The New World (Dis)order: PART I: American Adventurism, Non-Interventionism, Trumpism and Afghan Chaos

Illustration by Barbara Kelley via Hoover Institute

NOTE: This is the first in a five part series.

PART I: American Adventurism, Non-Interventionism, Trumpism and Afghan Chaos
PART II: The Misunderstanding of Vladimir Putin
PART III: China Awakens Under Xi Jinping
PART IV: Crony Capitalism and the West’s Achilles Heel
PART V (November): The New World (Dis)order 

PART I: American Adventurism, Non-Interventionism, Trumpism and Afghan Chaos

“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
-Mark Twain

Bush’s Adventurism

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a foregone conclusion in my mind. I said late in 2021 that Putin would invade no matter what the West did to try and deter him. 

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was, in addition to his long-held territorial ambitions, meant to be a test to gauge the West’s unity and resolve, and to provide China with a litmus test for their impending invasion of Taiwan.

To understand how we got here, with Europe facing its largest invasion since WWII, we need to go back to the US invasion of Iraq, and also to events before and after the invasion. 

While I am not interested here in arguing about the justification for America’s invasion of Iraq, what is irrefutable is that every one of Cheney and Bush’s assertions about Saddam Hussein and Iraq turned out to be patently false. 

Leading up to the invasion, America failed to produce a single credible piece of evidence to back up their claims about Saddam’s ties to Al-Qaeda or his biological weapons stockpile. I stated categorically months before the invasion that the only way the US would find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is if they planted them there.

Also, America was unable to convince a majority of allies to join their illegal invasion. In addition to America and British forces, the grand coalition consisted of Georgia, Australia and Poland, with the three countries sending 2,300, 2,000 and 194 troops, respectively.

Post-invasion, independent and US intelligence agency reviews of millions of documents seized in Iraq conclusively stated that “…there was nothing to substantiate a "partnership" between Hussein and Al-Qaeda.” The report added that there was no ‘smoking gun,’ and everyone knows how many weapons of mass destruction were found.

While the Bush administration sought and got approval from U.S. Congress in 2002 to use military force against “those responsible for the September 11 attacks”, there was and remains no basis in international law to justify America’s invasion of Iraq. 

The Bush administration tried to argue that the UN security council resolution which granted use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990 applied. However, the UN declared that the Iraq invasion was in violation of its Charter. Secretary General Kofi Anan stated unequivocally in 2004, "From our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, it [the war] was illegal.”

Not only did America flagrantly violate international law by invading a sovereign nation without provocation, but the Bush administration broke every legal and democratic norm Americans have claimed to cherish and hold dear since WWII.

Ironically, former President Bush accidentally admitted it last year, when he repudiated Putin for invading Ukraine in a speech in May. He said, “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq—I mean of Ukraine.”

Under Bush, America embraced torture, set-up extra-judicial rendition sites in Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Senegal, Tajikistan and other countries. They constructed a prison camp in Guantanamo Bay because it would be outside U.S. legal jurisdiction. There they illegally detained and tortured enemy combatants indefinitely and without charge, denying them Geneva Convention rights and refusing these men access to legal counsel.

Bush and Cheney’s actions damaged America’s moral standing and severely limited the US’s future ability to call out other nations for their transgressions. The unilateral way in which America invaded and occupied Iraq has not been lost on the leaders of China, Russia, Iran and other authoritarian regimes. These regimes watched the U.S. violate international law, trample on enshrined global conventions and use financial muscle, military might and UN Security Council veto power to bribe, blackmail and bully smaller nations into acquiescence or abstention. 

Not a single U.S. leader or architect of the Iraq invasion was criminally charged or faced consequences for war crimes. To this day, the U.S. remains a non-signatory to the International Court of Justice (ICC), along with China, Russia, Syria, Qatar and Libya.

In 2008, while America was embroiled in two failing and unpopular wars and in the midst of a financial crisis, Russia invaded Georgia. It was the first time since their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan that they launched a military attack on a neighboring country. While Russian-Georgian tensions had been simmering since the breakup of the USSR, it was Georgia’s tilt toward the West that drove Putin’s decision to invade. 

Georgia joined the US-led coalition in Iraq, sending the third largest contingent of troops, which had earned Putin’s ire. Then in 2004 they elected a pro-West leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, who actively sought membership to NATO and wanted to move his country away from Russia’s sphere of influence. 

At the 2008 NATO Summit President Bush surprised everyone by lobbying to extend membership to Ukraine and Georgia. This crossed a red line for Putin, who was clear that he was not willing to lose control of former Soviet Union breakaway republics, because they provided a security buffer between Russia and the West. Putin’s invasion of Georgia began a few months after the summit.

France brokered the ceasefire agreement which stipulated the removal of Russian troops from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway regions at the center of the dispute. The agreement was hastily put together and tilted in favor of Russia, as a result of public divisions within the EU. Italy’s Foreign Minister at the time said “We cannot create an anti-Russia coalition in Europe…on this point we are close to Putin's position.”

Vice-President Cheney condemned Russia’s actions and declared that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered.” Yet, that is precisely what happened with a muted response from the US and Europe. There was no punishment when Russia violated the terms of ceasefire by declaring Abkhazia and South Ossetia independent countries, and kept their occupying forces on Georgian soil; who remain to this day.

Russia’s aggression paid-off, without any costs to Putin. The Georgian President warned the US not to placate Putin, and prophetically said at the time that the Georgian invasion was the beginning of Putin’s ambitions, and not the limit of it.

Obama’s Non-Interventionism

The Obama years were a welcome change, and his administration attempted to repair the damage done by the previous one. On day one he declared he would shutter Guantanamo Bay, and later summed up his foreign policy doctrine as “Don’t do stupid shit”. 

Mr. Obama’s approach made sense, compared to his predecessor’s shoot from the hip style but it would come to be viewed as weakness, based on Mr. Obama’s repeated and dogmatic refusal to use force, in a world with rising authoritarianism.

In 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor in Tunisia set himself alight to protest corruption and police brutality. This act set in motion a series of violent mass protests across the Middle East and North Africa, which came to be known as The Arab Spring. 

However, unlike in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen where ruling dictators were toppled, the uprising in Syria was met with a brutal crackdown. Bashar Al-Assad used his military to mercilessly kill peaceful protestors and stamp out the popular rebellion. 

At the time President Obama warned Assad saying that "This outrageous use of violence to quell protests must come to an end now.” While the condemnation was strong, Mr. Obama resisted any US intervention in Syria. This despite his senior advisors, defense and national security teams urging him to take limited military action. 

Their recommendation was not to put US boots on the ground, but to train and equip the Syrian resistance, to set up safe zones and to launch targeted air strikes to degrade Assad’s air force. Their strategy was designed to force Assad to the negotiating table, rather than defeat him on the battlefield. However, Obama steadfastly refused and agreed only to provide humanitarian aid and light non-lethal equipment to the rebels.

Sensing Obama’s hesitation and unable to quell widespread and growing unrest across the country, in early 2012, Assad used chemical weapons and gassed his citizens. Meanwhile, the vacuum on the battlefield, created by Obama's refusal to arm the rebels, got filled by a loose and dangerous network of jihadis fighting for Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and other affiliated terrorist groups. 

In late 2102, President Obama stated at a White House press briefing, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.  That would change my calculus.  That would change my equation.“

The world, including his Secretaries of Defense and State saw the red-line as an ultimatum for the use of force. Vice-president Biden warned The President not to make a public declaration because he feared it would need to be acted on. He was right. Seeing America back-down after drawing a public red-line emboldened every dictator and authoritarian leader from China to Venezuela.

Ironically, it was Mr. Obama who said during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that“inaction tears at our conscience, and can lead to more costly interventions later…”. The U.S. President’s repeated refusal to act would have devastating consequences not just for the Syrian people but the world at large.

Even before the votes were cast in the 2016 US presidential election, a few things began to embolden Mr. Putin. First, the Obama administration’s strategic and costly error in downplaying the Russian state-sponsored hacking, which they uncovered in the summer of that year after DNC servers were found to be compromised. 

Obama chose not to respond forcefully because he wanted to be seen as impartial and because everyone in his administration believed Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, so they decided that starting“a cyber war with Russia wasn’t worth it.”

Mr. Putin was also emboldened by candidate Trump’s open embrace of Russia. One that resulted in a bizzare public plea, at a press conference in Florida, where he said "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” 

Third was the result of Putin’s high-risk disinformation gamble, which exceeded even his wildest expectations. Putin had succeeded in sowing mistrust amongst the US electorate and deepening existing divisions among Americans across the political spectrum. 

Through the Mueller investigation we learned that the Kremlin’s elaborate campaign had a $1.2 million monthly budget that was used for identity theft, which enabled Russian spies to enter the US under false pretenses. The Russian agents set up meetings with legitimate organisations for fact-finding and on-the-ground research in swing states. Information that was used to set up fake grass roots organisations, social media accounts, run anti-Clinton ads and even stage local events. The Russian’s even paid Americans to appear at Trump rallies dressed as Mrs. Clinton in a prison uniform.

Trumpism

Once Trump became president it was clear that he lacked cohesive vision and coherent strategy to guide his foreign policy. His decisions were instead driven by his whims. One minute he would contradict military commanders about troop withdrawals by tweet, and next make decisions that lined up with his personal business interests. Trump continued to publicly express his admiration for dictators and bragged about his great chemistry with them while showing disdain for NATO.

Mr. Trump’s first official trip abroad was to Saudi Arabia, a place where his love of dictatorship and personal business coincided. Upon arrival Trump’s first words were“We are not here to lecture. We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.” Next came his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, followed in early 2018 with the termination of JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. 

In 2017, after Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt abruptly cut diplomatic ties with Qatar, accusing them of supporting terrorism. Trump welcomed the move, even as his Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense were publicly reenforcing America’s relationship with Qatar, a country that hosts a key US Air Base and is the regional headquarters of U.S. Central Command. 

At the G-20 Summit in Hamburg Trump had a second meeting with Putin which was not disclosed by the White House. This meeting broke protocol as Trump met with Putin for over an hour without any other US officials present and without his translator. It was just Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin and his translator. This was followed by a two-hour summit in Helsinki between the two leaders, again with no US officials except a translator.

Trumpism was defined by chaotic, contradictory and haphazard foreign policy, most often out of sync with his own administration. Trump broke with decades of US policy by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In agreeing to meet with Kim Jong Un, twice, he became the first sitting US President in history to do so and set foot in North Korea. 

Mr. Trump defended Saudi Arabia after they murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, saying on NBC’s Meet the Press, "Iran's killed many, many people a day. Other countries in the Middle East; this is a hostile place. This is a vicious, hostile place. If you're going to look at Saudi Arabia, look at Iran, look at other countries,"

It is true that Trump administration agreed to send lethal aid to Ukraine, which Mr. Obama’s had refused, but Mr. Trump was also the one who held a gun to President Zelensky’s head. Mr. Trump put on hold on US military aid unless Ukraine agreed to investigate Joe Biden, which led to his first impeachment trial.

Throughout his presidency Mr. Trump made false claims about Ukraine, privately and publicly. A respected diplomat told lawmakers during the impeachment inquiry, that Trump had said to him “Ukraine was a corrupt country, full of 'terrible people.'"  The US President was the same man who praised Putin in 2014 when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and said at the time that “the rest of Ukraine will fall … fairly quickly…” 

In 2014, Trump defended Russia despite evidence showing that a Russian missile shot down a Malaysian Airlines plane, killing all 208 passengers on board. It would not be an understatement to say that Mr. Putin believed he had an ally in the White House, and on the heels of his 2016 election disinformation campaign success, it left him feeling more emboldened for his future invasion of Ukraine.

Trump’s final act as president was to withdraw from the Open Skies treaty, the third arms control agreement he withdrew the US from. His administration claimed they were doing so because the Russians had been violating the agreement, but the US too had placed their own restrictions on it. Mr. Trump went ahead despite NATO countries expressing “regret” over the US intention to withdraw, stating that despite its problems the treaty remained “functioning and useful”.

Biden’s Afghan Chaos

China, Iran and Russia made hay of the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Without question they saw both failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as evidence of declining US military power and influence. 

Mr. Putin stated with glee on the anniversary of Washington’s twenty-year intervention in Afghanistan, “The result is zero, if not to say that it is negative”. A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman said of the chaotic scenes of people clinging and falling from aircraft wheels, “American myth down. More and more people are awakening.” 

The Afghan withdrawal made the Biden administration look incompetent and weak. Especially after the US president had publicly stated that there would be an orderly withdrawal and assured the world that US intelligence assessments made him confident that a Taliban takeover of the country was "highly unlikely” and would take at least six months to a one year - not the 10 days it actually took.

Within the backdrop of the disastrous Afghan exit, the Biden administration had also been working to forge closer ties with Ukraine. In July, 2021, under Mr. Trump, the US and Ukraine conducted joint naval exercises with 32 other countries from six continents participating. Operation Sea Breeze almost escalated into conflict after a British naval destroyer entered Russian territorial waters, and the Russians fired at it.

In January 2021, right after President Biden assumed office, Mr. Zelensky appealed to US President to let Ukraine join NATO. After receiving assurances of US support from Mr. Biden, President Zelensky signed a decree freezing the assets of Viktor Medvedchuk, a political heavyweight with close ties to the Kremlin and placed him under house arrest. 

Mr. Medvedchuk’s was Putin’s choice for replacing Mr. Zelensky and heading up a puppet government in Ukraine. Putin is godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter. Soon after his arrest Russia began amassing troops on the Ukraine border, claiming they were conducting training exercises.

In November that year, as Russian troops continued to amass on Ukraine’s borders, Mr. Biden signed the “US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership” a document stating a commitmentto help Ukraine achieve “full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions.” 

This was a red line for Putin, going back to the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, when according to his version of history, the West promised that they would never expand NATO into the former USSR’s backyard. However, diplomats engaged in those negotiations, scholars and even former President Gorbachov have acknowledged that no such promise was made.

By December 2021, around 100,000 Russian troops, tanks and heavy artillery had been deployed around Ukraine’s borders. Russia issued security demands which included NATO pulling back troops and weapons from eastern Europe and barring Ukraine from ever joining the alliance. 

While the West rebuffed their demands, they once again misjudged Mr. Putin. Ignoring history, they believed that the US President’s public and private warnings that an invasion would result in disaster for the Russian economy and for Mr. Putin personally would be deterrent enough to get the Russian President to act rationally.

Read next installment in series:

PART II: The Misunderstanding of Vladimir Putin

The Case Against Facebook (now Meta)

(Image: OMG News Today)

The primary issue with Facebook is not their platforms or algorithms - those can be fixed. It is their leadership.

The company was borne out of deception after Mr. Zuckerberg reneged on a contractual agreement he made with his Harvard classmates. They had approached him with an idea for a social networking platform and sought his help to build it. In 2009, Mr. Zuckerberg paid his ex-classmates around $65 million to settle the lawsuit.

I am not suggesting Mr. Zuckerberg set out to build a hate-filled platform, but I am saying that his lack of ethics and his megalomania combined with a desire to blindly maximize profits make Meta’s platforms uniquely dangerous.

The reality is even worse.

It is not just that Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg have chosen to ignore real-world harms. In a bid to make their service more addictive to users, they have actively designed and conducted experiments to find new ways to manipulate emotions.

Independent studies have shown that a large majority of health news shared on Facebook is fake or misleading, yet for a long-time the platform embraced conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and climate deniers because fake news drives more engagement than boring facts, which in turn translates to more advertising revenue for the company.

In my mind, the pivotal point for Facebook came in 2012 when General Motors, one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., decided to stop advertising on Facebook, saying that “paid ads on the site were having little impact on consumers' car purchases.”

GM’s announcement came one week before Facebook’s IPO and raised some uncomfortable questions, not only about the company’s ability to maintain its 88% revenue growth from the prior year, but also its astronomical valuation. One based entirely on an ad-driven revenue model.

At the time, Anant Sundaram, with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, noted that the average price-to-earnings ratio for the majority of US companies over the last one hundred years had been around 15, but Facebook’s PE ratio was 100.

He added that “it would take Facebook 100 years to generate enough profits to pay for itself” and it seemed like investors were betting the company's profits would “double, and then double again, and then double again — within the next few years“. He summed up the challenge saying that to succeed Facebook would “need to attract 10 percent of all advertising dollars spent on the planet…”

When you combine this unrealistic growth expectation with an unscrupulous founder, the result is what Francis Haugen described as a company that has, “over and over again, shown it chooses profit over safety”.

We know that the data analytics firm which briefly worked with Trump’s election team in 2016, Cambridge Analytica, legally bought and harvested the personal data of 50 million Facebook users (and their friends). They then used this data to try to influence and manipulate voting behaviour.

While this was the first time most people became aware of real-world dangers and the cost of giving away personal information for “free”, the red flags around Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg’s business decisions had been apparent for many years prior.

In 2013 a tech consultant revealed that Facebook collected content that people typed on the site but erased and never actually posted. The company’s argument justifying this intrusive data collection was that Facebook could better understand their users if they knew their “self-censored” thoughts.

In 2014 the NYTimes reported that Facebook was manipulating people’s newsfeeds, showing overwhelmingly negative or positive posts. In effect, they were using people as lab rats in a “psychological study to examine how emotions can be spread on social media”. At the time the lead researcher at Facebook, Adam Kramer, posted a public apology which has since disappeared.

In conducting this experiment Facebook never felt the need to inform or seek consent from users before making them part of the experiment, a precondition for any ethical research. After they were outed, Facebook argued that users had given “blanket consent to the company’s research as a condition of using the service”.

When Mr. Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp in 2014 he promised to protect user privacy. In fact, WhatsApp’s co-founder penned a blog post assuring users that “Respect for privacy is coded into our DNA…” and that they would continue to “know as little about you as possible…”. Less than two years later Mr. Zuckerberg went back on his word, mandating that WhatsApp share personal information with Facebook.

In 2015, Mr. Zuckerberg launched a seemingly altruistic initiative to provide free internet access to the poorest people in the world, called internet.org. This too turned out to be smoke and mirrors. Arguably, Mr. Zuckerberg’s real goal was to create a global monopoly for Facebook by building a walled-off internet. 

The condition for the “free internet” was that Facebook would decide the basket of websites people could access. No other social networks were included and Google Search was also excluded. Mr. Zuckerberg likely wagered that if people’s primary experience on the internet was on Facebook, they would come to think of Facebook as the internet. You can read my piece on "How Facebook Can Fix Internet.org".

Based on internal documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, we now know that many of these poor people ended up being charged millions of dollars a month for their “free” internet via carrier data charges due to “software problems” at Facebook.

In 2016, the Wall Street Journal discovered that Facebook was attempting to spread its tentacles into the personal lives of non-Facebook users by tracking them across the internet. Under the guise of showing people more targeted ads, their plan was “to collect information about all Internet users through 'like' buttons and pieces of code embedded on websites.”

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2018 that Facebook had been over inflating the average viewing time for video ads on its platform, by as much as 900 percent for over a year. An unreacted filing from a 2018 lawsuit in California claims that Sheryl Sandberg was informed of the issue in 2017, including a proposed fix, but the company refused to make the changes saying it would have a “significant” impact on revenue.

The Financial Times reported the statements today based on a newly unredacted filing from a 2018 lawsuit in California. The lawsuit claims that Facebook knowingly overestimated its “potential reach” metric for advertisers, largely by failing to correct for fake and duplicate accounts. The filing states that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged problems with the metric in 2017, and product manager Yaron Fidler proposed a fix that would correct the numbers. But the company allegedly refused to make the changes, arguing that it would produce a “significant” impact on revenue.

In 2018, a U.N. fact-finding mission pointed to the role of social media networks, and Facebook in particular, in fueling hate speech against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. The report said that the “incitement to violence” was “rampant” and “unchecked.” The chair of the committee added that in Myanmar “social media is Facebook”, and “for most users [in Myanmar], Facebook is the internet.”

Independent research going back to 2004 has shown that social media detracts from healthy face-to-face relationships and reduces time spent on meaningful activities while increasing sedentary behavior. 

This can lead to internet addiction, which in turn erodes self-esteem through negative comparisons people make on sites like Instagram. But skeptics claimed it was not clear whether “people with lower self-esteem are more likely to use social media, rather than social media causing lower self-esteem…”

In 2017, two academic researchers conducted a rigorous longitudinal study and published the results in the American Journal of Epidemiology, definitively answering this question. 

Their findings concluded that using Facebook was “consistently detrimental to mental health” and that both “liking others’ content and clicking links significantly predicted a subsequent reduction in self-reported physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction.”

In 2018, another comprehensive study by University of Pennsylvania confirmed that there was a direct link between social-media usage and depression and loneliness, and connected Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram use to decreased well-being.

You might ask that if all social media is harmful, why single out Meta (formerly Facebook)? It’s a valid question. I offer a few reasons why we need to start with Meta.

First, no other social platform comes close to matching Meta’s global reach and scale.

As of Q3, 2021, Facebook had more than 2.89 billion monthly active users and both Instagram and WhatsApp crossed 2 billion each. TikTok is the only other social platform with more than one billion users. Compare this with less than 400 million people on Twitter, 478 million on Pinterest, and 514 million on Snapchat. 

Meta owns three of the four largest social networks on earth, which means Mr. Zuckerberg alone has the power to control and manipulate vital news, daily information and communication flow for more than half the planet’s population.

Second, consider that in many countries, Facebook’s platforms are not just dominant but they are the primary mode of communication for people. In India, around 340 million people use Facebook, and 400 million use WhatsApp's messaging service to communicate daily.

The world’s largest democracy has become a case-study in the real-world dangers of one company having unchecked power to impact people’s daily lives with uncontrolled content that is fueled by opaque algorithms.

In 2019, documents leaked to the Associated Press revealed that a Facebook employee created a dummy account to test how its algorithms affect new Indian users on their platform. The results shocked the company’s own staff.

In less than three weeks the test account’s newsfeed turned into a cesspool of fake news, vitriol and incendiary images and videos. Bloomberg reports that there were “graphic photos of beheadings, doctored images of India air strikes against Pakistan and jingoistic scenes of violence”. In documents released by Francis Haugen, a staffer wrote in a 46-page internal report “I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life."

The reason this test was significant is because it was designed to focus exclusively on Facebook’s algorithms recommending content for the test user and not friends, family or others on the platform. 

Additional documents reviewed by the Associated Press show that Facebook had been aware of this problem for years, and even flagged India as one of its most “at risk countries” in the world, but struggled to do anything to limit the spread of vitriol in their largest and fastest growing market.

The other problem highlighted by Facebook’s test was that because the majority of posts were in Hindi, their content moderation algorithms were not able to detect it. Compounding this challenge is the fact that Indians also use different blends of Hindi, including something called Hinglish. A mix of Hindi and English words that no algorithm can be trained to decipher because often it is made up phonetically as people type.

Consider that in India alone there are 22 official languages and dozens more dialects, and globally there are over 7,000 official languages spoken, not including dialects. As of 2019, Facebook supported 111 languages, but translations for community guidelines and content moderation only existed in 41 languages. 

In essence, Meta’s public pledges to improve content moderation algorithms and hire thousands more human moderators will not solve this problem. According to internal documents reviewed by CNN, Facebook's own researchers stated that the company is not in a position to effectively address hate speech and misinformation content in languages other than English.

Another internal study reviewed by the Washington Post found that between 2017 and 2019 Facebook’s ranking algorithm gave “five times more weight to posts that users responded to with an "angry" reaction than those that evoked other reactions, such as “like”. The newspaper concluded that such posts, while more engaging, were far more likely to include “misinformation, toxicity and low quality news”.

The bottom line is that Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg have shown time and again that they have no real intention of reducing the vitriol and misinformation on their platform. The closest thing we have to a smoking gun pointing to the fact that they prioritise engagement over well-being is a 2011 internal email from Ms. Sandberg, when Facebook was preparing to take on Google’s new social network, Google+.

The emails are is included as part of evidence in an antitrust case filed by 46 US state attorneys general, the District of Columbia and Guam. In the email exchange, Ms. Sandberg writes “For the first time, we have real competition and consumers have real choice…” 

At the time the company was planning to remove users’ ability to untag themselves in photos. But based on the competitive situation it was decided internally to hold off on making changes “…until the direct competitive comparisons begin to die down.” The suit argues that it is proof that Facebook preserves user privacy when it faces external threats, but degrades it when those dissipate.

In late 2021, after seeing alarming signs of deteriorating mental health among youth, the U.S. Surgeon General conducted a national study. His report cited that one of the factors contributing to the mental health crisis is the fact that “social media companies were maximizing time spent, not time well spent.”  

The report was prompted by an alarming rise in teen emergency room visits for suicide attempts. Among adolescent girls suicide attempts surged 51% in early 2021, compared with the same period in 2019.

The Surgeon Generals’ findings are supported by another 2021 study that found that non-educational screen time for teenagers doubled during the pandemic, increasing from an average of 3.8 hours, to 7.7 hours a day. The researchers directly associated increased screen time with adverse health outcomes, which included weight gain and increased stress.

We also now have hard evidence, based on a Washington Post and ProPublica investigation, that groups on Facebook played a key role in spreading misinformation and false narratives between Election Day and the January 6th siege on the US Capitol.  The investigation found at least 650,000 posts questioning the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s victory, with many posts “calling for executions and other political violence”.

An exasperated Facebook employee wrote on Jan 6th, on an internal forum, “All due respect, but haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time, and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”

The fact is that any other company faced with so much internal and external evidence of their harm to society, and particularly young children, might seriously take stock and reconsider their business model. However, Meta, under Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg have demonstrated that they have no real intention of doing so.

Sure, they continue to offer cosmetic changes but these do nothing to solve the underlying problems. Take for example, Facebook’s creation of an independent oversight board. With 20 members this committee can only review a tiny subset of issues, and that too after the damage has been done. Not surprisingly, reporters have found that Meta has been less than honest with their own oversight board.

Even now, Meta’s leadership refuses to take any responsibility. Andrew Bosworth, soon to be their new CTO, recently told Axios that “society” was responsible for misinformation. He said, “Individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing. They are the ones who choose to share or not share a thing.”

This is not surprising since Mr. Zuckerberg told employees not to apologise. On the company’s earnings call, after Ms. Haugen’s revelations, he said that this was a “coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company”. 

If Mr. Zuckerberg has nothing to hide, one wonders why, in the weeks following Ms. Haugen’s disclosures, Meta imposed new rules to limit internal access to “research discussions on topics, including mental health and radicalization” and researchers were told “to submit work on sensitive topics for review by company lawyers.”

Over the years, Mr. Zuckerberg has publicly called on lawmakers to regulate social media platforms. In 2019, he penned an op-ed in the Washington Post, saying “I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators” and added “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree.” He asks Congress to regulate important online issues like free speech, harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

From an honest broker this might seem like a reasonable request, but this is Mr. Zuckerberg we are talking about.

Aside from the deep partisan divisions that forestall any meaningful legislation being enacted by Congress, Mr. Zuckerberg is aware that half the US Senate is 65 years or older. The current 117th Congress is the oldest in two decades. The average age of senators is 63.9 and the average age of house members is 58.3. We have twenty-one senators who are between the ages of 70 and 80.

In addition, there exists a skill gap within Congress. Only 11 members (10 in the House and 1 in the Senate) of the current 535 voting members and 6 non-voting delegates have an engineering degree or technical background.

Mr. Zuckerberg is still not taking any chances and has been quietly spending millions to build a powerful D.C. lobbying arm. Over the last decade Big Tech firms have become the dominant lobbying group in Washington, overtaking Big Oil and Big Tobacco. 

Meta which was not among the top eight spenders in 2017 has become the largest individual lobbyist, along with Amazon. Between 2018-2020, Facebook increased its lobbying spend by an a whopping 56%.

In 2020, after lawmakers began to increase scrutiny of tech companies, Meta spent more on lobbying than all the other Big Tech firms. More recently in the quarter ending September 2021, after the whistleblower Ms. Haugen came forward, they nearly outspent the entire D.C. industry on lobbying.

Their goal, it would seem, is to overwhelm the small handful of lawmakers who understand the complexities of social media and technology, by ensuring that they are outgunned and outvoted. To achieve this, Meta’s army of lobbyists routinely wine, dine, woo and whisper in the ears of the majority lawmakers.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the day after Ms. Haugen went public, Meta’s lobbying arm went to work. 

First they called lawmakers and advocacy groups on the right, telling them that Ms. Haugen was trying to help Democrats. Next they reached out to Democratic lawmakers to say that Republicans were focussed on “the company’s decision to ban expressions of support for Kyle Rittenhouse”, the teenager who killed two people during unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Both Republicans and Democrats familiar with the company’s outreach told the WSJ that Meta's goal was clearly to sow discord along partisan lines and muddy the waters so the two parties would not reach consensus on tough new rules governing social media companies, and Meta in particular.

We know that social media has adverse effects because the algorithms are designed with monetisation in mind. The more time you spend on these platforms, the more opportunities to advertise. As a result, harassment, manipulation and misinformation are rife in an environment where gaining followers and increasing likes is dependent on getting noticed. 

With the volume of noise and clutter on these platforms today, the more controversial, vitriolic and outrageous a post, the more likely it is to get noticed and promoted by the algorithms. Anyone remember the viral video of granny crossing the street safely?

Other CEO’s have acknowledged these dangers and are making efforts to mitigate adverse impacts. Even TikTok, a Chinese company, says they are working on changing their algorithms. Pinterest recently took the extreme step of blocking all vaccine related searches, until they can find a long-term solution.

I have nothing against Mr. Zuckerberg personally, and believe that when we get this right, social media can be a net positive force in the world. However, I don’t believe this can or will happen under Mr. Zuckerberg’s stewardship. There must be a reason why, of all the Big Tech companies, Meta has by far the longest list of “insiders-turned-critics.“

Peter Drucker, the marketing guru, famously said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” and this is fundamentally the issue at Meta. 

It took Microsoft over a decade, two CEO changes and a Federal antitrust investigation before they were able to change their toxic ‘rank and yank’ culture. Similarly, it was not until Mr. Kalanick was forced out of Uber by powerful venture investors that the company was able to expunge its cut throat, chauvinistic and frat boy culture.

Mr. Zuckerberg holds an absolute majority of Meta’s voting shares and with the company’s dual-class voting share structure, he retains majority control in any shareholder vote. What that means is, as John Webster noted in the Duchess of Malfi, “Usually goodness flows, but if it is poisoned near the head, death spreads throughout the entire fountain.”

I am wholeheartedly a capitalist and make no bones about the fact that it is the only system, even with its many flaws, that has proven successful in lifting millions out of poverty. However, a few private companies should never have this much power to disseminate the world’s news and information thorough black boxes.

Meta has the power to manipulate the minds of people on a hitherto unimaginable scale. Between Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, one company and one man control the flow of critical information for more than half the earth’s population.

With great power comes great responsibility, and as long as a reckless, irresponsible and dishonest leader like Mr. Zuckerberg is at the helm, that power will continue to be used irresponsibly.

How Narendra Modi Conquered Coronavirus

(Image: Twitter/ANI)

"No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it." -Andrew Carnegie

Much like George W. Bush once prematurely declared victory in Iraq, our Prime Minister started taking victory laps in mid-February this year when he proclaimed that “…the whole world was worried about India's situation. But today India's fight against corona (coronavirus) is inspiring the entire world…”

No matter that the World Health Organization, our medical fraternity, immunologists and scientists the world over warned that complacency could have devastating consequences for India. And that no country would be safe until at least 85% of the population is vaccinated.

On 7th March 2021, the Indian Health Minister boldly declared at a Delhi Medical Association gathering that “We are in the end game of the COVID-19 pandemic in India.” Adding that India was now the ‘world’s pharmacy’, boasting that we had shipped “5.5 crore vaccines to 62 different countries.”

What he failed to mention was that claiming the moniker of world’s pharmacy meant Indians would get fewer vaccines. India’s current vaccination rate is 9.4%, which lags Brazil (12.8%) and Turkey (15.6%). At this pace, it will take another 600 days to vaccinate enough Indians to achieve herd immunity. Shortages have now become so acute that 94 vaccination sites were recently closed for three days in Bombay, even as India was reporting nearly 400,000 Covid cases daily. 

It would seem that the BJP government decided having Mr. Modi strut on the world stage claiming to be the world’s pharmacy was more important than prioritising vaccinating our own citizens, as every other nation did.

Then, as if to prove that he is not just a man of words, Mr. Modi started holding massive election rallies across West Bengal. These rallies had thousands of people in attendance without masks or social distancing because naturally Mr. Modi’s aura was enough to strike fear into the heart of coronavirus.

Just over a week ago Mr. Modi tweeted from a rally saying “Have never ever seen such huge crowds at a rally” and added “wherever I look, I see people, only people”. It would seem that his aura has faded because in the past week West Bengal reported the highest spike in a single day, and instituted lockdowns due to an alarming rise in cases.

The next coronavirus showdown occurred in late March. By now the second wave was well under way and the double mutant variant had been identified, but Mr. Modi refused to cower. Instead, he appeared in full-page ads in national newspapers welcoming devotees to Kumbh Mela, an annual pilgrimage for Hindus.

A courageous leader might have cancelled a gathering of hundreds of thousands of people traveling from all over the country to wash their sins in the Ganges, but not our Prime Minister, destroyer of corona. He made sure the masses got their opium, even if it meant risking their lives.

The ads not only encouraged the young, old and infirm to attend but claimed that the festival was “clean” and “safe”. On being asked, the Chief Minister of the state told the media that the festival would not be cancelled because “Maa Ganga’s blessings are there in the flow. So, there should be no corona…” Incidentally, this man once compared Mr. Modi to Lord Ram. No word yet on whether India plans to export water from the Ganga, along with vaccines.

In Assam the Health Minister, also BJP, declared in April, “There is no Covid in Assam... there is no need to wear a face mask..." When his comments were mocked by the opposition and the media, he took to twitter inviting them to visit Assam, boasting that his state had eliminated Covid, unlike states run by opposition parties.

They must have accepted his invite, because as of this week Assam is witnessing an alarming rise in positive cases across the state. The situation is so bad that they have not only had to impose a nightly curfew but are having to source oxygen from Bhutan.

In Gujarat, Mr. Modi’s home state, an MLA was asked if the spike in cases there might be a result of local elections held in late February. He responded saying that “Workers of the BJP have done work, have done labour work and none of them has been infected.” We hear this former Science and Technology minister, along with the Chief Minister, state BJP chief and several other MLAs all tested positive for Covid-19. Clearly, they must have been shirking their work.

Yet another BJP luminary, a minister from Madhya Pradesh, recently explained to the media why Modi’s administration should be absolved of all responsibility for this crisis. He said that “Nobody can stop these deaths….People get old and they have to die.” Let’s hope he shares this wisdom with the WHO.

Over the last year, instead of building hospital capacity, oxygen plants and stockpiling life-saving medicines, as WHO and various health experts recommended, it seems Mr. Modi had his finest yoga mind work on developing a drug to fight Covid-19.

Coronil, the Ayurvedic wonder drug was launched with great fanfare in February, with the Indian Health and Union ministers proudly sharing the stage and endorsing it. Baba Ramdev stated that his “research-based medicine” showed 100% recovery for Covid positive patients, in an astounding 3-7 days. Turns out his research was conducted on only 100 people, unlike dumb Western studies that waste time recruiting thousands of participants for research trials. Indian ingenuity at its finest!

The yoga baba claimed that this marvel of science was approved by the WHO. We are still trying to confirm who exactly approved it because the World Health Organisation was quick to issue a tweet saying they have “not reviewed or certified the effectiveness of any traditional medicine for the treatment of #COVID19.”

Even before this wonder drug was created, BJP leaders were not shy to offer Indians various remedies to boost immunity and protect against coronavirus. In July last year, the West Bengal BJP chief told people to drink cow urine. “This is India, the land of Lord Krishna, and here we worship cows. We will have cow urine to stay healthy.” We are reliably informed that those who took his advice are now, indeed, closer to God.

While Mr. Modi has no fear of coronavirus, he does tremble at the sight of a free press and lacks the courage to hold himself accountable to the people who elected him. By the time he finally appeared on national TV India’s healthcare systems had collapsed, crematoriums were overwhelmed and we had widespread shortages of oxygen, plasma, Remdesivir and other life-saving medicines, all across the country.

Mr. Modi is convinced that his long white beard and flowing designer garbs are enough to calm the nation and stop people from complaining about losing loved ones, because he was still unable to offer a plan of action to steer the country out of the worst crisis we have faced since our Independence.

He did acknowledge that the challenge before us is big and that “we have to overcome it with our resolve, courage and preparation” but was not able to explain why, more than a year into the pandemic, his administration was so woefully unprepared.

As infections and deaths continue to break new records each day, states have mandated strict lock downs and banned all non-essential activities. However, Mr. Modi has made an exception for his Rs 20,000 crore pet project to redevelop a 3.2 km stretch of Delhi built by the British. The Central Vista project will needlessly tear down and rebuild several iconic landmarks and construct a new Parliament building.

Since the Central Vista is a vanity project, tied to his legacy, bids were fast-tracked and the entire process was conducted far from the prying eyes of the media, and awarded without a public consultation. Coincidentally, the winning bid went to a firm from Gujarat known to have close ties to Mr. Modi.

Yet, for some reason sanctioning oxygen plants took his government eight full months into the pandemic, just to start inviting bids. Only 11 of 162 plants have been built, and only 5 are operational. The budget for oxygen plants was a meagre 201 crore, while 917 crore was allocated to rebuild a Parliament building that everybody agrees does not need to be rebuilt.

As if mocking the plight of Indians desperately gasping for air, Mr. Modi’s Union Minister recently told the media that the blame lay with state governments who were not “controlling demand” for oxygen. It seems that in a country of 1.4 billion people our government believes that it is resources and not lives that are most precious and must be preserved.

One could forgive Mr. Modi if this crisis had transpired at the beginning of the pandemic when every leader was caught flat footed. Also, we know that unlike Western countries, it is harder in India to institute endless lockdowns, as the overwhelming majority of Indians are unable to zoom to work. For millions of Indians a lockdown can mean starving to death.

However, what cannot be excused, one year into this pandemic, is the fact that the Modi government did nothing to build capacity in the healthcare system, stockpile oxygen and other lifesaving treatments, knowing that it was just a matter of time before the virus would mutate and become more deadly.

Mr. Modi surrounded himself with loyalists and instead of experts. He never assembled a Covid Task Force to monitor the situation or to develop plans to deal with outbreaks and surges, and transfer medical supplies and other things to areas most in need. Instead, he stood on the stage at Davos this year and boasted, “We worked on strengthening the Covid specific health infrastructure, trained our human resources to tackle the pandemic and used technology massively for testing and tracking of the cases.”

Mr. Modi has gone out of his way to behave like the pandemic is over and his administration has instead encouraged people to stop taking even basic precautions, refused to limit public gatherings, lifted restrictions on massive Indian weddings, religious festivals and election rallies and they have severely botched India’s vaccination rollout plan, choosing instead to ship desperately needed vaccines to far flung corners of the globe.

In less than two terms Mr. Modi has succeeded in taking a proud seventy-four-year-old nation from shining example of democracy and powerhouse of economic growth, to laughing stock of the world. The incompetence, complacency and ineptitude Mr. Modi and his administration have demonstrated during this pandemic rival that of banana republics and failed states like Venezuela.

We know Mr. Modi, cares deeply about his public image and legacy. He now assuredly holds a special place in the heart of every Indian who has lost a grandparent, parent, spouse, sibling, aunt, uncle or child due to his government's apathy and ineptitude.

Mahatma Gandhi, the father of our nation, was responsible for giving birth to India. 

Narendra Modi will forever be remembered as the man who brought death to India.


AUTHOR'S NOTE: 
My heart goes out to everyone, as I spend every moment worrying about my mother, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, friends and their kids - all one symptom away from a life-threatening emergency, or worse.

What makes me livid is the fact this situation was avoidable and unnecessary. More than a year into the global pandemic, the Modi administration’s lack of preparedness is beyond inexcusable. It is criminally negligent.

WE WILL NEVER FORGET.