every user equally, has secretly compiled a list of 5.8 million VIPs to whom its rules do not apply. Only they can say and show everything

Cambridge Analytica and the NSA

The personal data of at least 87 million users was targeted and siphoned off by the British company Cambridge analytica (of billionaire Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon) and its Canadian subsidiary, AggregateIQ [4]. They were used at least :

• for the election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014
• for 44 local elections in the US in 2014,
• for Mauricio Macri in the Argentine presidential election,
• for Nigel Farage in the UK Brexit referendum in 2016.
• And above all during the US presidential campaign also in 2016, successively for Ben Carson,
• Ted Cruz ,
• and finally for Donald Trump and his campaign manager... Steve Bannon.

According to The Observer, Cambridge analytica employed many figures from the British military-industrial complex and MI6 propaganda services [7]. Perhaps this is just the tip of the iceberg: Edward Snowden revealed that Facebook had joined the ultra-secret PRISM electronic surveillance network allowing the National Security Agency (NSA) to access the personal data of all its customers. But nothing has leaked out about what use the NSA makes of it.

According to Newton Lee, a former researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses, the PRISM network is the avatar of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that Admiral John Poindexter developed under Donald Rumsfeld at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)