A friend of mine whose parents grew up in East Germany once told me that the Stasi would have loved Facebook. “Millions of people voluntarily offering up their personal lives, their addresses, their photos,” she said. “The Stasi had to force people to do that!”
She didn’t have a Facebook account. But over a billion people around the world do — and that makes the social network a tempting target for authoritarian regimes, who either want to monitor or control the speech of their citizens. But who could have predicted that the most authoritarian of them all would, once again, be Germany?
A power the Stasi — or, yes, the Gestapo — could only dream of has been handed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. At her behest, the social network has begun a Europe-wide campaign to counter so-called “hate speech” on its platform. It is also working with a German publisher to remove “racist” posts in Germany.
With more communication than ever before taking place on platforms like Facebook, this level of censorship is unprecedented. Previously, censors were limited by the amount of people they could send to monitor underground bookstores. Now, with human communication mediated by an-ever shrinking list of tech companies, computer algorithms can be used to monitor and censor the speech of entire nations. The future is here: not the one envisaged by Gene Roddenberry, but by George Orwell.
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