Sorry, but this title was the best pun I could come up with to express my concern—shared by many other netizens—about the smell of something rotten going on inside the world’s biggest social media network.
It started with revelations about the trashing of personal data on millions of FB subscribers, including nearly 1.2 million Filipinos who may have been affected by the data breach at Cambridge Analytica, one of the users of that data.
The squirming, hemming and hawing performance put up by FB founder Mark Zuckerberg at a US Senate hearing was something to behold. One could only quail at the thought of so much information about billions of people worldwide being handled by this prodigiously smart millennial with so little evident social maturity or moral judgment.
The price that may have to be paid for reposing so much power with these overpaid geeks has already become apparent in our own country, reportedly FB’s most active market outside the United States.
The National Privacy Commission, headed by the very sensible lawyer Raymund Liboro, wants to find out if FB adhered to “data processing principles of transparency, legitimate purpose, and proportionality required of information controllers processing data of Filipinos.”
Among other restrictions, Liboro says that FB’s dealings with data brokers, even if standard industry practice elsewhere, “is generally considered illegal under Philippine law as a form of unauthorized data processing.” Did the FB geeks even bother to ask their lawyers to find out what is and isn’t legal here?
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Not content with “perhaps” breaking the law, FB has gone ahead to partner with an outfit that ACTUALLY broke the law: Rappler, the online news site. As everyone knows by now, the Rappler guys, led by uber-woman Maria Ressa, maneuvered to bring in foreign investment with substantive management control power, in excess of what the Constitution allows them as a media company.
As FB’s new “fact-checking” partner, together with fellow yellow gadfly Vera Files, Rappler now has the power to shut down whatever online site it doesn’t like, not just by labelling them as “fake news” sites, but simply by claiming that they’re “unsafe” or they don’t meet FB’s “community standards”.
The question now, given the demonstrably yellow color of Rappler’s and Vera’s past record, is whether they will come down just as hard on anti-Duterte sites as they definitely will on pro-Duterte ones. Unfortunately, the reports starting to come in say that they won’t.
The new online truth police are reportedly even going farther: For example, managing the distribution of online content for political reasons. If you think reading fake news is bad enough, think about having to read only real news that’s been pre-selected for you by the “fact-checkers”—or missing other real news that they’ve withheld from you.
The best solution, as FB has itself offered, is to license more fact-checking partners from other parts of the political spectrum, even from government itself. That way, biases are neutralized and all fake news is proscribed, whether it’s “your” or “our” fake news.
The other solution, of course, is straightforward: to close down FB in this country. China has shown that it can be done. The ball is now in FB’s court.
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In another face-off with the yellow camp, Ateneo president Fr. Jose Villarin fired a big shot across the bow of the oust-Sereno movement.
In his statement, Villarin opined that “the legal and proper process is impeachment and not quo warranto.” He further claimed that the justices who had testified earlier against CJ Sereno at the House committee hearings had “effectively prejudged” the quo warranto petition.
In a case of “your priest, my priest,” San Beda law dean and consultative commission member Fr. Rannie Aquino has replied to Fr. Villarin, to the effect—paraphrased here—that quo warranto speaks to Sereno’s compliance with legal requirements BEFORE her appointment, while impeachment would deal with her behavior AFTER her appointment to the High Court.
The one does not necessarily cancel out the other. Every government official, whether impeachable or not, must comply with applicable requirements in order to validly take office. Any marriage can end up in divorce (wherever this is allowed), but it can also be annulled as invalid from the start, ab initio (especially if you ask the Catholics).
By accusing some justices of prejudging the case, Fr Villarin is veering dangerously close to contempt of court. But perhaps he’s calculated that the risk is worth it at this eleventh hour, when he may be sensing that the scales will ultimately swing against him, his fellow yellows, and their unworthy heroine.
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With the resort island of Boracay now joining the less idyllic Marawi City as objects of massive government rehabilitation, many people may worry about the success of these well-intentioned interventions. We’ve seen too many rehab programs before that went nowhere, especially under the previous administration.
This is why we welcome the latest suggestion from Senator Ralph Recto to use Boracay and Marawi as pilot sites for “Project DIME”. This is a joint DBM-DOST project that will employ satellites, drones, and other cutting-edge digital communications technology to monitor big-ticket projects. The President himself could run this project, live-streamed real-time, out of a Palace war room.
The parentage of DBM and DOST assures me that DIME is likely to be cost-efficient, transparent, effective, and high in local content. In fact, there’s a lot coming out of the DOST laboratories these days that deserves to be commercialized.
And DIME need not be confined to rehab projects. It can also serve as management dashboard for all those major infrastructure projects being touted under the government’s Build Build Build program that, however, seem to be taking their time in breaking ground, setting sail, or taking off, as the case may be.
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.