If you think SA’s government was alone in effectively putting itself up for rent to private interests, like those of the Gupta family, this week’s Facebook leaks should act as a tonic for any such naiveté. The fact is, large companies have been trying to compromise policymakers for years. In the US, it even has a quaintly polite name: lobbying. At home, we tend to refer to the practice, or at least the particular flavour of it brewed by a venal former president and his pastiche of cartoon villain sidekicks, as state capture.
Now, this new insight into Facebook’s practices stems from documents filed in a California court in response to a 2017 case against Facebook by app developer Six4Three — first reported by Computer Weekly and the British newspaper The Guardian, with investigative journalist Duncan Campbell.
The e-mails reveal Facebook’s sprawling lobbying operation across the world — including the UK, India, the US, Brazil and Europe. While the original documents, seen by the FM, don’t specifically mention SA, it would be an exception had this country not experienced similarly surreptitious meddling.
Perhaps the most telling revelation, indicative both of Facebook’s power and its willingness to abuse it, is its alarming interaction with Ireland’s former prime minister Enda Kenny.
In one memo, Marne Levine — then Facebook’s vice-president of global public policy and now its VP of global partnerships — boasts that her company has formed a "great relationship" with Kenny, who, it says, has offered to use Ireland’s position as the president of the EU for six months to influence the other countries on the new data protection laws.
"The prime minister said that they could exercise significant influence as president of the EU, even though technically Ireland is supposed to remain neutral in this role," Levine says.
Facebook then told Kenny that the data rules were "a threat to jobs, innovation, and economic growth in Europe". Kenny apparently "committed to using their EU presidency to achieve a positive outcome" on the data rules.
This is a company entirely comfortable with manipulating personal data for a few cents
Facebook has been fighting against the European rules, which it considers "overly prescriptive". A cynic might argue that "overly prescriptive" simply means the rules won’t allow Facebook to spy on people as it wants, and use this data for commercial purposes.
It’s a justifiable concern, not least because Facebook owns WhatsApp, which is used by more than 1.5-billion people across the globe, and Instagram — and it has shown little pause in breezily harvesting personal data from all three platforms.
These new leaked memos now show just how scheming the company can be. At one point, Facebook executives are casually discussing how they’d revamped their policy to allow advertisers to target people who hadn’t indicated whether they were "married" or "in a relationship".
"This targeting capability is currently only available for dating, but the ads product team is working to expand it to other verticals, like political." This is a company entirely comfortable with mercilessly manipulating personal data for an extra few cents.
This — the sense that Facebook’s executives would trade their firstborn for an incremental sales advantage — is exactly why the FM’s technology writer, Toby Shapshak, has for months been urging people to ditch the social media service.
After all, it’s not as if these leaked e-mails are some extreme exception to an otherwise law-abiding ethical corporate citizen.
Last month, a report by a UK parliamentary committee, which examined Facebook’s role in spreading fake news, branded the company’s executives "digital gangsters", who lied and set out to mislead parliament.
Facebook, the report said, considers itself "ahead of, and beyond the law", while its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, contemptuously ignored invitations to speak to the investigators.
Why should South Africans care, aside from the fact that we have elections looming and the Trump fiasco shows that Facebook has a casual amorality when it comes to swaying elections?
The answer is perhaps best summed up by a Canadian MP, Charlie Angus, who this week expressed alarm that Facebook was able to "have government policies bend" to their policy preferences. "I think what is clear is that Facebook has a casual contempt for domestic laws wherever they operate."
Those are both characteristics, you’d have to agree, that are eerily reminiscent of the Guptas.
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