Facebook is on the hot seat as the main-wing U.S. bosses have launched a multi-front attack to force billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg to contribute more to their war plans. They’re also sending a message to the other technology mega-companies: They must serve the political needs of finance capitalism or suffer the consequences.
Two leading ruling-class mouthpieces, the New York Times and the Observer of London, have led the charge in exposing Cambridge Analytica, an election consulting committee that paid for Facebook user data on 87 million people. The information was used to help elect Donald Trump and earlier to win the Brexit referendum to split Britain from the European Union.
The attack comes now because president Trump has grown increasingly erratic and unreliable. As the U.S. rulers’ main wing, led by investment banks like JPMorgan Chase and multinational oil companies like ExxonMobil, struggles to hold on as the world’s leading imperialist power, it needs to try to push Trump back in line. It needs to stop the tech industry from helping rival capitalists who are backing the loose-cannon president. And as it builds toward war and fascism, it needs to bring U.S. media—including social media—under tighter control.
Facebook’s crime: aiding the opposition
One of Cambridge Analytica’s leading investors is Trump supporter Robert Mercer, whose daughter Rebecca sits on their board. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, the white supremacist and “America First” isolationist who put Breitbart News on the map, was a fellow board member. In the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, Cambridge Analytica funneled data and “psychographic modeling” to a political action committee founded by John Bolton, Trump’s new national security advisor and a longtime opponent of the U.S. bosses’ attempts to build the international alliances they’ll need for World War III (Washington Post, 3/23).
Mercer, one of the wealthiest capitalists in the rulers’ domestically oriented wing, has funded campaigns for tax cuts, ending Obamacare, denying climate change, and shutting down immigration. The Mercers have targeted U.S. Senate leader Mitch McConnell and other mainstream Republican politicians, who are important players in protecting the bosses’ imperialist interests in the Middle East and elsewhere..
The main wing of the ruling class is making a special example out of Zuckerberg, whose crime was to help Mercer keep arch-imperialist and loyal main-wing servant Hillary Clinton out of the Oval Office. One way or the other, Zuckerberg will be compelled to give up some of his billions—just as Bill Gates was disciplined by the federal antitrust suit against Microsoft. In 2000, two years after the suit was brought by Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice, Gates founded the Gates Foundation. Over the last 10 years alone, it has donated $34 billion to education reform and non-governmental organizations operating in foreign countries on issues supported by the main-wing U.S. bosses.
In the face of weakening U.S. dominance and a fast-rising China, the world order established after World War II is falling apart. The U.S. ruling class is locked in a desperate struggle against renegade members of its own class as well as its big international rivals. The U.S. bosses’ weakening situation will continue to drive them toward fascism. They must discipline the Mercers and Kochs—along with Facebook, Google, and Apple—as they intensify their exploitation and terrorization of the working class. They’ll need far more national unity to have a chance to prevail in the next global war.
Facebook attacked
In 2011, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) imposed a consent decree on Facebook regarding protection of personal data. This represented the first overt attempt by the big capitalists to bring Zuckerberg to heel. Subsequently, Facebook sought to prove its loyalty in the 2012 presidential election. Carol Davidsen Media Director of Obama for America said, “Facebook…didn’t stop us…[Facebook] [was] candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side” (Daily Mail 3/18).
In fact, Facebook has always collected user data and for years has shared that data with paid advertisers and app developers. Sharing data is the reason Facebook exists. It’s how it became a $500 billion company, and it’s certainly nothing new. But the company’s Mercer-Trump connection has led former FTC officials to suggest that Facebook has violated its consent decree, which could lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in fines (fortune.com, 3/30).
U.S. envious of rival bosses’ fascism
The main trend in the world today is growing fascism. In general, other top imperialist and regional powers have more controlled and unified ruling classes than the U.S. Their media outlets function as a reliable arm of the state. Opposition voices are neutralized, shut down, and often killed. The U.S. main wing must be envious—and taking notes.
In Russia, shortly after assuming the presidency in 2000, Vladimir Putin began consolidating his control: “Oligarch owners were either co-opted, jailed or exiled, and by 2006 most major Russian media were either directly or indirectly under Putin’s administration’s control…. The editors-in-chief of all the major media in Russia attend regular ‘strategy meetings’ with Putin’s staffers” (The Guardian, 3/24/17).
In China, state control over the news media “is achieved through a complex combination of party monitoring of news content, legal restrictions on journalists, and financial incentives for self-censorship” (2006 FreedomHouse Report). China also cracks down on video-streaming websites and requires users to register their real names on online forums. “New rules also require online news websites to be overseen by government-approved editorial staff and for workers to have reporting credentials from the central government” (CNBC, 10/26/17).
In Saudi Arabia, during the recent purge by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, two media tycoons were among those arrested: Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, majority owner of the Rotana media company, and Waleed Al Ibrahim, the owner of MBC and Al Arabiya, a pan-Arab news channel based in Dubai. Controlling “a wide network of Middle Eastern television channels, radio stations, music labels and digital entertainment assets from Morocco to Oman, [they] were reportedly arrested for resisting the crown prince’s repeated attempts over the past year to buy their companies” (Al Jazeera, 11/19/17).
Similar situations can be found in Iran and Turkey, among other countries.
U.S. plays catch up
Beyond extracting money from capitalists reluctant to pay their share, the U.S. rulers are desperate to gain a tighter leash over their media. When the U.S. bosses rose to world preeminence as the dominant capitalist power after World War II, mass media was narrowly held and easily controlled. There were three national news networks and four or five newspapers with national influence.
Today, with the rise of cable, satellites, and the internet, thousands of stations have national reach. Small operators like Breitbart and InfoWars can reach tens of millions of people. The attack on Facebook can be seen as the big U.S. bosses’ attempt to bring undisciplined, rogue media, including social media, under greater control by the state.
The bosses have no problem collecting our data
While Facebook has been selling whatever “private” information they can, we should not be fooled by the ruling class’s feigned concern over the collection of personal data. In fact, the bosses have long relied on private companies to collect and hold onto personal data. The USA Freedom Act, hypocritically touted as a limit on the power of the National Security Agency (NSA), was signed by Obama in 2015. It requires every phone carrier to collect and hold indefinitely the records of all their customers.
“As a result, the NSA no longer has to worry about keeping up its own database and…the percentage of available records has shot up from 30 percent to virtually 100. Rather than one internal, incomplete database, the NSA can now query any of several complete ones” (ABC News 10/20/16).
No good side in bosses’ dogfights
Between the main wing fascists, the Tea Party klansmen, and the Chinese, Saudi, and Russian butchers, workers have no good choices under capitalism. As these bosses fight out their differences, the international working class will bear the brunt of the attacks.
Capitalism is built on racism, sexism, and the massive exploitation of workers around the globe. The rulers’ wars are killing millions and will kill and devastate millions more. In a period of rising fascism, the data the bosses are collecting will inevitably be used as a surveillance tool to try to stop us from fighting back. A communist revolution won’t be built through the bosses’ social media. It can only be constructed by building a base in the international working class. Join us!