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Even when Facebook takes action against disinformation in non-Western countries, says Ashraf Zeytun, the company’s former head of public policy for the Middle East and North Africa, it is usually too little and too late. For example, he points to several thousand fake accounts that Facebook recently closed in the Middle East. “I believe there are hundreds of thousands of fake accounts,” he said. “So whatever they’ve done now is cosmetic.”
When Facebook uproots such networks, Zeitoon says, it’s usually because of the personal efforts of enthusiastic and committed employees, not because the company has decided to devote time and resources. “When they say they don’t have the expertise or the workforce, that’s nonsense,” he said. “They have some of the best brains in the world. But the priorities of these guys are more Western priorities. The disinformation network in Jordan is not a priority for Facebook.
The danger is greatest in countries where democracy is already in short supply. When people do not trust traditional channels, they tend to receive a lot of their news and information from friends. This kind of human-to-human communication – Mark Zuckerberg calls it “meaningful social interactions” – seems more plausible. And that is why it is the ideal tool for spreading misinformation. Authoritarian governments have mastered the art of using Facebook to create disinformation campaigns with fake accounts, fake news, and what Zeitoon calls “a significant abundance of troll armies.”
The best way to expose these abuses is to allow reporters in these markets to see the newspapers for themselves. I am the editor of an independent media outlet in Beirut called The Public Source. (I have lived in Beirut for more than a decade and I have been covering the Middle East since 2003.) There are only a handful of truly independent news outlets in Lebanon, and we are one of them. We do not receive funding from the government, political parties or external forces. (Nowadays, this category includes Facebook, which is increasingly funding journalism in the Middle East and around the world.) We requested access and received no response.
Facebook holds a lot of power in Lebanon, where mobile phone prices are among the highest in the region. Many Lebanese have families living abroad, in part to help pay just that kind of outrageously high fees. So almost everyone relies on Facebook and WhatsApp, which are owned by Facebook, to keep in touch with friends and family. WhatsApp is so central to daily life in Lebanon that when the government tried to impose a $ 6-a-month tax on voice calls over the Internet, such as WhatsApp, in October 2019, it sparked a popular uprising called the WhatsApp revolution in the West. media, but known in Lebanon as the October Revolution or the Revolution of October 17 – continued, in one form or another, to this day.
Facebook’s ownership of Lebanon is not unique. The Free Basics program, which was originally launched in 65 countries, takes advantage of poverty and low Internet penetration to reach audiences across the global south. Some countries, such as India and Egypt, eventually unplugged. But since last year, Toussaint Notias of Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Laboratory has found that Free Basics still exists in 28 countries on the African continent alone; Facebook has launched a similar program called Discover in a number of countries, including Peru, Chile, Thailand, the Philippines and Iraq.
The power that Facebook has in countries like Lebanon is exactly why my colleagues and I at The Public Source believe that it is essential that independent media around the world – not just in the Western European or English-language press – have the right to participate in Facebook Papers. . Outsiders, no matter how skilled, will always miss stories that locals will be able to frame. This is especially true in countries and communities where foreign language and knowledge of local and regional policy are key.
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