No one can pretend that Facebook is just a harmless joke anymore.

The discovery that Cambridge Analytica blew up the data of 50 million Facebook profiles to attack American voters is really scary. But Cambridge Analytica should not be isolated from the worst in this story: Facebook. It's a mystery that as his company regulates the flow of information for billions of people, encouraging and promoting certain opinions, and monitoring their interactions, Mark Zuckerberg was invited to give speeches at Harvard without being treated with the scepticism he deserves.

We've already reached the point when a private corporation holds detailed data for more than a quarter of the world's population. Zuckerberg and his company have long avoided responsibility. Governments in each country must be serious about how to treat Facebook.

When sent to prison those who sent threatening messages to Caroline Criado-Perez and Stella Creasyn, a debate began on whether platforms like Facebook and Twitter would have to be classified as platforms or publishers. Facebook is treated like it's just a channel that conveys information, meaning there's no responsibility for the content of what users distribute.

In 2014, Iain MacKenzie, Facebook spokesman, said, “Every piece of Facebook content has the option of '{0}'report '%s' that follows the operations team to deal with it. Furthermore, individuals can block anyone who molests them, making sure they are not allowed to interact further. Facebook faces malicious behavior through a combination of social mechanisms and adequate technological choices that provide a massive online opportunity. ”

But the company is unclear about the number of moders it has employed, how they work, and how their decisions are under way. It has begun to take a strong line of extreme right content and is still resisting much legislative efforts to regulate its content. What users see then is decided by an algorithm that can change without any consul, including the government or businesses that depend on Facebook for their income which means that many of them can soon be erased from the map. In February 2018, the Digiday website reported to LittleThings, a four-year-old site that had decided to close when Facebook decided to prioritize users' positions on publishers' content. Hundreds of jobs were lost.

Facebook was not the only contributor to LittleThings' closure, but those working on the website said they had nothing to do with the change of algorithm. And this is not the only example: in 2013, an algorithm half-titted the traffic of the Upworth Web site one thing this web has never recovered.

The impact of Facebook dominance means that the publications are in constant effort to cope with the changing platform strategy. Wired editor Nick Thompson recently told Digiday he was afraid that “Facebook set up a plot that would cut media profits that grew at a lot of”.

Much was done by the fact that Facebook created “bubble filter”. He has been criticised for prioritizing the content that users would like, which means there are less diversity in news stories people read about and that they would fail to repel propaganda. In fact, the young Italian extreme-right star Matteo Salvin has inexplicably thanked Facebook for contributing to the latest election results in his country.

All of this from a company that in 2016 paid only 5.1 million pounds in corporate taxes in its operations in Great Britain, despite profits and incomes that nearly multiplied as a result of increased sales from advertising. In December 2017, Facebook announced that it would start taking profits from advertising in the countries where these profits took place, instead of redirecting them to Ireland, although, as this newspaper reported, the movement could not result in paying more taxes”. This happens despite Zuckerberg's call to governments to start paying a basic universal sum for every citizen in response to automation, partly led by Silicon Valley.

Even if we want to avoid the same and keep our data, it is not as easy as anyone might think. According to Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor, the company uses the same technique as propaganda and casinos to draw psychological dependence on their users, such as constant reporting and various rewards. Keeping us bent, Facebook is capable of keeping a large amount of data from us. What is surprising, and distressing, is the data that Facebook has the profiles that can build their users based on seemingly harmless information. The author of the book Networks of Control, Wolfie Christl, noted that a license published by Facebook finds different times people using location data from mobile apps. Then he uses them and other information to divide users into different social classes.

Massive data that owns Facebook is shared with the acquisition of components. Nick Srnicek, author of “Plaforma Capitalism”, said, “Facebook is acting like a classic monopoly: buying computers like Instagrams, copying rivals like Snapchat, and even having one of its own apps, Onavé, which reports them from possible threats. All this combined with an uncontrolled inclusion of our data that was used to build an inexorable gap around his businesses. ”

Maybe it's time to treat Facebook as the giant multinational corporation especially because people with Facebook profiles are not company consumers: they're the product sold to advertisers.

Taken from Guardian Translated from Periscope