Facebook vs. the EU

Only one can come out alive.

For all the talk of the European Union taming Silicon Valley’s tech giants, Facebook is still running wild across the Continent ahead of this week’s European Parliament election.

European voters are under assault from disinformation unleashed on Facebook and Messenger, as well as other parts of the media giant’s empire, such as WhatsApp and Instagram.

In a report released this week, the online activist network Avaaz found that Facebook continues to allow far-right and anti-EU groups to spread false or purposefully misleading information on the platform. Independent fact-checkers reviewed thousands of public pages, groups and websites identified as spreading disinformation or content that is hateful or inciting violence, uncovering the systemic use of fake accounts.

In Germany, fake accounts amplified the message of far-right party Alternative for Germany, while in France they spread white supremacist content. Dozens of pages created in Italy attracted followers with generic issues before morphing into pages that share fake-news and messages of support for the far-right League party or the anti-establishment 5Stars.

After running its own independent investigation, Facebook took down an unprecedented number of the pages and groups reported by Avaaz. Combined, the pages it took down had 5.9 million followers — almost three times more followers than the record-performing pages of Europe’s main far-right and anti-EU parties. Italy’s League, Germany’s AfD, Spain’s Vox, Britain’s Brexit Party, France’s National Rally and Poland’s Law and Justice party have 2 million followers between them.

Facebook’s response is praiseworthy, but it comes too late. Millions of Europeans have already been exposed to malicious content, lies and hate. It also fails to address the main problem.

The prominence of disinformation in the pre-election debate — which in many places has drowned out the messages of mainstream parties — was made worse by new political advertising policies Facebook put in place after revelations of abuse ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Under the new rules, an ad buyer can only pay for political content in the country in which they are based. The result? EU political parties, institutions and civil society groups have largely found themselves barred from using Facebook and other apps for EU-wide communication campaigns.

It’s a major oversight on Facebook’s part. By confining political messaging to national borders, the social network has prevented mainstream parties and pro-EU organizations from mobilizing citizens and countering malicious disinformation efforts.

Facebook has invested a lot of energy in claims that it does not take sides and is inherently “neutral.” But the company’s self-imposed political advertising rules are far from politically neutral. It has systematically refused to investigate and act on content from “specific” actors, for example, despite the well-established fact that the most problematic content comes from an identifiable community.

By insisting it is “neutral,” Facebook is creating false equivalences between dangerous ultra-nationalist, right-wing propaganda and mainstream political messaging. This provides an indirect advantage to the political preferences of extreme actors.

Indeed, Facebook’s ubiquitous pay-as-you-go business model — which rewards views over veracity — favors extreme political messages over others. As a result, these malicious postings continue to be perceived as more widespread than what they actually are.

It should not come as a surprise, then, that ultra-right parties, whose extraordinary social media fluency and outreach unite them across the Continent, are among the few remaining defenders of Facebook’s interests.

Too often, the EU has shown itself to be ambivalent and even complicit to Facebook’s activity.

The EU failed to craft a dedicated regulatory framework that would govern access to the platform’s digital advertising ecosystem and has essentially outsourced the task to Facebook itself, via the Code of Practice on Disinformation.

After receiving several complaints, the European Commission concluded that EU institutions are heavily reliant on Facebook to reach Europe’s citizens. The institution did eventually get the company to grant the EU institutions an exemption from the political advertising rules until the day after the election, but pan-European parties and civil society organizations are still banned from cross-border online campaigning.

After the polls are closed and the contest has been decided, the next battle must be against Facebook’s insidious effects on European democracy. Expect the fight to be a heated one — as the populists who benefit from the company’s policies fiercely oppose any attempt to regulate them.

Europe’s future and Facebook’s have never been so interdependent. It’s a deadly grip, and at the moment, it looks like only one of the two will be able to escape it alive.

Alberto Alemanno is Jean Monnet professor of EU law at HEC Paris and founder of The Good Lobby, a campaigning group that was barred from running political ads across the EU on Facebook ahead of the European Parliament election.