According to a company executive on Tuesday, Facebook will take aggressive measures to restrict the circulation of content in the eventuality that November’s presidential election gets extremely chaotic or violent, end quote.
In other words, Facebook openly states that it will censor users as the platform’s “watch dogs” see fit. Last week, the company said it will pull its business from Europe if European courts agree with the EU ban on transferring EU user data to US based servers.
Basically, this is what Washington is trying to do with TikTok, i.e. to stop transferring US users data on Chinese servers. And on Tuesday, Facebook openly declared that it will drastically curtail speech on its platform in the US in the same manner authoritarian regimes in Venezuela, Iran or China did in the past.
The only difference is that in the US is not the government censoring you, it’s a private company, and that’s OK.
“There are some break-glass options available to us if there really is an extremely chaotic and, worse still, violent set of circumstances,”
said Facebook’s head of global affairs Nick Clegg for FT. He also said that Facebook already did that in other parts of the world:
“We have acted aggressively in other parts of the world where we think that there is real civic instability and we obviously have the tools to do that [again],” Mr Clegg added, citing the previous use of “pretty exceptional measures to significantly restrict the circulation of content on our platform”.
The first sign of death for any tech company is the overplaying of its hand. And this is LifeLog’s final push, brought to you by the good people at DARPA.