The Facebook whistle-blower is just another enemy of free speech
By positioning herself as a Silicon Valley renegade, Haugen gives those in Washington the perfect stick with which to beat the last bits of freedom of speech which exist on major online platforms.
There weren't many signs of panic while looking for petrol the other day. Disappointingly, my nearest Esso had plenty of the stuff. Evidently I was late to the brawls and knife fights that must have taken place just a few days before.
With a sigh of resignation, I put my knuckle-duster back into the glove box and filled up the car.
Esso is owned by ExxonMobil. If you trace the company far back enough, it was once part of Standard Oil: the oil behemoth owned by John D Rockefeller, the richest man ever to have lived. Standard Oil fell victim to trust-busting in 1911 and was split up into eight different companies.
Modern monopolies rarely get the same treatment. The likes of Amazon and Google, instead of being sliced up, become vital parts of modern 'liberal democracy', a giant revolving door between government and Big Tech facilitating movement happily between the two.
Just take Nick Clegg, for example. My dad once said he had the appearance and demeanour of a manager at John Lewis. The universe disagreed, however, and he became some big knob at Facebook.
Facebook is rarely out of the news. In the lavatory that is the modern news cycle, it is effectively unflushable. Given its scale- with over twenty-five billion monthly visits- this is understandable. A brief crash on Monday, which went unnoticed by saner segments of the population, propelled it once more to the headlines.
Additionally, we recently have been treated to the emergence of a 'whistle-blower': Frances Haugen.
So which whistle is she blowing? There are various: that Facebook knows of Instagram's deleterious effects on young people's mental health, was one.
Another was that Facebook is allegedly an enabler of 'hate' and 'misinformation'. According to Haugen, the algorithms employed by Facebook promote 'hate speech, divisive political speech and misinformation'. The sceptical among us will translate that to mean 'anything right-of-centre'.
Ms Haugen was inspired to fight this particular battle after she had supposedly 'lost a friend' to 'conspiracy theories' that were spreading on the social network. A source I read was that said friend 'fell victim' to men's rights activism- a most heinous of crimes.
Indeed, Ms Haugen joined Facebook's 'civic integrity' team, tasked with tackling 'misinformation'. She grew disheartened with the company's efforts, however, after the stroll-into-the-Capitol on 6th January and Facebook's supposed refusal to acknowledge it's role in letting it happen.
She also alleges that Facebook's unwillingness to entirely stifle freedom of speech- sorry, I mean filter out 'disinformation'- led to European political parties adopting political policies they 'knew' to be damaging to society. This can be loosely translated as 'having to finally listen to voters'.
Glenn Greenwald's take on this is right. What Haugen accuses Facebook of is nothing other than the failure to fully stamp-out unorthodox thought which fails to abide by the liberal shibboleths of the modern woke left.
By positioning herself as a Silicon Valley renegade, Haugen gives those in Washington the perfect stick with which to beat the last bits of freedom of speech which exist on major online platforms. Any speech which fails to fall into their narrow world-view is verboten.
As Greenwald rightly points out, those who rail against the likes of Facebook never complain about it's accumulation of power- they never want to do a 'Standard Oil' to it- but instead merely contest the nature of the use of its accumulated power.
In their mind, having almost monopolistic control is not an argument in favour of reducing their might, but instead of co-opting it and transferring it to authorities who can then use it in their own interest.
