A Bigger Bang — How Facebook Kills Global Democracy

Facebook, as with British Justice, is open to all — just like the Ritz.

The Big Bang in the City of London Financial Sector happened in the Eighties and permitted US banks to massively expand their operations.

Stuffy old British banking gave way to a more openly money grabbing approach which meant people from varied backgrounds were allowed in to make their fortunes.

The Masons and the City establishment still ran the place but the lower orders were allowed in and, to a certain degree, their loyalty could be relied on.

This is what Thatcher, Blair, and Cameron represented.

A bizarre mingling of privilege and meritocracy.

In which a man like Jacob Rees-Mogg can praise Chancellor Sajid Javid as an inspirational Tory success story while also rightly claiming that the Queen is just a Constitutional Monarch (ie must know her place).

Rees-Mogg’s own father edited the Times and was only admitted to the Lords on a Life Peerage, in 1988.

So despite his professed love of Erskine & May, Jacob Rees Mogg’s fetish for Parliament’s rites and tradition is mainly theatrical.

His own family weren’t admitted till he himself was approaching twenty.

Facebook

Why the focus on the City of London and Rees Mogg?

The effect of Facebook on democracy and particularly political marketing is akin to the Big Bang on Finance.

There are so many social factors and consequences that accompany such a development.

Facebook was always going to be a threat to TV and Newspapers.

Zuckerberg allows everyone a voice, political messaging, without restriction — for a price.

Micro-targetting of lies has jumped from possible & scalable to now the absolute norm.

— Ranjan Balakumaran (@financialeyes) November 12, 2019

As Rees-Mogg is in cahoots with Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, his own sister joined the Brexit Party and became an MEP, it should not come as such a surprise that yesterday Nigel Farage withdrew every Brexit Party candidate from any seat in which the current MP is a Tory.

This strategy would be nothing if Boris Johnson hadn’t already performed a purge of the party and guaranteed 100% loyalty to the Hard Brexit cause.

Personally I believe the EU and the ECB are awful corporatist militarist vehicles that UK should have nothing to do with.

So now Trump, Bannon, Farage, Rees-Mogg, Cummings, & Johnson are a more immediate threat.

They have to be dealt with but not by staying in the corporatist EU.

Ad Libraries

If you look at Facebook’s arguments for profiteering from political BS, the rôle of the Ad Library takes centre stage.

Facebook lets politicians scam its users by citing free expression and increased transparency about who is buying adverts and how much they are spending.

Here is today’s UK Ad Library (link above). It shows information about Sunday 9th November, as I write this post it is 0438 on the morning of Tuesday 12th November (GMT )

You can click on any of the entries for more details.

This is the Boris Johnson Page :

Ad-Library-Boris-Johnson-Page-part-one

The openness with which politicians now lie is not something we are going to be able to do much about as gatekeepers and intermediaries, ie press barons and their digital counterparts, now allow all sorts of untruth to go unchallenged.

It’s a great time to be blogging about the truth, sadly a little too great.