What the Facebook revelations have taught us – By Mishi Choudhary, Eben Moglen

Facebook is so cooked that even its new brand, Meta, means – in Hebrew, at least – “dead”. But put aside the florid symbolism and all the noise being made by already outraged politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, and what does all this really mean for us, here in India, its largest market?

We are yet to see any meaningful discussion from our leaders because they are all too deeply involved. The “Facebook papers” are in themselves smuggled screenshots of an immense miscellany of Facebook documents. They are a trove in which journalists have been digging somewhat coordinated tunnels, from which are beginning to see some refinable ore.

But, in reality, the papers have mostly been the launching platform for a sophisticated lobbying operation fronted by the leaker, a former Facebook employee named Frances Haugen. The papers do, at a minimum, substantiate Haugen’s central point, which is that Facebook studies itself thoroughly enough to know that it cannot under any circumstances be trusted….

This article originally appeared in The Indian Express.