Siva Vaidhyanathan writes:

Facebook, like the internet itself, is supposed to be a global phenomenon. It’s designed, its leaders say, to unite the world, transcend difference, and collapse distance. Its global reach and influence is undeniable. Nothing in human history has connected more than 3 billion human beings. Nothing has had such a profound set of effects in such a short period of time as Facebook has had everywhere—except, more or less, the People’s Republic of China—over the past decade.

Despite the constant flow of scandals, revelations, accusations, accounts, and studies that have documented the damage that Facebook amplifies for its users, most of the attention that journalists and critics have given the company has focused on only two countries—the United States and the United Kingdom—and one language, English.

When news stories break about Facebook allowing massive spills of personal and behavioral data to rogue political consulting companies like Cambridge Analytica, the spotlight is on American and British data and elections. When most critics complain about all the garbage that flows across Facebook, the news stories they cite and the issues they raise almost always focus on American politics, society, and public health.

Whenever Facebook announces a new policy to tamp down the garbage or misbehavior, I always tweet at the reporters covering the story, “Did you ask if this policy change was only for the United States or only in English?” I rarely get a response. The answer to that question rarely makes it into news accounts.

In 2018, I had an off-the-record conversation with members of Facebook’s civic integrity team. They went on and on about the measures they were taking to protect the 2020 elections in the United States. When I asked them about what they were doing about the 2019 general election in India, they fell silent. They seemed not to have considered that it might be a bigger problem—the biggest problem. [Continue reading…]