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“It simply came to our notice then too typical that the “content of any medium” blinds us to the nature of the media. ” Marshall McLuhan about 57 years ago.
What McLuhan meant was that in a discourse dominated by electronic media, we are overly concerned with individual sentences, leaving aside the communication systems that experience those sentences.
This week, McLuhan’s famous observation has come out of the AIDS ball and has found tremendous practical application Facebook watchdog, a group of appointed experts Facebook, Inc., he decided Donald Trump is extending restrictions on the use of Facebook and Instagram to ensure a “proportionate response to the rules” of the Facebook platform for six months.
At this point, who really cares? The former president has been harmed, and with it, Facebook is riddled with malicious misinformation, all sorts of disguises and masquerades, hate speech and defamation and harassment of numerous crimes.
But Facebook’s management was responsible for evaluating only two Instagram and Facebook posts, outside of the dynamics of the social media posts that were posted. He did these two close readings, and convincingly well. But that success and the decision about Donald Trump were neither here nor there. In the end, the result of the exercise was a distraction from Facebook’s responsibility, causing much more widespread damage to democracy. First, the committee mentioned two “contents” that McLuhan would call “messages” as key to decision-making. The first was a video of Trump giving the camera an address, “I know your pain.” It was posted on Facebook and Instagram and at 4:21 p.m., EST, on January 6, 2021, the U.S. Capitol was violently attacked by Trump supporters.
The second was a 42-word paragraph on Facebook with Trump’s name on it, a time marked just two hours later. “These are the things and events that have happened to the great patriots who have been treated so badly for the great patriots who have so badly viciously abducted a sacred election victory. Go home in peace with love. Remember this day forever!”
The Facebook surveillance team’s statement focused on language, time, and the origins of both posts. He never mentioned the dynamics, the business model, or the tools of social media, Instagram, and Facebook.
According to the commission’s statement, “We love you. You are very special” in the first post and in the second post “great patriots” and “remember this day forever” Facebook violated the rules prohibiting praise or help from violent people. “
As for the time stamps, the statement says, “At the time of Mr. Trump’s publications, there was a clear risk of immediate harm and words in favor of those involved in the riots legitimized their violent actions.”
As the author of these messages about the American president, the document says, “As president, Mr. Trump had a huge impact. The reach of his posts was huge, with 35 million followers on Facebook and 24 million on Instagram.” The commission continued: “It is not always useful to make a firm distinction between political leaders and other influential users, recognizing that other users with a large audience can also pose serious risks of harm.”
In fact, that point was a surprise in the oversight committee’s statement, as well as a shock. Facebook believes the U.S. president is clearly not a public official or even a commander-in-chief. He is an influencer. And it gets its power from the people, rather than Facebook and the business model of influencers and followers.
The power established on Facebook is not “legitimate” in sociological terms; it is not a power, like that of a school teacher or an elected official, that those who exercise it see as just and proper. Far away. Facebook’s “influence” is based on Facebook’s point system (fraudulent system), a highly stylized massive multiplayer role-playing game. But that’s not to mention that this committee, in McLuhan’s sense, has been blinded by the game’s inventions. The influence of Facebook is closer to the influence of World of Warcraft than to legitimate power. But instead of calling Facebook for creating a system that gives people an unregulated and dangerous “impact,” a bad named actor talks about the abuse of that system.
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