We are at a crunch point between truth and lies, and Facebook is right at the centre. This week we – the Observer and Guardian, Channel 4 News and the New York Times – have thrown our all at exposing the dark arts facilitated by Facebook’s waywardness and its neglect of the security of those who love and live it, its users.
Facebook’s users are voters across the world. What we revealed was the extent to which a London-based company, Cambridge Analytica, had used data to target them and affect elections. Trading in fear, it sought in the US to erode Democratic voters’ faith in their own candidate, with the “crooked Hillary” viral effort that depicted her as a wanted criminal.
It took old media to rumble Cambridge Analytica. Carole Cadwalladr of the Observer, which shared the story with Channel 4 and the New York Times, worked with her source Chris Wylie for a year. on all this Channel 4 News spent four months investigating the way Cambridge Analytica was doing business. This was toil that Facebook had a moral imperative to do for itself. Facebook had a duty to protect its users’ profiles from theft, and to detect and track down any entities attempting to use them.
Facebook knew two years ago that user profiles had been lifted, but did nothing. Even after our revelations, it took Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg four days to respond. Facebook is probably the biggest commercial entity in history to have penetrated the brain cells of so vast a number of human beings. Yet it is a law unto itself in terms of both regulation and tax. The world wide web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, said on Channel 4 News the other night, that “the genie is out of the bottle”. He doubted it could ever be got back in. There surely has to be a cost to any individual or organisation that sets out to harvest humankind’s desire for connectivity, community and friendship, without safeguarding the mechanisms by which they do it.
Cambridge Analytica’s activities have exposed the threat to democracy that Facebook’s omissions have facilitated. Zuckerberg owes us more than a squirt of soundbites on CNN. He should do an in-depth interview with one of the organisations trying to investigate what is going on in the new digital world. At the same time, civil institutions in countries across the world need to do far more to regulate what entities such as Facebook are doing. Here in the UK, the idea that the information commissioner has just 10 frontline officers to fight the regulatory and security battles to come is close to absurd. Governments, like citizens, are out of their depth. Democracies have a super-human job to do to preserve the glories of the internet while preserving us from the abuse, filth and criminality that we now know is all too easy to conjure through it.
As a journalist, I am grateful every waking day for what I am able to do thanks to the internet. But I loathe the idea that a company such as Cambridge Analytica has the capacity to work out whether I am susceptible to covert messaging that will affect the way I vote. Facebook has enabled us to secure literally billions of viewings of the news clips we post on our site. But in doing so we provide material around which it can sell advertising. Channel 4 News gets no revenue for this. Most readers of the Guardian and the New York Times read online. We all depended on terrestrial advertising to support what we do. That source of funding is evaporating. We have been arguing fiercely with Facebook, and Google, that they owe us a fairer share. Serious news, which Zuckerberg says he believes in to counter the fake news that thrives on his platform, costs serious money.
Unless the tech giants start to take notice, there is a real danger that next time there might be no “old media” left to call them out. Don’t get me wrong. We all want to cooperate with Facebook in forging a new media world, and still have a chance to get this right. We must do so if we are to restrict the criminal use of private data for perverted ends, and instead garner our collective resources to render Earth safer and better. Come on, Mr Zuckerberg. Give us some interviews and let’s thrash this out on old and new media alike!
• Jon Snow is a presenter on Channel 4 News
