Is Facebook Using the African Continent as a Proxy to Target Voters?

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We're running, in general, this grand psychological experiment on what happens when you plug three billion people into an automated attention information sorting system. And no one's ever run thatx ment before, and it's kind of an unsafe experiment,. I feeleve facebook only has something like 20 major languages, or something like that, that they do fact checking for. The russians have really understood that this resentment happens to mirror the resentment felt here inthe sor in europe, against raceism, institutional raceism. It's important to know what groups are being politically weaponized against each other because that's what's going to be used later on.

This summer, Facebook unveiled “2Africa,” a subsea cable project that will encircle nearly the entire continent of Africa — much to the surprise of Julie Owono. As Executive Director of Internet Without Borders, she’s seen how quickly projects like this can become enmeshed in local politics, as private companies dig through territorial waters, negotiate with local officials and gradually assume responsibility over vital pieces of national infrastructure. “It’s critical, now, that communities have a seat at the table,” Julie says. We ask her about the risks of tech companies leading us into an age of “digital colonialism,” and what she hopes to achieve as a newly appointed member of Facebook’s Oversight Board.