The end of the happy time.

Posted by Pointman on April 13, 2018 · 19 Comments 

In 1940 after the fall of France in WWII, German U-boats were very quickly redeployed from the northern and only coast of Germany, to the west coast of France. Suddenly, their range was increased so dramatically, they could strike out deep into the Atlantic. For the next six months, they sank nearly 300 merchant ships in the western approaches to Ireland with a combined tonnage of 1.5m. The crews called it “Die glückliche Zeit” or the happy time, because all they were doing was sinking unescorted single merchant ships with impunity until they simply ran out of ammunition and had to return to port for more.

It lasted until the Royal Navy got their act together and the escorted convoy system set up and running. From then on, the Kriegsmarine lost a lot of submarines and prominent U-boat aces like Prien, Schepke and probably the best submariner they had in Kretschmer.

As with all happy times, you only recognise them in retrospect. By the end of the war, 40,000 men had gone to sea in U-boats and 30,000 never returned home. Once you get outside special forces, the conventional thinking is that any unit taking more than 10% casualties is combat ineffective and should be retired from the line for rest. You’ve got to give them a plus for guts while bearing in mind nearly 50,000 men of the British merchant marine lost their lives in the war, and despite that casualty rate, there was never a shortage of civilian sailors to crew the merchies.

If you’re a regular follower of this blog, you’ll know I’ve had deep concerns about the direction the Internet has been going in for the last decade. A handful of individuals atop huge corporations like Google, Twitter and Facebook have established near total monopolies over massive swathes of it, and as usual in such situations, have been abusing that position with gusto and an arrogant disdain of anyone who objected to it. They’ve been taking the piss for years, and what’s more, nobody seemed to care, never mind giving them a bloody good slap for it.

You were totally free to express your opinion on anything in their nicey nice social media universe, but unless it happened to agree with their world view, their version of morality and most especially their politics, your social media life got hard, your opinion somehow disappeared, got shadow banned or in the end, you yourself just got banned. Everybody knew it was going on, but like child sexual abuse in a family, the whole grubby thing was either swept under the carpet or people looked the other way, not interested in getting involved in such an ugly problem.

It was so much easier to join everyone else doing the rah-rah cheerleading from the sidelines about how liberating and wonderful the whole vie électronique was.

But it wasn’t so wonderful for those individuals whose opinion was going down a black hole, nor those who were making a living producing original content only to find their product had overnight been suddenly demonetarised, or those groups of people protesting against a political trend they didn’t agree with, or Christians who found out they were the only religious group being pushed off the platform and even those people uploading a lecture by someone with whose opinions they didn’t necessarily concur, but watching that viewpoint being taken down and them being punished for sharing it in the first place.

Everything was going swimmingly for these masters of the Internet until a few weeks back. The story broke of an obscure firm that nobody had ever heard of helping themselves to the data of what was initially thought to be only 50m Facebook users. It turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg and to everyone’s surprise, it was actually common practice which Facebook had been turning a blind eye to for years. After successive revelations that everyone was doing it, even God forbid the prissy bitches of the Guardian with their app, Facebook eventually fessed up and said that any user should assume their data had been swiped.

I have some pity for those users and their sense of betrayal, but if you’re going to use social media, you have to get your head straight about what you’re actually doing with the personal details of your life. No matter what your privacy settings are, what you’re really doing is pinning daily notes onto a notice board placed in the public square. Complete strangers come along, copy the details and then sell them on to various interested parties. You aren’t in the permissions loop for any of that.

It’s all about selling your information, nothing more. Never mind all the PR spin about him by his paid press agents, what came out in the discovery phase between Zuckerberg and some ex-employees who were suing him, was his complete contempt for Facebook users, whom in messages he called “dumb fucks” for giving all their information about themselves to him for free.

The scandal grew so big that Zuckerberg was asked to appear before Congress for two days of testimony. Given the outrage, he really couldn’t resist, but notice at no point was he asked to testify under oath, therefore obviating any danger of being done for false testimony. A deal had obviously been done, hence his multitude of I don’t know answers to potentially sticky questions and some outright lies.

For instance, he was asked about the banning of the vbloggers Diamond & Silk and said words to the effect he wasn’t around when it happened, but according to the two ladies in question, they’d been having a vigorous email exchange with Facebook’s censors for nearly six months prior to them being banned. Given their prominence and their 2m plus followers, he must have known of the move to ban them completely from the platform.

The pointed questions were all about political censorship of Facebook users, and despite what was obviously some pre-testimony coaching, he didn’t come out of it looking very good; a bit like an emotionless cyborg weasel if anything. The obvious favours to the Obama campaign of 2012 were barely touched upon. It was the usual Washington snail’s pace, but you could see one or two of the congressmen sizing him up and thinking pulling the legs off this little insectoid one by one in front of the cameras would be easy, and a very vote winning thing to do.

The most interesting part of all his giving evidence to congress was an exchange with Representative Billy Long (R,Mo). From his face, Zuckerberg had obviously been briefed about this man by the row of Harvard Law School suits sitting behind him – comes across like an amiable Missouri hick with his feet up on the pot-bellied stove in the local store rambling on about something, but don’t underestimate him, or he’ll chew you up good.

Suddenly the giant Zuckerberg looked like a naughty little boy sitting on his booster cushion, and choosing his words very carefully while giving testimony to congress.

Long gave Zuckerberg a mild roasting, which I’d recommend you watch if only to study his interrogation technique, but his preamble to it was to say “If I was you, a little bit of advice, congress is good at doing two things; doing nothing and overreacting”. He went on to grill him about the banning of those two menaces to the community, Diamond and Silk, and the darn puzzling question of why it always seemed to be that conservative pages were the only ones getting censored by Facebook, rather than any left-wing ones.

It was a relatively easy pass for Zuckerberg, but you could see from the relaxed threat in Long’s face this was only round one, and unless the partisan censorship of conservative views ended, especially in the run up to the mid-terms, congress would be meeting with him again and coming down hard on them all. Long is by repute a very handy Poker player, and I’d believe it after watching that charming style of questioning. Harmless and deadly.

He finished up his questioning with a subtle but cautionary warning to Zuckerberg. “We’re getting ready to overreact”. The message is clear, even if delivered with some very over easy dollops of Southern charm. The happy time of getting away with whatever the hell they want to do is over for the social media Masters of the Universe.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Facebook – hero or villain?

The evil empire of the internet must be broken up.

Internet censorship and whither shall we go?

Twitter is fundamentally corrupt.

A welcome to the dark side.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Censorship, Facebook, Zuckerberg