Trump And The Data Brokers of Facebook
We saw a May month where European commissioner Margrethe Vestager was prominently featured in American media as the strong and perhaps evil woman taking on US tech giants Google, Apple and Facebook. And she wasn’t alone. Germany took another blow at Facebook and neighboring Austria also wanted its part of the fun with a case against the social media behemoth over alleged hate speech.
From a less powerful but more self aware and critical corner of Europe we saw once again publishers from the media world collectively calling for regulations in the game of data collection/privacy/digital advertising which more or less is set en route to become a pure duopoly with local and global dominance of Google and Facebook.
On that note we’re seeing some disturbing alignments of the otherwise mostly liberal Silicon Valley people and their industrial traditionalist US President. The technology corporations and the US President is suddenly looking more and more like troublesome soul mates.
Remember how Facebook was discovered favoring Democrats from Republicans in the early days of the US election. And how it turned out that Trump spend $70 million(!) a month on the very same Facebook to promote his campaign. Sue Halpern writes how Facebook helped put Trump in the White House in The New York Review of Books.
Anyway, it is getting harder to see the lines between private sector commercial interests and politically motivated power play from the President. Both parts want data — the one for selling, the other for buying.
Add to that cocktail the various American intelligence services and their extreme data collection from places like Facebook and the fact that Trump is in charge of all those spy agencies as he demonstrated this month with his firing of James Comey as director of FBI.
Donald Trump has the control of how much data can be collected, what it can be used for and he has shown that he is willing to spend the money to use that data for flooding Facebook with his own personal agenda.
That is a dangerous cocktail that will leave little interest in protecting the public and the privacy. And the ménage à trois will have much interest in reinforcing the powerful feedback loop between the President and the data vendors of the private sector.
Luckily we have a critical European public. Whether in the form of the EU commissioner, the pinstriped publishers of newspapers-going-digital or the citizens challenged with hate speech and public shaming asking for someone to take responsibility for the new public sphere of Facebook.
Otherwise we could all be living in the world of the President of United States of Facebook.
