Facebook employees have actually pressured Mark Zuckerberg to delete some of Donald Trump’s posts for violating their ‘hate speech’ rules for his stance on immigration.441 Again, imagine the phone company canceling your service because they didn’t like what you and your friends talked about. That’s basically what Facebook and the other social media giants are doing by policing what people post and then shutting down their pages if they feel something is too ‘offensive’ or violates their terms of service.
Facebook quietly admits censoring content for the Chinese government.442 The website was banned in China in 2009, so Facebook developed new censorship tools to appease the Communist government there, and so they allowed the website back.443 The day before Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding in the UK, Facebook suspended a bunch of pages of people and groups they suspected were going to ‘cause trouble’ during the event.444 And Mark Zuckerberg has admitted working with various European countries in order to censor criticism of the mass influx of Muslims into Britain, France, Germany, and Sweden.445
Some are calling for Facebook (and other social media services, including search engines like Google) to be treated as public utilities.446 One of the arguments is that using them in today’s society is as necessary as having access to traditional utilities like the telephone, water, electricity, and natural gas.447
After the historic flooding in Houston after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, many victims took to social media begging to be rescued, posting their address and pictures of the rising floodwater, and many were rescued by local volunteers this way. One may argue that banning people from such sites could put lives at risk, and is one more reason Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services should be considered utilities that can’t be shut off just because someone is posting things the companies don’t agree with.
Not only does Facebook want to be the middleman of all Internet traffic, but they’re getting into commerce by enabling financial transactions, original content creation like Amazon and Netflix, and they hope to lead the virtual reality revolution. Mark Zuckerberg has even created flying solar-powered Wi-Fi routers to bring the Internet to remote parts of Africa,448 and envisions a world where instead of physically going to a friend’s house to watch a football game, everyone will stay at their own homes and put on their VR headsets to watch television ‘together’ while communicating with each other through avatars. They’re calling it Facebook Spaces.449
If you’re starting to think Facebook’s vision of the future looks like something right out of The Matrix, you wouldn’t be wrong. Zuckerberg himself says that in 50 years we’ll all be “plugged into the Matrix” through his mind-reading machines and using virtual reality headsets as part of our daily lives. He said, “I think you’re going to be able to capture a thought [and take] what you’re thinking or feeling, in its kind of ideal and perfect form in your head, and share that with the world.”450
Such themes have been explored in science fiction films like Surrogates (2009), eXistenZ (1999), and The Thirteenth Floor (1999), all of which warn about the dangers of this kind of society, but Zuckerberg is determined to make such thing a reality.
Twitter is often the Internet’s equivalent of a wall in a gas station’s bathroom stall. Anonymous idiots write all kinds of garbage for the sole purpose of entertaining themselves for a few seconds by trying to shock those who read it. It’s also a place for people to engage in hate-filled arguments with random people over the latest political or pop culture story that’s trending. Twitter is also a way for people to try to get the attention of their favorite (or most hated) celebrities since many of them do engage with their fans there.
Unlike Facebook, (at least at the time I’m writing this) Twitter doesn’t have a real name policy and thrives on users being able to remain anonymous so what they say can’t be tied to them, where they live, where they work, or their picture. This anonymity encourages people to tweet the most vile, hateful, and threatening things they can imagine while hiding behind their computer (or phone).
Tweets consist of short statements that can’t exceed 140 characters and thus Twitter is called a ‘micro blogging’ site. While people can post lengthy essays on Facebook, Twitter is mostly for very short, often very blunt statements, and is a very fast-paced social networking site with the flow of new tweets never ending.
Despite the mudslinging and constant trolling, somehow (at least at the moment) Twitter does have a measurable influence on our society. It is perhaps best known for what’s trending on the site and was the first major social media platform to include a trending topics list. The trending box allegedly shows the list of the top 10 topics that people are tweeting about, and a look at it on any given day reveals what is most important to the people using Twitter. This is usually celebrity gossip, sports entertainment news, or tweets about the latest liberal causes or complaints. Often what’s trending on Twitter then gets picked up by mainstream media as a topic they see of interest to report on.
Twitter has become a place where celebrities release public statements on whatever scandal they may be involved in, and random things they say are often turned into meaningless little stories on celebrity gossip sites. As you know, President Trump likes to tweet and often goes on ‘Twitter rants’ about the media, the Democrats, and Deep State operatives within the government trying to sabotage his administration.
As I covered in the previous chapter, Facebook was exposed for manipulating the trending topics box by not only censoring certain stories and topics from being included on the list, but also artificially inserting topics into the module that they wanted to promote.451 And knowing what we know about technology and these major social media companies, it would be foolish to think that Twitter doesn’t do exactly the same thing. In fact, in a now deleted tweet, a Clinton insider named Peter Daou tweeted to CEO Jack Dorsey asking him to remove “Words That Don’t Describe Hillary” from trending, saying that Twitter was, “providing a platform for pure misogyny” by allowing it to stay on the trending list.452
When President Obama did a live Q & A with Twitter in 2015 using the hashtag #AskPOTUS [POTUS is short for President of the United States], the CEO asked his team to implement an algorithm to filter out “abusive” tweets that contained the hashtag.453 A few years later they would roll out this feature for everyone, allowing people to manually input any words, phrases, usernames, and even emojis they want automatically filtered out from their feed.454 The muting is even case sensitive. For example, you can now literally put the words “President Trump” in your filter, and if someone tweets at you a message that contains those words, you won’t even see it.455
In June of 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage had to be accepted as legal in all 50 states, the hashtag #LoveWins was instantly trending and included a rainbow heart emoji.456 Twitter automatically includes a custom emoji when certain hashtags are tweeted if the hashtag is sponsored by a company or an organization.457 It appears that President Obama was one of the first people to start using the hashtag, showing that it (along with the custom ‘gay’ emoji) was preplanned.458 Twitter even introduced a special Black Lives Matter emoji consisting of the “black power” fist the day after a Black Lives Matter activist shot twelve police officers, killing five of them in an ambush during one of the movement’s marches.459