By Jonathan COOK
The enthusiasm with which much of the media and political establishment have characterised Frances Haugen as a “Facebook whistleblower” requires that we pause to consider what exactly we think the term “whistleblower” means.
Haugen has brought to the surface a fuzziness in what many of us understand by the idea of whistleblowing.
Even Russell Brand, a comedian turned soothsayer whose critical and compassionate thinking has been invaluable in clarifying our present moment, joined in the cheerleading of Haugen, calling her a “brave whistleblower”.
But what do Brand and other commentators mean when they use that term in relation to Haugen?
[…]
This tech giant [Facebook] stands at the centre of a major elite battle: between old media and new media; between traditional, analogue corporate power and new models of digital corporate power; between elites that benefit from unregulated “free” markets and those who gain their power from regulation.
Within Facebook itself there are battles: between those who hold to its original ambition to monetise an endlessly connected world where we all get an online loudspeaker, and those who want the platform to become even more deeply embedded within the national security state and serve its purposes.
This is not a simple Democrat versus Republican divide. Facebook and other social media platforms – with their raucous effects on public discourse and their ability to amplify non-elite voices – have had a polarising impact that has cut across the usual left-right lines.
The complex skirmishes between elites have been further complicated by the increasingly libertarian, free market impulses within the current Republican party establishment (in tension with the right’s traditional focus on conservative and family values) and the “Big Government”, identity politics-obsessed impulses within the current Democratic party establishment (in tension with the left’s traditional attachment to more liberal, free speech values).
Paradoxically for many of us, Democratic elites often appear more visibly wedded to the national security state – and have stronger allies within it – than Republican elites. Just ask Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi how they respectively feel about the intelligence agencies.
Silicon Valley elites similarly straddle this divide, with some in favour of profiting from an online free-for-all and others in favour of tight regulation.
Secret algorithms
Haugen’s “whistleblowing” on Facebook is simply her going public that she favours one side of this elite competition over the other. She is not batting for us, the public, she is assisting one set of elites against another set of elites.
Which is precisely why her message to 60 Minutes and Congress reduces to a simple one: more regulation of social media, more use of secret algorithms, more darkness rather than light.
Those politicians who want greater regulation of social media platforms to keep out independent voices and critical thinking; the billionaires who want to reassert their gatekeeping media power against the tech upstarts; the Silicon Valley visionaries who want to poke their digital tools deeper into our lives have all found an ally in Haugen.
She does not threaten the status quo, a status quo that continues to plunder the planet’s finite resources to exhaustion, that wages endless resource wars around the globe, that is driving our species to the edge of extinction. No, she is upholding a status quo that will ensure the same psychopaths remain in power, their crimes even further out of view.
That is why Haugen is not really a whistleblower, brave or otherwise. Because there is a price to pay for standing up for truth, for humanity, for life. She is simply shoring up one elite path of several to more corruption, more deceit, more suffering, more death.
Aisle C 