but boy, is it going to LOOK good on TV!

As everybody knows, the First Rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. Judging by this article, instead, the first rule of Facebook’s “war room” seems to be “you just talk about Facebook’s war room”:

“Facebook wanted to show the world that it is on top of things [but] All one can really know about the war room is that it exists."

That war room also hosts a few, more or less hidden elephants. Here they are, commented in semi-random order:

The sovereignty elephant

• “Facebook executives outlined a clear strategy for securing the EU elections.
• “The obvious question is, of course, whether Facebook’s plan can actually keep the EU elections safe.”

NO, not at all. The right question here, the one that maybe should just end the discussion, is: why do “sovereign” states tolerate the very existence of any private for-profit social network once it can de-facto write and enforce election coverage rules in any country?” Meanwhile, nobody seriously questions Facebook’s own self-declarations of sovereignty.

The same, basic issue and conflict is hidden in plain view in another part of the article:

“In the screens in Facebook’s war room each of the 28 EU member states is indicated by tags atop the computers, although the tags' word of choice is market, not country.”

Got that? (global) Market. NOT country. In the “war room” of one of the major enablers of disinformation about deep state, Bilderberg or Elders of Zion rulers of the world and what not. You simply can’t get more recursively conspiratorialist than this.

The platform elephant

“That we have rely on trolls to call their own fouls, some argue, is a sign that Facebook is approaching the matter the wrong way: by adding extra layers of security, instead of reinventing its whole infrastructure”

Facebook cannot do that. Because where we need to go is where we won’t need ANY platform like Facebook anymore. Facebook must go the way of the mimeograph.

The neutrality elephant

“bad actors have gotten more sophisticated, [to such a point that] it is never clear who is winning”.

Agreed. The patch? “users interacting with newsy posts would be provided with contextual information about each post’s provenance, and shown an alert before being allowed to share content that fact-checkers have flagged up as incorrect.”

This just seems Facebook’s version of suggesting “opposite” videos on YouTube. The painfully obvious question here is “Who Watches the Watchmen?"

The “behaviour” elephant

“Behaviour, not content seems to be the new mantra”? This is SO bad it deserves a separate post.

The real solution? Slowness, again

“why does information warfare flourish on social media platforms? Because platforms are frictionless - because you set an account up immediately, and you can share as much as you want. Facebook is taking some steps to address that issue, but far from a radical rethink.”

To solve this, and all the other problems of the same kind, just demand the fix I proposed just a few days ago: remove instantness. Until the moment we can actually replace all the Facebooks of today with better architectures, it may be the only feasible solution.

Image sources:

• quotefancy.com
• Watchmen from Fan-M, via fanpop.com