Taliban vs Zuckerberg

Providing space and sanctuary for radicals and terrorists to plan, organise, and execute attacks against governments and people is strictly frowned upon by the world community. You could be forgiven for mistaking the above statement about Afghanistan. It is rather about Facebook. The 9/11 attacks were planned and organised on the soil of Afghanistan.

They succeeded in bringing down the twin towers and even hitting the Pentagon. However, one of the planes, United flight 93, was brought down by the brave passengers on board in a rural area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It is not known what the intended target of that plane was but the possibilities include the US Capitol.

The attack on the US Capitol, however, was perfected by a group of Christian terrorists on January 6, who planned and organised the attack not in Afghanistan but on another fertile space for terrorism: Facebook. While those brave civilian passengers aboard United flight 93 moved fast and broke the terrorists’ plan, Mark Zuckerberg also believes in moving fast and breaking things, albeit in a completely opposite sense of the phrase.

The US ended its occupation of Afghanistan by striking a deal with the Taliban where the latter are required not to allow their land to be used by any foreign terrorist group to plan and execute terrorist attacks against the west, particularly the US. Facebook doesn’t have physical land mass but it provides space that is more fertile for the purpose of all kinds of terrorist and subversive activities.

Destabilising governments, dismantling power systems, corrupting minds, empowering brutal governments, allowing foreign governments to change the direction as well as the outcome of the ballot, creating mental illnesses, nurturing conspiracy theories, killing human rights as well as humans, broadcasting mass murder live, and so forth are some of the activities better executed on Facebook than in Afghanistan.

The US is asking the Taliban to end their association with al-Qaeda. Zuckerberg is linked to all the nefarious actors all across the globe to continue using Facebook as their go-to space to organise subversive and terrorist activities. The real war against humanity and human decency has been waged by Zuckerberg through Facebook.

We now know that Facebook made a deal with the government of Vietnam to suppress legitimate criticism against the government. Physical space for planning and organising terrorism has a lot of competition. Afghanistan is not alone. Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, etc can all provide such sanctuaries. When it comes to online space, there is no competition. Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp. All the three constitute the super heavy chunk of online space where conspiracy theories and radicalism are nurtured, encouraged and spread.

The whistleblower Frances Haugen said Zuckerberg “has unilateral control over 3 billion people”. The entire journalism of Australia was almost brought to its knees by Facebook earlier this year. When asked about Facebook’s role in Covid, President Biden said “They’re killing people.” But then even the American president had to take his words back. Hitler and Stalin would have loved to have that kind of extortion power and the ability to manipulate minds.

Haugen revealed that in order to tackle the dwindling engagement from Facebook users, it has rolled out algorithms where people view things on their feed that makes them angry. Facebook realises that people engage the most when they are angered by some issue. The Taliban asked America to leave their land for peace to return not only to Afghanistan but America as well.

Zuckerberg has created a space where he is asking people to come and fight just so that he can keep going to the bank. The Taliban may not make much money, if anything, by associating with al-Qaeda. Zuckerberg makes money by having the globe’s worst characters use Facebook to create more toxicity, hatred, and violence than the Taliban, al-Qaeda and ISIS combined.