It’s some achievement to get me sympathising with Mark Zuckerberg. But denunciations from a powerful combination of a parliamentary committee in the UK and self-appointed watchdogs of the new media like the Guardian almost managed it.<\/p>\n
The digital, culture, media and sport select committee finally published a damning report into Facebook after an 18-month investigation, as reported<\/a>\u00a0today by the Guardian.<\/p>\n The solutions demanded by the committee, however, are intended not to make Facebook and new media more accountable, as the report claims, but to reassert the dominance of the British state in surveilling the public and revive the declining fortunes of the more trusted old media corporations, the Guardian very much included.<\/p>\n And lurking behind it all is the terror of the political-media class at the spread of a new kind of political insurgency \u2013 a rejection of the current status quo for war and neoliberal pillage \u2013 given voice on new media platforms that is readily dismissed, by both the committee and the Guardian, as “fake news”.<\/p>\n What is really at issue becomes clear the moment one starts to unpick the report. It intentionally conflates three entirely different problems, muddling them together to win support for all three.<\/p>\n The aim is to hammer Facebook into submission, not for our benefit \u2013 as is desperately needed \u2013 but so that the state and media establishment can \u201ctake back control\u201d.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s look at the report\u2019s conclusions.<\/p>\n First<\/strong>, it rightly accuses Facebook of being \u201cdigital gangsters\u201d, harvesting private information so that it can be sold. Facebook, the committee warns, has been monetising our private lives.<\/p>\n \u201cFacebook continues to choose profit over data security, taking risks in order to prioritise their aim of making money from user data,\u201d the report states.<\/p>\n It hardly needs pointing out that Facebook is a for-profit company that specialises in accumulating information, the details of our lives we willingly hand over.<\/p>\n It was inevitable that a global company providing a digital platform for sharing information between friends would get greedy and share that same information privately with those who wish to exploit us, whether commercially or politically.<\/p>\n Until data-sharing companies arose, the state and its security services had a near-monopoly on such covert surveillance. Think of all those CCTV cameras dotted along the high street. Or watch an episode of TV show The Hunted, where former police officers quickly hunt down members of the public on the run.<\/p>\n The parliamentary report sounds much less like a clarion call for our privacy to be respected than a threat to Facebook from the establishment over such information being spread around too much.<\/p>\n