India, Russia, Nigeria are all learning to suppress Twitter, Facebook from the US
The
Nigerian Twitter ban should be a warning to US lawmakers and activist.
Their efforts to rein in US-based social media giants risk restricting
democratic freedoms worldwide.
Social media platforms (Representational image) | Bloomberg
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Nigerians angry about their government’s recent banning of
Twitter Inc. have understandably focused their ire on President
Muhammadu Buhari: It was Twitter’s decision to take down his tweet
implicitly warning separatists that they could suffer the same violent
end as former Biafran rebels that prompted the crackdown.
But the Nigerian ban
should be a warning to U.S. lawmakers and activists, too. Their efforts
to rein in U.S.-based social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook
Inc. risk restricting democratic freedoms worldwide.
Antipathy toward the big platforms is rising across the U.S.
political spectrum. Democrats blame them for allowing misinformation to
flourish; Republicans, for allegedly censoring right-wing voices. Both
agree they should be cut down to size: The Democratic chair of the House
Consumer Protection & Commerce subcommittee has said “there is a bipartisan agreement that the status quo is just not working.”
The U.S. consensus has now begun to equate the tech companies’
attempts to maintain the integrity of their platforms through content
management with infringements by powerful corporate monopolies on state
power. Congress has taken up harsh new bills that are a first step toward using antitrust laws against tech companies.
This backlash is a gift to authoritarian governments around the
world, who have been looking for a stick with which to beat Twitter and
Facebook among others. Illiberal leaders have adopted the language and
legal tools being wielded by activists and politicians in the U.S.
Nigeria’s information minister has complained, “Twitter’s mission in Nigeria is very suspect, they have an agenda.” Russia, which has started choking
Twitter’s bandwidth, last week fined Google and Facebook for “banned
content.” Moscow also wants to force the companies to open offices in
Russia, so executives and employees can be held hostage to an
increasingly arbitrary legal system.
India, meanwhile, reportedly decided
last week that Twitter is no longer an “intermediary” but a publisher —
and so can be held criminally liable for anything anyone says on it.
Police in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh swiftly registered a
criminal complaint against Twitter and seven journalists, all of them
Muslim.
The reason?
A viral video in which an elderly Muslim man claimed to have been
attacked because of his religion. (The state police, which answers to a
government run by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, has
insisted that there was “no communal angle” to the assault and that both
Hindus and Muslims attacked the man.) In response, India’s information
minister said, “What happened in UP was illustrative of Twitter’s arbitrariness in fighting fake news.”
What global authoritarians want is for the big U.S.-based social
media networks to fall into line with the rest of the local media —
which are already, more or less, subject to state control and
intimidation. U.S. action to constrain the tech companies provides those
leaders with a toolkit of controls that they can justify
internationally. Companies that resist leave themselves open to
accusations of hypocrisy if they reject state diktats in the rest of the
world but accept them in the U.S.
Many struggling activists in backsliding democracies may not be happy
at depending upon the faceless bureaucracies of Big Tech to have their
voices heard. Yet not one of them would want that power to devolve
instead to the functionaries of their own states, most of whom are eager
to silence all dissenters. A U.S. that sets out to subordinate social
networks to the government only empowers authoritarian leaders that have
wanted to do the same for years.
U.S. activists should take
heart in knowing that the state is not the only option for disciplining
the social media platforms. Tech companies face another burgeoning
check on their power, one some would argue is more trustworthy than any
politician: their own workforces.
Facebook, for example, recently had to reorganize its team in India after employees worldwide accused it
of being too close to the government. The company’s Israel public
policy team, whose head had earlier worked in Benjamin Netanyahu’s
office, faced similar accusations last month. Facebook workers fought
back, with the New York Times saying,
“dozens of employees later formed a group to flag the Palestinian
content that they said had been suppressed to internal content
moderation teams.”
Authoritarians around the world won’t stop trying to suppress critics
online or off. That doesn’t mean American activists and politicians
have to help them.-Bloomberg
India needs free, fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism even more as it faces multiple crises.
But the news media is in a crisis of its own. There have been
brutal layoffs and pay-cuts. The best of journalism is shrinking,
yielding to crude prime-time spectacle.
ThePrint has the finest young reporters, columnists and editors
working for it. Sustaining journalism of this quality needs smart and
thinking people like you to pay for it. Whether you live in India or
overseas, you can do it here.
This is the second post in a series on the Facebook monopoly. The first post explored how the U.S. Federal Trade Commission should define the Facebook monopoly. I am inspired by Cloudflare’s recent post explaining the impact of Amazon’s monopoly in its industry.
Perhaps
it was a competitive tactic, but I genuinely believe it more a
patriotic duty: guideposts for legislators and regulators on a complex
issue. My generation has watched with a combination of sadness and
trepidation as legislators who barely use email question the leading
technologists of our time about products that have long pervaded our
lives in ways we don’t yet understand.
I, personally,
and my company both stand to gain little from this — but as a
participant in the latest generation of social media upstarts, and as an
American concerned for the future of our democracy, I feel a duty to
try.
Mark Zuckerberg has reached his Key Largo moment.
In
May 1972, executives of the era’s preeminent technology company —
AT&T — met at a secret retreat in Key Largo, Florida. Their company
was in crisis.
At the time, Ma Bell’s breathtaking monopoly
consisted of a holy trinity: Western Electric (the vast majority of
phones and cables used for American telephony), the lucrative long
distance service (for both personal and business use) and local
telephone service, which the company subsidized in exchange for its
monopoly.
Over the next decade, all three government branches —
legislators, regulators and the courts — parried with AT&T’s lawyers
as the press piled on, battering the company’s reputation in the
process. By 1982, a consent decree forced AT&T’s dismantling. The
biggest company on earth withered to 30% of its book value and seven
independent “Baby Bell” regional operating companies. AT&T’s brand
would live on, but the business as the world knew it was dead.
Mark
Zuckerberg is, undoubtedly, the greatest technologist of our time. For
over 17 years, he has outgunned, outsmarted and outperformed like no
software entrepreneur before him. Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal
Trade Commission refiled its sweeping antitrust case against Facebook.
Its
own holy trinity of Facebook Blue, Instagram and WhatsApp is under
attack. All three government branches — legislators, regulators and the
courts — are gaining steam in their fight, and the press is piling on,
battering the company’s reputation in the process. Facebook, the
AT&T of our time, is at the brink. For so long, Zuckerberg has told
us all to move fast and break things. It’s time for him to break
Facebook.
If Facebook does exist to “make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company,” as Zuckerberg wrote in the 2012 IPO prospectus,
he will spin off Instagram and WhatsApp now so that they have a
fighting chance. It would be the ultimate Zuckerbergian chess move.
Zuckerberg would lose voting control and thus power over all three
entities, but in his action he would successfully scatter the
opposition. The rationale is simple:
The United States government will break up Facebook. It is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when.
Facebook
is already losing. Facebook Blue, Instagram and WhatsApp all face
existential threats. Pressure from the government will stifle Facebook’s
efforts to right the ship.
Facebook will generate more value for shareholders as three separate companies.
I
write this as an admirer; I genuinely believe much of the criticism
Zuckerberg has received is unfair. Facebook faces Sisyphean tasks. The
FTC will not let Zuckerberg sneeze without an investigation, and the
company has failed to innovate.
Given no chance to acquire new technology and talent, how can Facebook survive over the long term? In 2006,
Terry Semel of Yahoo offered $1 billion to buy Facebook. Zuckerberg
reportedly remarked, “I just don’t know if I want to work for Terry
Semel.” Even if the FTC were to allow it, this generation of founders
will not sell to Facebook. Unfair or not, Mark Zuckerberg has become
Terry Semel.
The government will break up Facebook
It is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when.
In
a speech on the floor of Congress in 1890, Senator John Sherman, the
founding father of the modern American antitrust movement, famously said,
“If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not
endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the
necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should
not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and
to fix the price of any commodity.”
This is the sentiment driving
the building resistance to Facebook’s monopoly, and it shows no sign of
abating. Zuckerberg has proudly called Facebook the fifth estate. In
the U.S., we only have four estates.
All three branches of the
federal government are heating up their pursuit. In the Senate, an
unusual bipartisan coalition is emerging, with Senators Amy Klobuchar
(D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Josh Hawley
(R-MO) each waging a war from multiple fronts.
In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has called Facebook “part of the problem.” Lina Khan’s FTC is likewise only getting started, with unequivocal support from the White House that feels burned
by Facebook’s disingenuous lobbying. The Department of Justice will
join, too, aided by state attorneys general. And the courts will
continue to turn the wheels of justice, slowly but surely.
In the wake of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes’ scathing 2019 New York Times op-ed, Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s immense size allows it to spend more on trust and safety than Twitter makes in revenue.
“If
what you care about is democracy and elections, then you want a company
like us to be able to invest billions of dollars per year like we are
in building up really advanced tools to fight election interference,”
Zuckerberg said.
This could be true, but it does not prove that
the concentration of such power in one man’s hands is consistent with
U.S. public policy. And the centralized operations could be rebuilt
easily in standalone entities.
Time and time again, whether on
Holocaust denial, election propaganda or vaccine misinformation,
Zuckerberg has struggled to make quick judgments when presented with the
information his trust and safety team uncovers. And even before a
decision is made, the structure of the team disincentivizes it from even
measuring anything that could harm Facebook’s brand. This is inherently
inconsistent with U.S. democracy. The New York Times’ army of reporters
will not stop uncovering scandal after scandal, contradicting
Zuckerberg’s narrative. The writing is on the wall.
Facebook is losing
Facebook
Blue, Instagram and WhatsApp all face existential threats. Pressure
from the government will stifle Facebook’s efforts to right the ship.
For
so long, Facebook has dominated the social media industry. But if you
ask Chinese technology executives about Facebook today, they quote Tencent founder Pony Ma: “When a giant falls, his corpse will still be warm for a while.”
Facebook’s
recent demise begins with its brand. The endless, cascading scandals of
the last decade have irreparably harmed its image. Younger users refuse
to adopt the flagship Facebook Blue. The company’s internal polling on
two key metrics — good for the world (GFW) and cares about users (CAU) —
shows Facebook’s reputation is in tatters. Talent is fleeing, too; Instacart alone recently poached 55 Facebook executives.
In
2012 and 2014, Instagram and WhatsApp were real dangers. Facebook
extinguished both through acquisition. Yet today they represent the
company’s two most promising, underutilized assets. They are the
underinvested telephone networks of our time.
Weeks ago, Instagram
head Adam Mosseri announced that the company no longer considers itself
a photo-sharing app. Instead, its focus is entertainment. In other
words, as the media widely reported, Instagram is changing to compete with TikTok.
TikTok’s strength represents an existential threat. U.S. children 4 to 15 already spend over 80 minutes a day
on ByteDance’s TikTok, and it’s just getting started. The demographics
are quickly expanding way beyond teenagers, as social products always
have. For Instagram, it could be too little too late — as a part of
Facebook, Instagram cannot acquire the technology and retain the talent
it needs to compete with TikTok.
Imagine Instagram acquisitions of
Squarespace to bolster its e-commerce offerings, or Etsy to create a
meaningful marketplace. As a part of Facebook, Instagram is
strategically adrift.
Likewise, a standalone WhatsApp could easily
be a $100 billion market cap company. WhatsApp has a proud legacy of
robust security offerings, but its brand has been tarnished
by associations with Facebook. Discord’s rise represents a substantial
threat, and WhatsApp has failed to innovate to account for this
generation’s desire for community-driven messaging. Snapchat, too, is in
many ways a potential WhatsApp killer; its young users use photography
and video as a messaging medium. Facebook’s top augmented reality
talents are leaving for Snapchat.
With
2 billion monthly active users, WhatApp could be a privacy-focused
alternative to Facebook Blue, and it would logically introduce expanded
profiles, photo-sharing capabilities and other features that would
strengthen its offerings. Inside Facebook, WhatsApp has suffered from
underinvestment as a potential threat to Facebook Blue and Messenger.
Shareholders have suffered for it.
Beyond Instagram and WhatsApp,
Facebook Blue itself is struggling. Q2’s earnings may have skyrocketed,
but the increase in revenue hid a troubling sign: Ads increased by 47%,
but inventory increased by just 6%. This means Facebook is struggling to
find new places to run its ads. Why? The core social graph of Facebook
is too old.
I fondly remember the day Facebook came to my high
school; I have thousands of friends on the platform. I do not use
Facebook anymore — not for political reasons, but because my friends
have left. A decade ago, hundreds of people wished me happy birthday
every year. This year it was 24, half of whom are over the age of 50.
And I’m 32 years old. Teen girls run the social world, and many of them
don’t even have Facebook on their phones.
Zuckerberg’s newfound
push into the metaverse has been well covered, but the question remains:
Why wouldn’t a Facebook serious about the metaverse acquire Roblox? Of
course, the FTC would currently never allow it.
Facebook’s current
clunky attempt at a hardware solution, with an emphasis on the
workplace, shows little sign of promise. The launch was hardly
propitious, as CNN reported,
“While Bosworth, the Facebook executive, was in the middle of
describing how he sees Workrooms as a more interactive way to gather
virtually with coworkers than video chat, his avatar froze midsentence,
the pixels of its digital skin turning from flesh-toned to gray. He had
been disconnected.”
This is not the indomitable Facebook of yore. This is graying Facebook, freezing midsentence.
Facebook will generate more value for shareholders as three separate companies
Zuckerberg’s control of 58% of Facebook’s voting shares has forestalled a typical Wall Street reckoning: Investors are tiring
of Zuckerberg’s unilateral power. Many justifiably believe the company
is more valuable as the sum of its parts. The success of AT&T’s
breakup is a case in point.
Five years after AT&T’s 1984 breakup, AT&T and the Baby Bells’ value had doubled
compared to AT&T’s pre-breakup market capitalization. Pressure from
Japanese entrants battered Western Electric’s market share, but greater
competition in telephony spurred investment and innovation among the
Baby Bells.
AT&T turned its focus to competing with IBM and
preparing for the coming information age. A smaller AT&T became more
nimble, ready to focus on the future rather than dwell on the past.
Standalone
Facebook Blue, Instagram and WhatsApp could drastically change their
futures by attracting talent and acquiring new technologies.
The U.K.’s recent opposition to Facebook’s $400 million GIPHY acquisition proves Facebook will struggle mightily to acquire even small bolt-ons.
Zuckerberg has always been one step ahead. And when he wasn’t, he was famously unprecious: “Copying is faster than innovating.”
If he really believes in Facebook’s mission and recognizes that the
situation cannot possibly get any better from here, he will copy
AT&T’s solution before it is forced upon him.
Regulators are
tying Zuckerberg’s hands behind his back as the company weathers body
blows and uppercuts from Beijing to Silicon Valley. As Zuckerberg’s idol
Augustus Caesar might have once said, carpe diem. It’s time to break
Facebook.
As the tech war between the United States and China heats up,
the political controversy between who ought to own and control ‘big
data’ has similarly ignited, and is now about to land a bombshell on
Wall Street.
When Didi Chuxing, China’s
ride-hailing giant, launched its mega US IPO earlier this summer, it
seemed like the perfect statement of what China hoped to achieve: a mega
successful firm drawing in billions in foreign capital to propel its way upwards as a global brand.
Listing
in New York City was the firm statement that the Beijing-based company
had “made it” on the world stage, right? Despite the Trump and Biden
administration unleashing a litany of “investment bans” targeted at
Chinese companies of strategic interest which would force some firms to
delist, Didi was standing strong, and the moaning of hawkish US senators like Marco Rubio, who objected to it, were seemingly dismissed as an irrelevance.
One
might be forgiven for thinking that, in the midst of the US-China tech
war, in which the US has sought to block the rise of Chinese technology
and software on the global stage, this is precisely the kind outcome Xi
Jinping wanted. A firm statement of China-led globalization, against the
inwards and isolationist US, so lacking in confidence that it wanted to
push Beijing out. Not quite.
It's staggering to think with the massive regulatory crackdown by China's ruling party against big tech, that somehow Beijing and Marco Rubio are in fact, on the same page here.
Both
don’t want Chinese firms to list in the US and both see it as a threat
to “national security” (albeit from different angles). Just about two
days after the stock made its US debut, Beijing ultimately responded by ruthlessly purging Didi and banning new downloads of the app, stating it hadn't coordinated with authorities before it pushed for its listing.
Now, there is speculation that China might be prepared to restrict the
overseas listings of such firms altogether. It cites data privacy. This
is a curious argument to have, because on the flip side of the coin
we've seen how such arguments have also been used to politically
discredit Chinese firms themselves, such as Trump’s unsuccessful attempt
to ban TikTok and WeChat. The argument was the same: "it puts the
private data of our users at risk."
The world we know today is a
world of big data. These monopolistic services we use every single day,
such as Google and Facebook, see information about us as a commodity,
something to sell to advertisers as an astute way to perfectly target
people down to the most minuscule detail and flog their products, too.
If you like, ‘we’ the users are their product. This practice has become
extremely controversial in tandem. As a signature example of how it
works, google-search a particular product or thing and you'll find ads
for it appearing on Facebook, or vice versa. Creepy, right? Yet, it’s
perfectly legitimate.
This is where geopolitics seeps in, big
time. The Cambridge Analytica scandal of just a few years ago reminds us
that this isn’t just about making money, it’s also a question of who
else gets to see this data, who controls and regulates it, and how else
it is used. Unfettered access to private information on millions of
people is a critical resource which, it is argued, can be used for all
kinds of nefarious political ends. It's now claimed in both Washington
and Beijing that data is a "national security threat" of sorts: "What
could our adversary find out about our population? What could they do
with this information?”
China, of course, has more precedent on this than the US, which
often uses this claim opportunistically while not seriously reining in
its own big tech anyway. Beijing has long invoked what it calls the
principle of "internet sovereignty"– whereby it states that a government
has a national right to fully control the internet within its own
domain, which of course involves censorship, too, and seemingly as its
own social media ecosystem has developed, this premise has extended to
sovereignty over personal data too. If Americans are perceived to have
access to the personal data of over a billion Chinese people, it’s a
threat to national security.
Thus, if Chinese companies have
access to personal data, then China is committed to regulating it in two
capacities. Firstly, to prevent anti-monopolistic practices, it does
not deem the rise of another "google" or "facebook" to be in the
national interest. Secondly, a seemingly new-found principle is that no
foreign investor should have a right to access this data. That is not to
say that foreigners "cannot" invest in these companies, but certainly
that they should not have access to such critical information in the
process of doing so. That is, if you want to invest, you do it via
China's rules, in China.
This process has undoubtedly been
exacerbated by the growing mutual distrust between Washington and
Beijing. It is an inevitable aspect of their technology war, a reminder
that advocating tech decoupling is not a one-way process whereby it is
simply Washington that throws China out, but works more so as a cycle,
wherein growing hostility increasingly renders some form of engagement
untenable. Thus, Beijing sometimes wants to throw America out, too.
After all, it is no secret that tech firms based in the United States
have a legal obligation to coordinate with the national security agency
and hand over data.
China never faced this problem until its own internet giants
became global. Thus, Beijing seemingly sees a growing vulnerability in
leaving its own population so readily exposed to potential US
surveillance and snooping, especially if its own big-tech firms are
being handled on Wall Street. But China could also be eyeing more value
in foreign capital coming to its own firms within China, as opposed to
in New York City, putting its national interest above the interests of a
company. In a nutshell, though, China is invoking tougher sovereignty
over its big tech and it's not a question as to how much money they can
make. Thus, this push to "delist" firms from Wall Street unusually
becomes a mutually desirable and reinforcing cycle.
Of course, the
media do have a vested interest in pushing negativity about this, so it
remains to be seen how far China will push these firms regarding
delisting as it reshapes its regulatory environment, but it’s hardly
great news for Wall Street.
Three of the world’s largest internet companies have been hit
with hefty financial penalties after a Russian court ruled they had
fallen foul of rules requiring them to process users’ private data
exclusively within the country.
On Thursday, media
watchdog Roskomnadzor issued a statement confirming that Moscow’s
Tagansky Court had slapped steep fines on three American social
platforms, microblogging site Twitter, messaging service WhatsApp and
its parent company, Facebook.
“By court order, WhatsApp was fined 4 million rubles ($54,000),” officials said. “Facebook
- 15 million rubles (around $200,000), Twitter - 17 million rubles.
($230,000) for repeated violations of the requirements for the
localization of personal information,” it said.
Under the
rules, established in 2015, tech giants must process Russian users’ data
on servers within the country, rather than sending it abroad in the
first instance. Regulators insist this bolsters privacy and protection,
while critics blast the measures as a threat to online anonymity.
Companies must also establish local offices, ensuring there are
representatives to hold accountable to the law.
According to Roskomnadzor, the three US firms have continually
refused to abide by the rules, and both Twitter and Facebook have been
previously fined for breaches, with the former reportedly failing to pay
a previous penalty. “To date, the storage of personal data of
Russian users has been localized by about 600 representative offices of
foreign companies in the Russian Federation, including Apple, Microsoft,
LG, Samsung, PayPal, Booking.com and others,” officials maintain.
The
regulator began slowing access to Twitter’s servers in the country
earlier this year, over claims it was failing to remove banned content,
such as child pornography and posts encouraging minors to commit
suicide, and pushing participation in unauthorized protests during
Covid-19. While the San Francisco-based company initially blasted the
move as a threat to freedom of speech, it is understood to now be
working with officials to meet the takedown requests.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin has previously said that tech firms are
operating unaccountably, and making far-reaching decisions in only their
own best interests. “These platforms are, of course, primarily businesses… and what is the primary concern of a business? Making a profit,” he said in February.
“They don’t care if this content or that content causes harm for the people at whom it is directed,” he said. “After all, these modern IT companies are more and more beginning to control people’s consciousnesses.”
The world might face a financial disaster comparable with the
2008–2009 crisis because of problems accumulated over the last 18
months, which are a byproduct of measures implemented by governments to
battle the spread of Covid-19.
That’s according to the
Central Bank of Russia, which published a Monetary Policy Guidelines
draft report on Wednesday. According to the institution, the world
economy could enter a crisis scenario due to both the increase of global
debt held by countries and the increasing number of companies with weak
financial soundness.
According to the draft, the bank has
developed four separate scenarios for the near future, up to 2024.
According to its so-called ‘baseline’ scenario, a recession is avoided
as countries achieve their vaccine targets and advanced economies shift
toward monetary policy normalization.
However, the other three possible scenarios paint a decidedly
grimmer picture. In the first instance, the pandemic worsens
significantly causing an economic crash worldwide. In the second, the
pandemic improves, but problems accumulated over the pandemic
deteriorate the economic situation considerably causing a rise in
inflation. In the third, monetary policy normalization by advanced
economies is accompanied by unsteady dynamics in financial markets,
causing a lack of confidence in investors. This is the worst of the
three negative scenarios, the bank says.
Russia's economy is
suffering from stubbornly high inflation, which currently sits at 6.5%,
and has been blamed for eating significantly into living standards in
the country ahead of upcoming parliamentary elections.
In July,
Central Bank of Russia Governor Elvira Nabiullina revealed that the
institution would be hiking its rate to match its key interest rate to
the 6.5% annual inflation rate in a bid to encourage saving and
discourage borrowing. The bank wishes to get this figure down to the
publicly announced target of 4%.
Vaccine passport hypocrisy: How the UK is copying China while still criticising Beijing on human rights
Neil Clark
is
a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog
can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and
world affairs @NeilClark66
The UK, like many other Western countries, is following China’s
restricted access QR code digital ID system, while all the time seeking
to take the moral high ground over Beijing. It’s hypocrisy at its
finest.
Demonise China, while
copying the worst aspects of it. That, in a nutshell, is what the
Western power elites have been doing these past 18 months – under the
guise of fighting a virus.
‘China’s Covid-19 QR Code surveillance state’, that was the title of an informative article published by The Financial Time in early May 2020. “Local
authorities across China have rolled out health code systems, accessed
through smart phone applications, to control the movement of people and
identify those who had been diagnosed with the virus or visited high
areas of infection. Sometimes it feels like every transaction – even
entering a park – is subject to government approval,” author Don Weinland wrote.
In March 2021, in an article entitled ‘The new codes governing everyday life in China’, the AFP reported from Beijing, “It’s
a ritual that has become hard to avoid in China – scanning a code with
your mobile and proving your health credentials via an app, giving you
the green light to go. Or not.” The article went on, “Entering
residential buildings, businesses or a park, taking a plane, train or
taxi, or simply trying to get home, you are well advised to make sure
your phone battery is charged.”
Sounds pretty dreadful, no? But look what’s happening across the Western world today.
In France, the ‘pass sanitaire’ – which uses QR codes scanned by a
smartphone to show that someone has been vaccinated – has been in force
since August. It is now obligatory to present a ‘pass sanitaire’ to
gain access to cafes, restaurants, health centres, libraries, department
stores, long-distance trains and a whole host of public places. Beijing
and Paris. Spot the difference? Apart from the Eiffel Tower there isn’t
one. Ditto Cyprus and China. Israel and China. Ireland and China. New
York and China.
Meanwhile, in England and Scotland
we’re told that jab-only vaccine passports – again using a smartphone
app – will be introduced at the end of the month to restrict access to
nightclubs and ‘large events’. That’s despite us knowing that being
vaccinated doesn’t prevent someone getting ill with Covid or
transmitting the virus. Vaccine passports are clearly not so much about
public health, but public control. It could not be more blatant.
The
great fear is that once mandated, these ‘passports’ will be extended to
other venues, as in France, and won’t be temporary – no one is
mentioning an end date – and will morph into China’s social credit
system.
Prior to 2020, the notion that the West would copy Beijing
in going down this road of digital control, and restricted access based
on QR codes, would have been met with outrage – “We are the West. We
stand for freedom!”
But the very same people who would have said
this in 2019 are not only downplaying what vaccine passports represent
in terms of loss of freedom and establishing a new, transactional
relationship between the citizen and the state, but are actively
promoting them as a ‘good’ thing.
Vaccine
passports will alter society for one simple reason: They set a new
precedent for trade of personal health data (Verifiable Credentials
& Digital ID) for access to basic goods & services. So now
blockchain & biometric data will rival capital as a means of
exchange.
UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has been fierce in his criticism of China – in February he accused
Beijing of “industrial scale” human rights abuses. Yet the same Dominic
Raab also said in February that vaccine passports for shops and
restaurants in England could happen.
If
you look across the UK establishment, including the media, it’s the
same picture. Hyperventilating on China’s ‘appalling human rights
record’ while ordering a ‘Chinese takeaway’ by supporting restricting
access to daily life for those ‘undesirables’ – aka the ‘unvaxxed’ or
‘anti-vaxxers’ – without the right app or QR code.
Sinophobia and
Sinophilia. At the same time. In the same people. How do we explain this
cognitive dissonance? What the Western elites and their media
stenographers want to do is to copy the Chinese system domestically – or
at least the QR code/digital ID part of it (they certainly don’t want
the death penalty for corruption and ‘economic crimes’) – while being
opposed to Beijing’s role in international affairs.
Its growing
influence in Africa, its friendship with Russia and its strategic
partnership with Iran… These all explain why the elites want to turn
their own countries into copies of China – with the aim being a digital
ID social credit system which would massively increase control over
citizens and bar ‘dissidents’ from public life – while grandstanding
over Beijing and exuding 19th century-style moral superiority over it at
every opportunity.
It’s not hard to notice that the more the West
turns into China, the more the anti-Chinese rhetoric increases.
Hypocrisy? It really is off the scale.
Vaccini, gli italiani con Draghi. Otto su dieci sono favorevoli all'obbligo
di Ilvo Diamanti
(fotogramma)
Su cento elettori il 64 per cento è per imporre l’iniezione a tutti; un altro 17 per cento solo ad alcune categorie. Il 78 per cento è per il Green Pass. Sempre alto, al 69 per cento, il gradimento del premier in un equilibrio politico instabile con quattro partiti divisi da pochi voti. Molti cittadini sono preoccupati per la situazione in Afghanistan e la possibile ripresa del terrorismo
L'ascolto è riservato agli abbonati
3 MINUTI DI LETTURA
Il sostegno al governo guidato da Mario Draghi, per quanto in calo, si conferma largamente maggioritario. Lo sottolinea il sondaggio condotto da Demos per l'Atlante Politico di Repubblica, nei giorni scorsi.
