(by Massimiliano D'ELIA) Mark Zuckerberg today is tomorrow will face the trade and justice commissions of the US Senate to report on the recent scandals that have struck his invention, Facebook.
The prospect of new laws restricting Facebook and other Internet companies is extremely unlikely, not only because of a lack of political will or because of technology pressures, but because the issue under review is so complex that it would require huge efforts and resources. for a problem that is not considered upsetting. Zuckerberg is expected to witness before a joint hearing of the Senate trade and justice commissions.
The CEO of Facebook will have to try to clarify how Russia managed to have interference in the presidential elections of 2016 with the most famous and widespread platform in the world and if he himself knew that a consulting company like Cambridge Analytica had the data and profiles of about 87 millions of users.
Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of the Trade Committee has already said he does not expect anything new from the confrontation with Zuckerberg because 44 Senators will ask questions, or develop concepts in just 4 minutes each. The confrontation, Nelson argues, will just be an excellent world stage for Zuckerberg.
Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, of the justice commission told journalists that for 33enne Zuckerberg it will be a good opportunity to put an end to the story, without explaining the technicalities that have generated the story.
Privacy advocates have asked the secretary Sarah Sanders to bring to the Senate a proposal to get new regulations approved, at least for the future, leaving the past behind.
Republicans are against new regulations and are convinced that businesses in the digital world don't need gags. “I don't want to hurt Facebook, I don't want to regulate to reduce the essence of Facebook to 50 percent,” said Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana.
The essence of Facebook in fact, that is, the maximum pervasiveness is the secret of success where millions of dollars are concentrated in an unimaginable result of American and foreign companies.
Tarpare wings to Facebook means to put a blindfold before your eyes to not see the reality.
We speak of immaterial reality, a new and unexplored terrain of confrontation in some ways, where the so-called hybrid wars are already being fought.
Conflicts without conventional but more effective weapons. Apparently Moscow in these "circles" would be ahead of the other world superpowers, see the Crimean annexation case. Limiting Facebook with ties is not the solution to the problem, it is necessary to gear up and study new "virtual" ways of contrasting. China, for example, during the congressional elections blacked out 90 percent of the web in Asia, managing to also exclude VPNs. In Italy, for the first time in history, the electoral campaigns took place on social media in a pre-eminent way. Intelligence services use social media to track down novice terrorists, or to understand and profile suspects. In short, Facebook must be considered more as a tool than a threat: a sort of heritage for humanity not to be demonized.
It is up to those who use it to be able to interpret the messages they want to grasp from the network. Governments, on the other hand, will have to equip themselves to compete on equal terms in the new "intangible" environments.
