Dell Cameron writes:

When the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for deceiving its users on privacy, it celebrated the fine as “record-breaking and history-making.” Two years and $200 billion in revenue later, Facebook has found a way to turn lemons into lemonade, deceiving its users once again and using a seemingly powerless FTC to do it.

Facebook’s Tuesday night crackdown on research into the dangerous falsehoods perpetuated by its platform was predicated on the lie that the FTC had effectively forced its hand. “We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC Order,” it said. That statement sparked a flurry of condemnation from federal lawmakers, who accused the company of working to conceal its role in fostering fraud and abuse that’s having a corrosive effect on the country.

Facebook wasn’t shy about laying out its motivation, though its excuses contained one lie of omission after the next. The action was taken, it said, to obstruct research into its platform conducted out of New York University; work intended to enhance knowledge production on a range of critically relevant societal harms; the attraction of violent belief systems, the weaponization of election disinformation, conspiratorial attitudes eroding the public’s faith in validated medical science, et cetera.

The Knight Institute, a First Amendment nonprofit housed at Columbia University, is convinced Facebook’s motive was somehow even more sinister: Although Facebook had denounced the NYU researchers and their methods ten months ago, their work was allowed to continue until Tuesday—hours after learning researchers had expanded the project to include Facebook’s role on January 6, the day of the Capitol insurrection. [Continue reading…]