However, almost twenty years after Facebook was founded, the digital networks erroneously referred to as “social media” in this country are increasingly turning out to be enemies of democracy. They offer a platform to all those who uninhibitedly spread hate and hate speech and have played a significant role in the social upheavals of recent years. It is therefore worthy of all credit that the WDR sheds light on Facebook’s basically criminal behavior with its “story” contribution “Die Machtmaschine”: Despite all of Mark Zuckerberg’s assurances, the parent company Meta is all about profit. Of course, polarizing statements, conspiracy stories and obvious untruths ensure far more platform traffic than a good civil exchange, which is why the platform’s algorithm is particularly happy to spread such statements among the people.
However, the team around Svea Eckert, Stella Peters and Petra Nagel faced a challenge that actually turned out to be almost impossible to solve: How can such a report be illustrated? After all, in the long run it’s pretty monotonous to just watch people talking. So the authors made do with recreated blurred scenes that make up a large part of the optical level, but seem completely arbitrary because they show simple everyday office life; with Zuckerberg, as one might guess from the hoodie, right in the middle. In terms of content, the show doesn’t have much new to offer anyway; especially not for the readership of quality newspapers and news magazines. Trump’s presidential election campaign and his lies about Hillary Clinton, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the influence of the British data company on the US election and Brexit, and finally the Russian “troll factories”: anyone who has ever dealt with the matter knows all of this.
The film is important nonetheless, because the strategies have long since been applied in this country. The largely right-wing extremist AfD has studied Trump’s election campaign very closely. The party is trying to drive a wedge into society with new topics anyway: first the euro, later the refugees, and finally Corona. In this form of “negative campaigning” the focus is not on one’s own program; it is primarily about discrediting the political opponent, which is why the 2017 AfD election campaign focused on denigrating Angela Merkel.
The insights into the inside of the “power machines” are also instructive and informative, which are provided by two American journalists and various “whistleblowers”, above all the former meta manager Frances Haugen. She provides the information that illustrates the full extent of this “Chronicle of Failure”. The commentary is coined on Facebook because the leadership always knew what was going wrong and even left the most absurd pipe dreams on the web; most notably the humbug being propagated by QAnon, a group that worships Donald Trump and believes a global satanic elite is turning the blood of children into a rejuvenating serum. During the 2016 US election campaign, this myth became notorious under the catchphrase “pizzagate”.
But “Chronicle of Failure” fits just as well with American politics, which allowed the company to do as it pleased. One person in particular benefited from this, because Facebook issued a kind of “Lex Trump” internally: the President was allowed to use his account to spread nonsense as he pleased, which would have been immediately deleted by ordinary users. What people with an alert mind recognized as “fake news” culminated in the fairy tale of the supposedly stolen election victory and the storm of his supporters on the Capitol a good two years ago for the supporters of the president who was voted out in autumn 2020. According to a German political advisor, lies are more emotional than facts. Using Trump’s example, the film shows how the platform played its part in paving the way for populists to come to power. Trump’s campaign office took advantage of the personalized advertising that Facebook enables. In this way, people could be specifically addressed who had not previously been interested in politics but were easily radicalized.
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