What kind of internet do we want? (Let's not ask Facebook)

I didn’t want to write my last editor’s letter of 2019 about Facebook. A few months on from Sandberg’s mea culpa, Zuckerberg misguidedly evoked civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and abolitionist Frederick Douglass while giving testimony before Congress regarding Facebook’s digital currency. It’s great to know that the company responsible for disseminating Russian propaganda in the US general election of 2016 and the Brexit referendum has such high standards when it comes to protecting liberal democracy. Indeed, Zuck views Libra as extending “our democratic values and oversight across the world.” In case you missed it, this was just a few days after he made a speech at Georgetown University in which he announced that Facebook was happy to continue to publish political advertising that was demonstrably untrue. Shortly after that, Sandberg appeared on *Bloomberg’*s TicToc and said, “we believe in free expression, we believe in political speech and ads can be an important part of that… we’ve now announced a presidential-ads tracker, which means you can see any ad anyone is running who’s a political candidate, anywhere in the US, anywhere in the world even, if it’s not targeted at you.”