How Facebook is destroying democracies around the globe | ZDF Magazin Royale

Source: How Facebook is destroying democracies around the globe | ZDF Magazin Royale, ZDF MAGAZIN ROYALE, 30:37, uploaded 2021-12-10, Watch Later position 728.

ZDF Magazin Royale opens by pretending to celebrate Facebook. The platform is the blue hell of the internet, the presenter says, where a child can receive an unsolicited photograph from an older man whilst an aunt discovers Holocaust denial. Facebook becomes the place where a gong-bath coach can turn into a virologist in four days. The jokes establish the programme’s method: the company presents itself as a friendly way to connect people, whilst its own documents describe the damage that connection can carry.

From Facebook to Meta

The programme begins with Facebook’s proposed escape into the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg wants a digital universe in which people can do everything they already do in the physical world, with graphics that resemble Wii Sports from 2006. Zuckerberg would own the world as well. The question behind the joke is how a company that has already assembled such a large social system acquired the power to sell an alternative reality of its own.

The origin story starts with Zuckerberg’s birth in 1984 and his move to Harvard. The programme compresses the early history into a sequence of accusations and punchlines. Zuckerberg hacks a university database, builds Facemash from photographs of female students, and turns the stolen images into a rating system. In 2004, he launches The Facebook, where people hand over their data voluntarily. Peter Thiel supplies half a million dollars, which helps the company grow whilst the show folds in the older disputes over whether Zuckerberg took the idea from fellow students and interfered with rival platforms. The details arrive as satire, so the programme uses the story to establish a pattern of data extraction and weak consent rather than to offer a settled legal history.

Facebook then buys Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 for 19 billion dollars. The programme says that Facebook has acquired around 100 companies and that almost three billion people use Facebook each month. It treats Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp as one expanding system, then calls the user base a country larger than any real country. The rebrand to Meta appears when the headlines turn from growth to crisis: pressure from US state attorneys general, revelations from Frances Haugen, and the Facebook Papers.

Haugen, a former Facebook employee, gives journalists thousands of internal documents. The programme reads those documents as evidence that Facebook has repeatedly measured the platform’s harm and continued to leave it in place. Internal studies, presentations, and employee chats show a company that knows its products cause damage whilst its public promises produce little change. The central claim is simple: Facebook knows that it harms the world, and the knowledge does not stop the business.

Instagram and the harm that the company measured

The first case concerns health. The programme uses a deliberately absurd food journey to describe how recommendation systems can move a person from a healthy-food interest into a stream of unhealthy material. Instagram then turns the stream towards body comparison. The presenter watches fitness influencers and claims that the comparison can leave people depressed.

The joke gives way to an internal Facebook study about Instagram and teenage body image. The programme reports that, among suicidal teenagers, 13 percent of British users and 6 percent of American users attributed their wish to die to Instagram. Those figures appear as results from a Facebook presentation, although the video gives no study title, sample description, or link. The programme’s point rests on the company’s own knowledge: Facebook had evidence that Instagram harmed teenagers whilst continuing to promote the product.

The documents then widen the subject from mental health to organised violence. A Mexican drug cartel uses Facebook platforms to recruit, train, and pay hitmen. The programme reads descriptions of videos showing executions and photographs of beaten people and severed hands. It says that cartel pages on Facebook and Instagram remained active for at least five months, and that similar videos with cartel hashtags were still visible when the programme checked them.

Markets that Facebook leaves open

The next case follows a BBC investigation into the sale of women in Kuwait in 2019. Sellers use Instagram to advertise women and WhatsApp to arrange the practical details of a transaction. Facebook knew about the problem and gave it an internal codename, HEx, for human exploitation. The programme says that the company acted after the BBC report became public, while an internal report still found domestic-servitude content on the platform.

The reason for the change comes from Apple. Apple threatened to remove Facebook and Instagram from the App Store because of the BBC’s findings. An internal Facebook document described the possible consequences as severe for the business. Once the App Store became the threatened object, the company acted with more urgency. The programme’s judgement is that Facebook found the safety of its application easier to defend than the safety of the women being sold through it.

The broadcast then reports its own same-day check. Its team finds Instagram pages offering women for sale in Saudi Arabia, follows a WhatsApp contact, and receives an immediate reply from a trafficker. The seller describes one woman as obedient, fond of cleaning, and skilled at massage. He offers another for 6,800 euros and says that the buyer would own her for two years. He sends a photograph of her passport and offers a handover in central Riyadh the next day. The programme presents this exchange as evidence that the market remained easy to reach when the episode aired.

Facebook says it did not report the traffickers to local police or alert the women’s embassies. The programme gives the business reason through the advertising system. Traffickers could target advertisements at men in Dubai, and the advertisements brought Facebook 152,000 dollars. Facebook kept the advertising revenue. The platform’s connection between buyers and sellers therefore carried a direct financial return for the company.

Rules for ordinary users and powerful ones

Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook’s standards apply to everyone regardless of status or fame. The programme compares that public promise with Neymar’s 2019 Instagram post. After facing sexual-assault allegations, the footballer posted naked photographs and the full name of his accuser. Under Facebook’s rules, the programme says, an ordinary user’s account would face permanent deletion for revenge pornography. Facebook left Neymar’s account in place because he was Neymar.

The internal explanation is a secret programme called XCheck. The programme says that XCheck created exemptions for about six million accounts, allowing prominent people to break the platform’s rules without the sanctions applied to ordinary users. Facebook therefore has rules, yet it also has a hidden status system that decides who can ignore them. The programme calls this an authoritarian arrangement inside the world’s largest social network.

The same organisational problem appears in Vietnam. Zuckerberg is reported to have agreed to delete posts from government critics. A former Facebook security chief explains that one policy organisation had responsibility for the platform’s rules and for keeping governments satisfied. Facebook could meet politicians for lobbying and then face their calls for genocide later in the day. The programme treats the conflict as a business decision: when the company must choose between human rights and access to a market, it protects the market.

Political speech and profitable violence

Brazil supplies the programme’s next example. Jair Bolsonaro benefits from what the video calls an industry of lies on WhatsApp before the 2018 presidential election. Facebook allows political figures to spread false claims because it says that it does not fact-check politicians and does not want to restrict political speech. The programme connects that rule to an internal observation that political lies are especially believable. Falsehoods from trusted people become more dangerous, and anger makes them more clickable.

The leaked documents also describe algorithms that promote anger. The programme presents Facebook as a company that knows outrage travels well and keeps the system tuned to it. The result reaches beyond the screen through the example of T. Raja Singh, an Indian politician who calls for Rohingya Muslims to be shot, describes Muslims as traitors, and threatens to destroy mosques. Facebook employees want to remove the posts. Their superior warns that punishing politicians from Narendra Modi’s party could damage the company’s business prospects in India, Facebook’s largest market.

The programme treats this as the point where moderation becomes a political economy. The company can recognise a threat and still leave it online when enforcement could cost access, influence, or revenue. A platform that promises to connect everyone then becomes a useful service for demagogues who need distribution.

Countries where Facebook becomes the internet

Myanmar shows what the same decision looks like when Facebook supplies much of a country’s public infrastructure. In 2017, the military starts a disinformation campaign against the Rohingya minority. The programme says that Facebook’s algorithms spread the hate, after which violence escalates, 25,000 people die, and hundreds of thousands flee. Human-rights organisations warn the California headquarters. By 2018, Facebook has only five Burmese-speaking employees for a market of 18 million users.

The staffing figure matters because Facebook is the internet in countries such as Myanmar. People use it to read the news, shop, and communicate. The company therefore holds more responsibility than a website that people can visit or leave at will. The programme says Myanmar produces little advertising money, so Facebook gives the market less care than its profitable countries receive.

Ethiopia follows the same path. Headlines in the programme say that Facebook hate speech pushes the country towards genocide and adds fuel to its civil war. Researchers accuse Facebook of failing to stop the spread. The presenter keeps the jokes running through the horror, then turns to Afghanistan to show how a platform can fail before a post even reaches its moderation system.

Afghan users who try to report hate speech find English-only drop-down menus and an English-only Community Standards page. Facebook’s automatic hate-speech tools perform badly in the local context. The programme reports a 99.8 percent failure rate in Afghanistan. A second report says that, of all content classified as hate speech during one month, Facebook’s tools removed only 0.23 percent automatically. The figures belong to the reports quoted by the programme, which supplies no methods or links for checking them.

The result is an international communication platform that cannot communicate with most of its users. The programme says Facebook ignores 90 percent of its users, then asks where those people could go. Instagram and WhatsApp belong to the same company. A different messenger may protect data better, yet a person who leaves WhatsApp loses contact with the people who remain there. The network effect makes the company’s products feel unavoidable.

A monopoly with its own reality

The final section gathers the cases into a description of Facebook as an authoritarian state. The programme quotes descriptions of Facebook as a lie-spreading instrument of civilisational collapse and as an imperial force. These are rhetorical judgements from the quoted reporting, and the broadcast uses them to extend its earlier point about private rules and public consequences.

The merger of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger technology gives Facebook a single database spanning more than a billion people, according to a headline shown in the programme. Facebook then moves towards payments and the Diem cryptocurrency. The programme imagines the company with its own laws, people to enforce those laws, foreign policy, official language, and currency. Its claim that Facebook already forms the world’s largest autocracy compresses the preceding cases into one political image.

Facebook is only 17 years old when the programme airs. Its rapid growth becomes the reason for the metaverse pitch. The company has damaged the shared world and now offers a replacement world whose rules it can own. The programme closes by saying that Facebook is too large for one state to regulate and more powerful than every state and law together. The closing song gives the proposed response in one line: “Enteignet Facebook”, expropriate Facebook.

Limits

The video’s original German title is Wie Facebook weltweit Demokratien zerstört. This note follows the complete German auto-caption track, with obvious recognition errors and repeated caption fragments regularised. The track includes music, visual sketches, and short passages whose proper names are difficult to recover from captions alone. The English caption track is a shorter automatic translation and omits much of the spoken material, so it was useful for cross-checking isolated passages rather than as the main source.

The programme relies heavily on Frances Haugen’s Facebook Papers, internal Facebook studies, press investigations, and reports about Myanmar, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Instagram, and political speech. The description supplies the link to the full ZDF Magazin Royale broadcast, yet it gives no bibliography or links to those underlying documents. The figures about Instagram and suicidal teenagers, the 152,000 dollars in advertising revenue, the staffing in Myanmar, the moderation rates in Afghanistan, and the deaths and displacement in Myanmar remain claims as the programme presents them. I have kept them attached to the programme or its cited reports rather than treating them as independently verified facts.

The reported Saudi WhatsApp exchange is also evidence of what the programme’s team says it found on the day of filming. The captions do not establish the seller’s identity, the wider scale of the market, or what happened after the exchange. The programme’s claims about Facebook’s motives come from its reading of internal documents and business incentives. Its final image of Facebook as an autocracy is a political judgement formed from those cases, not a legal classification.

Further reading / references

• The full ZDF Magazin Royale broadcast, linked in the video’s description.
• Frances Haugen’s Facebook Papers, cited by the programme as the source of internal studies, presentations, and employee communications.
• The BBC investigation into the sale of women in Kuwait, cited as the report that made Facebook’s internal HEx problem public.
• Facebook’s internal XCheck material and reports about Instagram’s effects on teenagers, political speech, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan, all cited in the programme without document links.