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AFP / Justin TALLIS
Depoliticize Facebook so that “The communities to which Internet users connect are healthy and positive”, here is the new will of Mark Zuckerberg announced during the presentation of the group’s quarterly results. This decision comes in particular following the affair of Donald Trump, banned from Facebook after the invasion of the American Congress by his supporters on January 6.
If for the moment this is only at the experimental stage in Canada, Brazil, Indonesia and the United States, the boss of Facebook is clear: ” to do
lower the tension and discourage divisive conversations. One of the ways we do this is obviously by removing groups that violate our user guidelines. […] But there are also a lot of groups that do not necessarily violate our rules, that we do not necessarily want to highlight ”.
In other words, political content will be more and more invisible by algorithm games.
In this way, Facebook simply intends to censor the political content of the platform, even though with more than 2.5 billion users it is one of the most important and popular information channels. “And to be clear, of course, we’re still going to allow people to participate in political groups and discussions if they want to. These can often be important and useful. They can be ways in which people organize grassroots movements, speak out against injustice, or learn
of people with different perspectives. “, declares Mark Zuckerberg not without hypocrisy in view of the first remarks reported in the same conference.
Under the pretext of tracking hateful and dangerous content, Facebook is preparing to attack head-on the democratic right of the most important and torn away by struggles, freedom of expression. While ensuring that the public authorities will not be affected by these restrictions, Facebook will plunge ever more in the shade the “divisive” voices, in particular those of the militants whose censorship is already rife. Moreover, it is scandalous that it is a digital giant like Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg who decide what content is acceptable or not, what information can circulate and what cannot on social networks. Beyond this aberration and just like Twitter which uses
more and more often to censorship, banned-by-Twitter-The-big-capitalists-will-never-be-allies-against-the-extreme-right “> it is impossible to trust the companies which hold these platforms to fight the extreme right.
Obeying only a logic of profit, these companies in no way fight against the extreme right, on the contrary it promotes this discourse when they suspend the accounts of several feminist activists who had tweeted “How do we make men stop violate ”or qualifies the denunciation of patriarchy and racism as“ hate speech ”, even though these same people are often victims of real harassment campaign on social networks.
Moreover, it is the independent media which have been in particular on the front line to make the police violence visible from the Yellow Vests via social networks which will be the first affected by these changes. In a context of deep political crisis, it is not surprising to see censorship strengthen on the part of the big capitalists as much on the side of private companies as of the government. We see it as well with
freedom-of-expression-on-line “> the law on separatism where the government directly attacks freedom of expression online in the midst of a health crisis at a time when social networks allow for political discussions.
While the management of the health crisis by the capitalists is catastrophic, as social inequalities, layoffs and social misery increase, for the government and big capitalists like Facebook and Twitter, the time has come for anti-antidemocratic attacks on freedom of expression to better invisible the reality of
the situation.
In view of the situation, it is certain that the latter fear the potential that the
social networks to spread information and organize growing anger, and the anti-democratic attacks of recent months demonstrate an attempt to regain control. Faced with this, it is important to stand up in the street in complete independence from the big capitalists and against the liberticidal policies of Macron who are in no way our allies in the fight against the extreme right.
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