Facebook: Cracking the Code Page #3

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Good to see you.

- Good to see you, man.

Let's go inside, mate.

It's cold.

Mohamed Soltan was also

arrested for protesting.

He was imprisoned

in the same jail as me.

There was this medium

that people just wanted

to express themselves because

there was no other avenue

in the public space

to express themselves

and then they found

this outlet...

and then they found this outlet

to the outside world as well,

where they would put

how they feel

about social justice issues,

on just day to day inequalities

that they've seen

and then there was

the second phase of that

where they saw that

there's quite a few of them

that feel the same way about

a lot of different things.

It took a prolonged court case,

a 500-day hunger strike

and intense international

pressure to get him released.

For him too, Facebook became

an invaluable tool.

Facebook unlike other platforms

and social media outlets,

it allowed for us

to put out the reports,

the medical reports, it allowed

for us to share my family,

to share stories

and it establishes credibility.

So Facebook provides this place

that is almost ideal

for finding like-minded people,

whether it means finding people

who live in a certain place,

who are interested

in a certain thing

or people who are in the thrall

of a dangerous ideology.

In Australia, Facebook has also

become a powerful political tool

for mainstream causes,

and groups on the fringe.

They don't want

to represent you.

They want to represent the great

global international agenda

that corrupts our people

from the inside,

builds mosques

in our communities

and floods our beautiful country

with third world immigrants.

But is that what we want?

- No!

Blair Cottrell leads a group

called the United

Patriots Front -

a right-wing movement

built on Facebook,

that campaigns against Muslim

and immigrants across Australia.

Facebook's been

extremely effective for us.

That's indispensable

to the development

of our organisation.

Without it, we would probably be

a separatist cult,

where no one would be able

to relate to us,

because no one would actually

hear us directly,

they would only hear about us

through established

media corporations.

Islam can only pose a threat

to our nation

if our weak leadership,

or rather lack of leadership,

is allowed to continue.

Facebook has helped turn

a disparate group of individuals

into a political force

that some say is dangerous.

It gives us the ability

to cut out the middleman,

to go directly to the people,

to the audience

with our message,

to speak directly

to the Australian people

which is a power that hitherto

has only been held

by established

media corporations

and anybody who speaks

through such media corporations.

But now anybody has that power.

Anybody has access

to that power.

Some of the UPF's

more inflammatory statements

have been censored -

he's been prosecuted

for staging a mock beheading

that they filmed

and posted on Facebook.

Facebook removed

some of their posts,

including the original

beheading video,

and threatened

to suspend the page.

Sometimes Facebook has removed

or censored

certain posts of ours

because we've used

the world Muslim for example.

Not in a negative way at all.

If we'd explained an incident

or a point of view

and we've used the world Muslim,

sometimes that registers

in Facebook's computer

and they automatically delete it

for some reason.

I don't know if it's a person

who deletes it or a computer,

but that can be

a bit problematic.

We actually started altering

the way we spelt Muslim

in order to have our posts

remain up

when we were speaking about

the Muslim people

of the Islamic faith.

Facebook has been criticized

for the way it censors

controversial posts.

Whenever someone flags

a post as offensive,

it gets sent

to a human moderator

who decides

if it should be taken down.

The company says it reviews

a hundred million pieces

of content every month.

People are under

a lot of pressure

to review a great deal

of content very quickly

and I certainly hear about

what appear to be mistakes

quite frequently and some

of them are kind of ridiculous

like at the end of 2015

a bunch of women named Isis

had their accounts deactivated

because clearly somebody went

and flagged them

as being terrorists.

After an Egyptian court

convicted me

of terrorism charges,

my own Facebook page

was suspended.

We were never told

why it disappeared.

Facebook says it was

to protect my privacy.

We believed I'd been labelled

a terrorist,

violating what Zuckerberg calls

its community standards.

You can't have a common standard

for 1.8 billion people.

Our diversity is actually

our strength, right?

Part of what makes us

a global community

is the reality of that

what forms a global community

are our incredibly

fundamental differences.

In one infamous example,

Facebook removed a post

showing one of the most powerful

images of the Vietnam war.

The photograph of a naked girl

violated

its community standards.

The community standards

are developed by his staff.

The community didn't develop

those standards.

They're called

community standards

but they were developed

by Facebook

and yes they've had input

here and there over time,

they also get input

from governments

about... you know, recently

a number of governments

told them You need to amend

your community standards

to be harder

on extremist content", you know.

And so they amended

their community standards.

It's not like the community

got together

and developed these standards.

Facebook is also transforming

politics as we know it.

Politicians have used social

media for years of course,

but in this last election

campaigners used big data

to radically transform

American politics.

In the words of some observers,

they weaponized the data.

We're on our way

to Washington DC

to find out what impact

Facebook has had

on the fight for

political power.

At the heart of political power

is information.

That's why government

security agencies

go to extraordinary lengths

to vacuum up data.

But increasingly it is also

becoming the key

to winning power.

I think that there's

a legitimate argument to this

that Facebook influenced

the election,

the United States Election

results.

I think that Facebook

and algorithms

are partially responsible,

if not the main reason why,

there's this shift towards

hyper partisan belief

systems these days.

We will soon have, by the way,

a very strong

and powerful border.

When Donald Trump became

the presidential frontrunner

in last year's US election,

few pundits predicted

that he'd actually win.

One of the Trump campaign's

secret weapons

was an ability to research

social media data

in extraordinary detail.

It helped him understand

and target his voters

with a precision

we've never seen before.

By using Facebook's

ad targeting engine for example,

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