RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an epic fight of so-called muckrakers — journalists and novelists such as Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, along with trust-busting politicians like Teddy Roosevelt — against rail, steel, and oil monopolies. Whatever one thought of their sensationalism and often hard-left socialist agendas, they at least brought public attention to price fixing, product liabilities, monopolies, and the buying of politicians.

No such progressive zealotry exists today in Silicon Valley and its affiliated tech spin-offs. And the result is a Roman gladiatorial spectacle with no laws in the arena.

In the last two elections, Facebook has sold its user data to Democratic and, apparently more controversially, Republican campaign affiliates. Google, Twitter, and Facebook have often been accused of censoring users’ expression according to their own political tastes. Civil libertarians have accused social-media and Internet giants of violating rights of privacy, by monitoring the shopping, travel, eating, and entertainment habits of their customers to the extent that they know where and when Americans travel or communicate with one another.

Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook are the world’s five largest companies in terms of stock value. Together they have market capitalization of about 3 trillion dollars, about the net worth of the entire country of Switzerland.

Until the rise of high-tech companies in the 1980s, there were, for better or worse, certain understood rules that governed the behavior of large corporations. Services deemed essential for the public — power, sewage, water, railroad, radio, and television — were deemed public utilities and regulated by the state.

Anti-trust laws prohibited corporations from stifling competition: Price cutting and fixing, dumping, and vertically integrating to ensure monopolies were all illegal. The government broke up large “trusts.”

The public looked askance at the power of mega-corporations and their ability to sway public opinion through the monopolistic purchases of media and advertising and their ability to liquidate smaller rival companies. Product liability laws, if often punitively and unfairly, held corporations accountable even for the misuse of their products: Smokers sued the tobacco companies when they suffered from lung cancer and emphysema. Baby cribs that had hard edges were liable for infant injury.

Yet today’s Silicon Valley and related high-tech companies are largely exempt from such traditional regulations. Facebook and Google run veritable monopolies. Facebook alone controls an estimated 40 percent of the world’s social-media market. It has more than 2 billion monthly users. Google controls about 90 percent of the world’s search-engine market. Apple earns $230 billion in annual revenue and is nearing a market value of $900 billion. Microsoft controls about 85 percent of the word-processing personal and business markets. Amazon alone was responsible for about 45 percent of all online sales of any sort last year. It has huge contracts with the Pentagon and owns the Washington Post. When competitors to Big Tech arise, they are offered billions of dollars, cashed out, and absorbed. Facebook has bought more than 50 rival companies. It acquired former competitor WhatsApp, the world’s leader in messaging platforms, for a staggering $19 billion. Alphabet/Google has bought more than 200 companies, YouTube among them.

Social media deliberately exploits human psychology, not least with its parade of endless distractions. As well as making us stupid and inattentive, political democracy also is undermined via the mining of big data, as the ongoing revelations of Facebook’s privacy violations attest.

The European Renaissance formed much of what became the West’s vocabulary concerning individual freedom, humanism, political order and the idea of scientific inquiry freed from religious supervision or customary oversight. It gave rise, amongst other things, to speculation about the possibility of perfection. Neo-Platonists, like Pico della Mirandola, considered what man’s release from a determinist chain of being might mean. “What a great miracle is man,” Pico wrote in 1487, “the intermediary between creatures … familiar with the gods above him, as he is lord of the creatures beneath him.”

In this optimistic spirit, later humanists, like Thomas More, imagined utopia, “no place”, where “there’s never any excuse for idleness”. More’s society of perfect happiness was also one of complete surveillance where “everyone has his eye on you”. In a similar vein, Francis Bacon conceived a New Atlantis where Salomon’s house, or the scientific College of the Six Days Work, would find out “the true nature of all things (whereby God might have the more glory in the workmanship of them, and men the more fruit in the use of them)”.

The scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment only reinforced this quest. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein captured the dream of science which also came to address the growing irrelevance of God. By the late nineteenth century both Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hardy speculated on the meaning of God’s death. As Hardy wondered:

And who or what shall fill His place?
Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes
For some fixed star to stimulate their pace
Towards the goal of their enterprise? …

In Silicon Valley, Big Tech offers the latest apocalyptic answer to Hardy’s question concerning “the goal of their enterprise”.

After an Ars Technica report that Facebook surreptitiously scrapes call and text message data from Android phones and has done so for years, the scandal-burdened company has responded that it only collects that information from users who have given permission.

Facebook’s public statement, posted on its press site, comes a couple of days after it took out full page newspaper ads to apologize for the misuse of data by third-party apps as it copes with fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal (follow the story as it develops here). In the ad, founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg wrote “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”

The company’s response to the Ars Technica story, however, struck a different tone, with Facebook titling the post “Fact Check: Your Call and SMS History.” It said “You may have seen some recent reports that Facebook has been logging people’s call and SMS (text) history without their permission. This is not the case,” before going on to explain that call and text history logging is included with an opt-in feature on Messenger or Facebook Lite for Android that “people have to expressly agree to use” and that they can turn off at any time, which would also delete any call and text data shared with that app.

Ars Technica has already amended its original post with a response to Facebook’s statement, saying it contradicts several of its findings, including the experience of users who shared their data with the publication.

“In my case, a review of my Google Play data confirms that Messenger was never installed on the Android devices I used,” wrote Ars Technica IT and national security editor Sean Gallagher in the amendment to his post. “Facebook was installed on a Nexus tablet I used and on the Blackphone 2 in 2015, and there was never an explicit message requesting access to phone call and SMS data. Yet there is call data from the end of 2015 until late 2016, when I reinstalled the operating system on the Blackphone 2 and wiped all applications.”

In its statement, Facebook said “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with. This was first introduced in Messenger in 2015, and later offered as an option in Facebook Lite, a lightweight version of Facebook for Android .”

Mark Zuckerberg famously started Facebook out of a Harvard dorm room in 2004, but his social network now boasts more than two billion users world-wide. Facebook hasn’t matured as fast as it has grown, and its recent troubles show that it will need to exercise more control over content and privacy. Or politicians may do it instead.

Facebook is facing a public reckoning after two newspapers reported that data on 50 million users was improperly shared with a firm working for the Trump campaign. The outrage is overwrought, but perhaps inevitable given that Facebook has promoted itself as a guardian of consumer privacy.

In 2014 the company supported a Senate bill to limit the National Security Agency’s access to electronic data, arguing that it was more trustworthy than the government. Last year Facebook joined other tech companies to oppose Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s rescission of Obama-era privacy rules for broadband providers that didn’t apply to them.

The Internet Association argued that companies like Facebook and Google “have more limited visibility into online practices and consumer information” than broadband providers that are “in a position to develop highly detailed and comprehensive profiles of their customers—and to do so in a manner that may be completely invisible.” Facebook’s alleged data breach has exposed this conceit.

Facebook makes most of its $16 billion in annual profit from harvesting data on users. In 2007 the company decided to start selling personalized ads to fuel its growth. To boost user engagement and generate more ad revenue, Facebook encouraged third-party apps such as inane personality quizzes like “Which Disney Princess Are You?”

Brennan admitted his charge that the Russians were blackmailing Trump was pure speculation. But that didn’t stop him or anyone else from spreading the smear.

The question was a reasonable one, but the answer was not. When the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe program asked why President Trump had congratulated Russian president Vladimir Putin on being reelected, former CIA director John Brennan pulled no punches. In answering the leading question that implied Trump may be afraid of Putin, Brennan said, “The Russians may have something on him personally.” The Russians, he said, “have had long experience of Mr. Trump, and may have things they could expose.”

Coming from just another foe of Trump — which Brennan, an Obama loyalist, certainly is — the assertion could be dismissed as just a partisan cheap shot. But coming as it did from a career intelligence officer who served for four years as the head of the American intelligence establishment, this had to be more than a baseless conjecture.

Except it wasn’t.

By the end of the day, Brennan admitted his wild charge was not based on any actual information or intelligence revealed to him during the course of his duties but just a willingness to assume the worst about Trump. In a written response to questions from the New York Times, he said, “I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they could use as blackmail.”

In a world in which journalists treated unfounded assumptions as just that, rather than headline news, Brennan’s charges would have been dismissed. But though the Times knew the accusation was baseless by the time it published its article on the subject, the paper buried the lead. The headline on the story was “Ex-Chief of the C.I.A. Suggests Putin May Have Compromising Information on Trump.” Brennan’s walking back of his charge didn’t appear until the eleventh paragraph of the story.

Washington in 2016 saw one of most audacious dirty tricks in political history: the Donald Trump -Russia collusion claim. Now it’s happening again—same partisans, same media; new conspiracy, new victims, including the National Rifle Association.

Remember how the Trump-Russia trick played? Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired opposition-research firm Fusion GPS to compile a dossier of salacious Trump allegations. The Fusion team delivered it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then, when briefing reporters, cited the bureau’s interest to establish the document’s credibility. To this day the accusations in the dossier have not been corroborated.

To pull this off, Clinton partisans needed government officials willing to entertain wild claims and media willing to propagate them. Both still exist in abundance, as we now witness a new conspiracy theory elevated into news.

Starting in February 2017, media outlets began issuing stories about a Russian central banker named Alexander Torshin and a Russian gun-rights activist named Maria Butina. Most broadly claimed the duo had been cozying up to U.S. conservatives; they specifically noted that they had an interest in the NRA. What was weird was that so many journalists were simultaneously doing this story—among them Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, the self-described “old friend” of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, who was also among the first to write about the dossier—at Mr. Simpson’s pitch.

This January, the House Intelligence Committee released its transcript of Mr. Simpson’s November testimony, in which he regaled incredulous committee Republicans with a wild new tale—of how the Russians had “infiltrated the NRA.” Fusion GPS had “spent a lot of time investigating” a “Mafia leader named Alexander Torshin” and a “suspicious” and “big Trump fan,” Maria Butina. Mr. Simpson provided zero detail to back up this claim—no names, dates, money transfers or specific actions.

But never mind. The day Mr. Simpson’s conspiracy-laden transcript was due to go public, McClatchy ran this headline: “FBI investigating whether Russian money went to NRA to help Trump.” The story cited only two unnamed “sources familiar with the matter.” The article admitted it “could not be learned” whether the FBI had any evidence involving the NRA, but it nonetheless went on at length about the group. A flurry of articles from other news organizations followed, while Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden fired off letters demanding the NRA account for itself. House Democrats jumped in, with Rep. Adam Schiff positing “an effort by Russia to create a back channel or assist the Trump campaign through the NRA.” Another flurry of articles. All still based on nothing but Mr. Simpson’s infiltration claim. CONTINUE AT SITE

Facebook is grappling with the fallout from its alleged role in permitting the London-based data firm Cambridge Analytica to gain access to data from profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users for political purposes. The Facebook data reportedly was mined for data by an app called “thisisyourdigitallife,” presumably for an academic research project. The app was created by Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic at Cambridge University, and his company Global Science Research. The data was then transferred by the researcher to Cambridge Analytica, which worked for the Trump presidential campaign and was backed by Steve Bannon and the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer. Cambridge Analytica claims that the Facebook data it gathered from the app was not used for the 2016 Trump presidential election campaign. Facebook claims that its user profile data was provided to Cambridge Analytica without its knowledge. Facebook also claims that it shut the app down in 2015.

There are reports the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating whether Facebook violated terms of a 2011 consent decree in connection with the transfer of user data to Cambridge Analytica. A spokesperson for the FTC would neither confirm nor deny whether it was launching such an investigation.

Members of Congress and United Kingdom lawmakers have called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain Facebook’s actions and his company’s connections with Cambridge Analytica. The hit to Facebook’s reputation and the potential for increased government regulation on both sides of the Atlantic are taking its toll. Facebook’s stock value has taken a nosedive as a result.

On the political front, President Trump’s enemies are busy exploiting the connection between Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign, and by implication the purported misuse of Facebook sourced data for improper partisan purposes. As the Russian-Trump campaign collusion narrative begins to fade due to lack of evidence, the Trump-hating media has latched on to a new Deus ex Machina behind Donald Trump’s improbable victory in a continuing effort to delegitimize his presidency.