Eric Blair, or George Orwell if you like, predicted in his book, “Nineteen Eighty Four: A Novel,” written in 1948, but published in 1949, that a phenomenon he called “Big Brother,” will be monitoring and dictating the direction and the quality of the lives of citizens, by 1984.
The world would become a dystopia, a state or society, usually totalitarian and despotic, where citizens go through suffering and injustice. The world, under one government, would routinely endure war and other disasters.
The major themes of “1984” are exposure of the evils of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, (which the social media have perfected), repressive regimentation of the lives of citizens and conduct or behaviour prescribed by Big Brother that is watching them all the time.
One of the main apparatuses of governance in Oceania, the setting of the book, is the “Thought Police,” used by government to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Individuality distinguishes an individual from others of the same kind.
The concept of individuality or individualism was developed in France during the Age of Enlightenment between the 17th and the 18th centuries. It suggests that sovereignty of reason and evidence of the senses are primary sources of knowledge. It encouraged the application of rigour in academics, science and debate.
Today’s Thought Police, the social media, is censoring thoughts by prescribing appropriate thoughts, compelling compliance, allowing what it deems acceptable, and denying what it does not want on its platforms.
Following the diarrhoea of inciting tweets after the November 3, 2020 presidential election that he lost, and in the heat of the January 6, 2021 invasion of the American Capitol by the morons that he goaded into action, social media giants, Twitter, Facebook and Snap Inc shut down President Donald Trump’s accounts on their platforms. YouTube pulled down a video.
These social media platforms thought that further tweets and postings from President Trump could compromise American democratic values, political wellbeing and prestige in the comity of nations.
The social media organisations demonstrated, and wielded, what amounted to wilful, unilateral and absolute political powers within a state. A private individual, Mark Zuckerberg, thought President Trump crossed a line by uploading messages that clearly incited insurrection, and sanctioned him.
Many howled in protest that these private organisations were assuming the powers of regulatory agencies, if not of the state. They wonder if other aspects of the sovereignty of the state would be taken over by private concerns in the future with some pretext.
Of course, there are some, no doubt with genuine concerns about President Trump’s irresponsibility, who felt that these organisations took the right decision in the interest of the American people.
After this justification of the unilateral actions of the social media in the interest of the state, the indignation of some against the shutting down of the President’s social media accounts became a whimper and almost faded away.
But earlier in 2020, conservative American newspaper columnist, George F. Will, had shown his distaste for President Trump’s style of governance in the following words: “This low-rent (King) Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proved that the phrase, ‘malignant moron,’ is not an oxymoron.”
In William Shakespeare’s eponymous tragedy, “King Lear,” the king relinquishes his powers and lands to two of his daughters. Recall that President Trump’s children and in-laws swarmed all over the White House as a herd of ultra-vocal government-paid presidential aides.
Now Facebook and Instagram have taken their political interventions to Myanmar, former Burma, after a military coup d’état against the government, and shut down the account of the military, as a political statement against a coup that uninstalled democracy in Myanmar.
Actually, Myanmar only had a diarchy, a mix of military and civilian rule. The coup merely excised the civilian wing of the diarchy to snowball the government into a full-blown military regime. The military finally pulled its iron fists out of the velvet gloves.
The military, known as Tamadaw, (makes you think of the destructive Tramadol), alleging electoral fraud, deposed the elected members of Mynmar’s National League for Democracy, the ruling political party, just one day before those elected in the 2020 General Election were to be sworn in.
President Win Myint and Aung San Suu Kyi, styled State Cunsellor, (a position equivalent to that of the spiritual leader Ayatollah, who supervises the Iranian President), ministers and Members of the Parliament, were detained. Aung is now charged to court.
The military vested executive powers in an official with the clumsy title of Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services and then proclaimed a state of emergency, the implication of which is that the government can do anything.
Many cities in Myanmar are witnessing acute chaos, arrests and death of citizens, following the civil unrest that came on the heels of the coup. The new military regime doubled down on repressive actions against the citizens.
Facebook and Instagram banned Mynmar’s military, the media it controls, and any commercial enterprise controlled by the military, from advertising on their platforms. They cited “exceptionally severe human rights abuses and clear risk of military-initiated violence in Myanmar,” as their reasons.
Facebook reported that in recent years, it had removed content from the pages and accounts of the military for violation of standards of decency. In 2018, Facebook banned individuals, like Min Aung Hliang, leader of the recent coup, and organisations linked to the military, ostensibly for wayward content.
Now think of the political implication of Facebook yanking off the Myanmar military’s account off its platform. Also imagine if the shoe were on the other foot, and all the power of sanction, wielded by this free market company, were in the hands of a Communist, Nazi, fascist or military dictator.
Think of a Stalin, a Hitler, a Musollini, or an Idi Amin with the capacity to determine what the citizens of their countries could hear, or couldn’t hear, say, or couldn’t say. Such a country would be an extremely stifling political space.
During the Cold War the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics jammed the airways to prevent Soviet citizens from listening to Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and British Broadcasting Corporation, because their content were democratic and free market values that countered preferred socialist values of the USSR regime.
In future, access to Twitter, Facebook and any of the other social media platforms could be denied, as a form of gunboat diplomacy, to compel citizen compliance with the dictatorial fiat of an ideological imperialist. This would effectively deny citizens of opportunities for dissent.
Imagine all the social media platforms becoming a single, monolithic, behemoth, a real “imperia in imperial,” a state within a state, that could give directives to banana republics, the way multinational corporations did for most of the 20th Century.
If a Rupert Murdock, whose News Corp has gobbled up nearly all the world’s major newspapers, newsmagazines, and domestic and international television networks, acquires dominant shares of the social media, the news diet of the entire world could depend on the whims of only one individual.
By pulling down the rights of Myanmar’s, albeit wayward, military to reply, Facebook assumes the powers of the “Invisible Hand” that economists suggest rules in the existentialist affairs of men. If this tiger changes its “tigritude,” that will be the day.
