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The power of Facebook

The rise of “the Enemy of the State” to global power

Facebook, which emerged as thefacebook.com, was launched by a group of Harvard students in 2004. The group was led by Mark Zuckerberg, who chose to call himself “the enemy of the state” in his first profile description on the platform. The initial goal of the online service was to create a space for Harvard students to interact with each other through personal profiles. The platform gained increasing interest and first, spread to other Ivy League universities, and then turned into a widely used service among educational institutions at national level in the US. In 2005 Facebook became available to international educational institutions, while in 2006 significant changes to the creation of profiles were introduced. These changes enabled a wider audience to join the platform regardless of their occupation and nationality. Until 2007 the creation of Facebook profiles was limited to just individuals, while the new features launched in 2007 made it possible for anyone to create a page, which in turn led to the rise of usage of the platform by stakeholders from all societal sectors – public, private, civil society .

Since its inception Facebook developed a diverse number of functions and services and what started out as a platform to connect students in the US became a big multinational corporation expanding its influence into new areas of the economy and life. While it rose to become one of the most powerful social media platforms globally, its popularity also became the reason for an increasing interest of state actors to define limits of Facebook's power.

Facebook: A threat to the state or a victim of the states

Bans on Facebook

With the rising reach of Facebook globally its political impact started becoming noticeable as also shown by the examples previously. While democratic countries have also censored content on Facebook, most of the action taken against the company was driven by autocratic states in their efforts against civil society unrest and oppositional forces. Multiple countries have placed temporary and some even permanent bans on the social media platform.

The first country to ban Facebook was Iran in the lead-up to its presidential elections in 2009. The social media platform was blocked in the effort of the Iranian government to suppress the voices of the opposition, as the platform connected the leading oppositional candidate to critical youth .

Soon after the ban was introduced in Iran, China banned Facebook. The ban followed after deadly civil clashes in the province of Xinjiang which were attributed to mobilization online . In 2000 a document of the Chinese State Council outlining categories that should be censored was released, where one of the points relates to the internet information services which promote hatred and racism among people . Therefore, the activity of Chinese users on Facebook groups that facilitated the mobilization for the Xinjiang riots is in violation of that principle. The violence in the province of Xinjiang became the reason for completely banning Facebook in China .

While citizens of North Korea have very limited access to the Internet in general, Facebook got banned in the country in 2016. Due to the already restricted usage of the platform in North Korea the main reason to ban the platform is to prevent real-time publications by foreigners visiting the country

Most recently, in the context of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia put a ban on Facebook and labeled Meta an ‘extremist’ company, whereby Facebook was seen as a platform promoting interests against Russia .

While the aforementioned bans on Facebook are driven by governmental efforts against oppositional forces, they can be seen as action taken based on the values held by the leaders of these states. In the same sense, the European Union has taken recent action against Facebook and other big companies, in an attempt to defend European values such as privacy, democracy and fair competition. The approach of the European Union is regulating such platforms and trying to achieve a change in behavior instead of banning them.

The EU's data protection concerns

The first big move against practices of Facebook and other big companies was the release of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR was negotiated in the context of the Snowden revelations, which in 2013 exposed the large-scale surveillance campaign of the US based on data of multinational corporations such as Facebook. This event significantly shifted the attention to large companies and resulted in their demonization and subsequently in the adoption of a very strict GDPR, as the salience of data protection increased among Europeans and European decision-makers respectively .

While the Snowden revelations exposed a number of companies, Facebook became the center of European attention in the two legal cases driven by the Austrian activist Max Schrems II. Schrems filed data protection-related complaints against Facebook, which resulted in the Schrems I and Schrems II rulings of the European Court of Justice. These rulings invalidated existing agreements for data transfers between the US and the EU, which significantly complicates the work of American companies relying on such transfers. These processes became the reason for the famous statement of Zuckerberg that Facebook could leave Europe, as no agreement between the EU and the US on data transfers might make Facebook’s operation in Europe unprofitable.

“With size comes responsibility” – European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager

At the end of 2020 the Digital Services Act Package was released by the European Commission and included two pieces of proposals for regulations – the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), both of which have significant implications for platforms like Facebook.

The DSA establishes a number of rights of users online, as well as directly regulates different types of content distributed by digital service providers. The DSA also implies that the European Commission should receive access to the data of such service providers in order to track compliance . The DMA, on the other hand, regulates competition and aims to ensure fairness among digital service providers by preventing unfair practices employed by big platforms acting as gatekeepers. Both regulations have been agreed on by the responsible EU institutions and will mean significant costs in case of non-compliance. However, it is worth noting that it will take another almost 2 years for the DSA to become applicable across the Union, while for the DMA it would be 6 months after it officially comes into force .

Despite enormous lobbying efforts, the EU is taking decisive action against companies like Facebook in the pursuit of protection of the Union’s values. Whether these newly introduced measures will have any effect on big platforms like Facebook remains to be seen as such companies possess the resources to cover even big fines, while the European regulatory apparatus is slow and might remain toothless in the fast-developing world of Big Tech.