The Internet: a New Year's resolution

"The law must stand up to the digital phenomenon. Facebook must respond as it responds to a newspaper or a television channel. Is not a whim, it is of justice.

The Internet: a New Year's resolution

"The law must stand up to the digital phenomenon. Facebook must respond as it responds to a newspaper or a television channel. Is not a whim, it is of justice."

Missing a few days for that many people spend their time to this thing, so classic as are the resolutions of New Year. This chronicler is not very fond of them, and not just because it's not often meet, but this time I would suggest a resolution collectively to the community of democratic countries in 2019: integrating finally, this huge nebula called the internet, and in particular the large companies that dominate, in the rule of law. Of international law and of the national. And not to aherrojarlas more than any other company, but to apply the same standards to the others, preventing and if necessary punish the commission of crimes ranging from the dissemination of calumnies and falsehoods to electoral manipulation.

the center of The debate lies in Facebook, whose youthful founder Mark Zuckerberg was a few years ago a popular icon, but that has fallen in a short time into disrepute with the successive revelations about abuses committed through a platform with 2,000 millions of users, whose devastating effects are being known. A few dates in The New York Times published a disturbing report on the attitude of the company, that for a long time masked and denied all of it, instead of facing up to his lack of control, that the hackers most claims were exploiting delictivamente.

For Facebook, until recently, theirs was a technology company like Apple or Microsoft, and not a means of communication. So I never applied the controls of accuracy, quality and interest that the media apply to themselves and that the law is watching.

As I wrote Emily Bell at the Columbia Journalism Review, "the crisis in Facebook lies in its attitude retrograde to the technology, which they see as a vector neutral business and not as a powerful cultural intervention".

you are Not far from having the same problems as other social networks, from Twitter to Instagram. And as you can not expect that their responsible, civic-mindedness and altruism innate (which until now have not been shown to), put coto directly to these abuses, the law must finally face up to the digital phenomenon. Facebook must respond as it responds to a newspaper or a television channel. Is not a whim. It is justice, and is necessary for the democratic process to stop deteriorate in the West, for the happiness of the autocrats in the rest of the world.

According to the criteria of

Learn more
Date Of Update: 21 December 2018, 20:01