17/04/2020
ESSAY: Fake News and Surveillance Capitalism by Ophelia Chen Yinyu, Yukina Mitsuhashi and Lou Szabo
First of all, it is important to clarify that the choice of platform for this project is an ironic choice, since this essay will be a critical analysis of the impact of fake news and surveillance capitalism these days, where Facebook plays a role predominant.
Shoshana Zuboff, an American author and scholar, coined the term “Surveillance Capitalism” in 2005 in her new book In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism . In the “Surveillance capitalism” society, she said that personal information is gathered as a behavioural data, which is used not only to create prediction products, anticipating what you will do now, soon, and later, but also to influence and modify human behaviour (Zuboff 2015). With the huge amount of big data provided by the world tech companies such as Google and Facebook, “Surveillance capitalism” has transformed contemporary economy and society (Zuboff 2015). In this book, she also explained how “Surveillance capitalism” impacts on democratic society.
The story of Cambridge Analytica with Brexit and the Trump campaign can be considered as the examples of the impact on democratic society. Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting and data analytics firm. According to Brittany Kaiser, the former business director for Cambridge Analytica, this firm had conducted work for the Leave EU campaign and the United Kingdom Independence Party (POLITO 2019). Also, some documents revealed that this firm had harvested raw data from up to 87 million Facebook profiles without any consent and used them to identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behaviour in the President Trump’s campaign in 2016 (New York Times 2018). These facts showed that personal data was used as the “means of behavioural modification”. This power to shape people’s behaviour for other’s profit and preference is entirely self-authorising and neglects democratic rights. Zuboff said in her book “Democracy has slept, while surveillance capitalists amassed unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power”.
Zuboff further explains that the logic of accumulation that will ensure the success of Google is apparent in a patent filed in 2003 entitled: "Generate user information for the purpose of targeted advertising". The invention aims "to establish user profile information and to use this information for the dissemination of advertisements". In other words, Google is no longer just extracting behavioural data in order to improve services. Now it's about reading users' minds to match ads with their interests, which will be deduced from the collateral traces of their online behaviour. The collection of new datasets called "user profile information" will considerably improve the accuracy of these predictions.
Such an attitude is also linked to the delicate issue of fake news. As said above, it has become clear thanks to parliamentary inquiries in the United States or in Great Britain that Facebook had been exploited by malicious people to disturb the electoral game. The perversity of the situation is that it is its very model which favours manipulation. Thanks to a marketing targeting of ultra-thin users, it is easy to target people on ethnic or religious criteria and, therefore, easy for a foreign power to buy for cheap some advertisements which have only one goal: to touch a given community by pushing it to radicalize and to be vindictive against another community. Facebook can thus serve the dark purposes of arsonist propaganda, aimed at breaking up democratic societies.
China has become the country of cameras and facial surveillance. Yitu, CloudWalk, SenseTime: Chinese artificial intelligence laboratories are the best in the world in this area and while China has never been a model of democracy, its new silk routes, which export cameras, surveillance systems and smart cities to around fifty countries around the world, have turned into gigantic data vacuum cleaners, putting private lives at risk. In Ecuador, Zimbabwe or the Philippines, the Chinese tech giants are rolling out their know-how. Serbia has just adopted Huawei’s Safe City Solution, which will allow 800 cameras in Belgrade to read license plates and perform facial recognition. While many activists and people in general are being more and more vocal on the matter and fighting for the respect of privacy, American and European researchers in facial recognition continue to collaborate with their Chinese colleagues and sign scientific articles with them. To save what remains of private lives, it is thus urgent to get out of this false neutrality by defending our values and our data.
China as a non-democratic country, has strict control over its daily press and public information. In Hong Kong social movement period, different social media platforms released various angles of the events depending on its standpoints. For example, in the “Umbrella Movement”, because of the opposition to the democratic social movement, the Communist Party ’s “People ’s Daily” news media showed more scenes of violence, as well as suppressed and concealed their real demands. Besides, in Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement, this kind of information public opinion control system has also been well reflected. The Extradition Bill Law is about allowing the criminal fugitives those who commit crimes in Hong Kong send to the mainland of China for trial. Because of the disagreement with the mainland legal system, the fact that the Bill has not been deliberated by the Judicial Council, and the doubt about the Extradition Bill itself, Hong Kong people decided to oppose this law, so they put forward “Five demands, not one less” slogans to oppose the implement of Extradition Bill. In mainland, the related news are blocked, what Chinese people can see is only about the impact of social movements on the suspension of work, the conflicts between the police and the public in society, and the violence that has been magnified, which are the negative perspective of social movements. There is no way for people to get access to real and objective news materials, or know exactly what is going on.
To conclude, the most serious issue is that unlike the universe of George Orwell, where the people know the existence of an invisible Big Brother and follow rules which are clearly imposed on them, the majority of the population today are unaware that they are subject to mass manipulation. Indeed, beyond spy servers, hackers etc; there is nowadays a voluntary oversharing of personal information on social networks, where people do not realize that this information can be used without their knowledge. Everyone is traced, followed, manipulated for commercial purposes or even more serious, political purposes, as shown by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There is a real erosion of privacy, which poses a serious democratic question in countries like the United Kingdom or the United States which claims democracy as a political necessity. The social construction of surveillance has even reached a new turning point as some people are fully aware of the constant surveillance they are under but consider it a mean of safety, problematically arguing that if one does not have anything to hide, they should not be worried or concerned by being tracked. It is therefore dire to re-evaluate the importance of the right of privacy and understand the impact of fake news and surveillance capitalism in our daily life, not as an abstract concept but as a genuine issue threatening democracy.
