Letters: Fake news

“Battling fake news” (May 13) put the issue of “fake news” in perspective. It is however, naive to expect Facebook and Google to act on the “problem” because they were set up for disseminating information wars. The US intelligence community started Massive Digital Data Systems in the late ’90s to develop “petabytes of data”. PhD student Sergey Brin developed Google’s “page rank algorithm” with this funding. Likewise, they were seized of the opportunity for “informational superiority” by dominating the information market. Facebook was born of seed funding by venture capitalists linked to central intelligence agencies and national security agency. It is no surprise that Peter Thiel sits on the board as owner of Palantir that specialises in data-mining and visualisation, and counts US government as customer.

Behind this smoke and mirrors strategy, Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp remains suspect; harvesting phone numbers and information exchange in real time, aggregating and providing them to governments on real-time basis serves to infringe on privacy of users since they own the decryption keys. “Fake news” as information propaganda is part of the objective of Google/Facebook — front ends for the US ugly military-industrial complex.

Abhishek Puri by email

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