On April 9th, an unusual trial will take place in a court in Vienna. Twenty-five thousand European citizens are taking the company that owns the social networking platform to court facebook, with serious charges that have to do with flagrant violations of privacy, antisocial collaborations with state surveillance services, illegal interconnection of personal data and their use, and even with psychological algorithms of entire social groups. Another 50,000 people from the rest of the world support the lawsuit, but for legal reasons they cannot be represented in the judicial extravaganza in Vienna. It is the first time that Facebook has been forced to open the curtains in front of its international audience, in order to evaluate its alleged illegal behind-the-scenes activity – if it is ultimately proven that there is such a thing. It is also the first time in European judicial annals that so many plaintiffs have crowded into one trial – if one excludes the people's courts of revolutionary moments when the people try their perpetrators. Of course, no court in the world, no matter how fair, can handle such a crowd, so here we have an Austrian law firm that is happy to take on the representation of the plaintiffs in the case “Europe v. Facebook”. And here, the puzzles begin: since the lawsuit was filed in August 2014, how come we have reached 2015 and the Facebook mob has not heard the news? The 75,000 likes that the case received (the sum of those who subscribe to the lawsuit) may be a small fraction compared to the global Facebook population of 1.5 billion happy people who constantly post their private moments, but it is enough to spread the news. This has certainly not happened, as the financial data published by the company itself proves: in the last quarter of 2014, when people at work were going unpaid for years or were making do with starvation wages, Facebook recorded net profits of 670 million US dollars from a turnover of almost 4 billion, having increased its daily users by 18 percent compared to the same quarter of 2013. On a normal planet of common sense people, this could not happen. Because, when they tell you that you are being exploited, and to your detriment, you normally turn your back on them so that they do not exploit you any further. On the Facebook planet, however, this did not happen, either because the population did not learn about it (how is that possible?), or because for some reason they did not care when they learned about it – either way, neither of the two is flattering. The bad thing is that the Facebook mob has shown the same inaction in other cases where its dignity was violated. Other times in the past, news has spread about illegal uses of personal information that Facebook's vast database handles and collects. But, even without the bad news, there is a clear logical equation that raises reservations in the common mind – when one and a half billion people do the same thing, they will not go unnoticed, and this is exactly what happens on the superhighways of social media. In other words, one and a half billion people who submit in real time what they think, where they go, what concerns them, and a whole bunch of other personal information, of course, are not left unexploited and all their information is lost in the cyberspace matrix as if it were some useless e-trash. Quite the opposite. For some, it is valuable information, in every sense: for the mammoth company itself that treasures by trafficking the private chatter of its people, but also for the employees of political administrators who, from the gray areas of legality, feed mysterious algorithms that make our lives difficult now, and more difficult later. Algorithms that (for anyone who didn't understand), perfect the models for predicting the behavior of entire societies, achieving levels of repression and management that no one has ever imagined. Meanwhile, everything seems to indicate that the Facebook mob, like every other mob on earth, believes that freedom is saying whatever one wants, without fear. They are exactly the kind of people Goethe meant when he said that the most hopelessly enslaved are those who think they are free. In its digital version, Goethe's thought changes little, and becomes "the most hopelessly naive are those who think the internet is free." It is not free, and we already have some evidence, for the skeptics who lack common sense. Just last summer, the (real) world was abuzz with the revelation that Facebook was illegally using the personal information of 600,000 of its users to conduct social psychology experiments without their knowledge. In fact, in the US, citizens angered by that revelation created a movement calling on Facebook users to simply abstain from the platform for 70 days. Not deletion, just abstinence for 70 days. The call gathered a few thousand signatures and after that, no one listened. Lid, the oldest (since 1863) and politically entangled scientific journal PNAS (an acronym for the mysterious title Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US), published the findings of Facebook's illegal experiments, which were nice and useful: "it was experimentally established that an emotional contagion is achieved between users, which is transmitted on a large scale through social networking applications." Which means that those interested in crowd psychology have made sure that, if they want, they spread emotions through Facebook websites and posts: for example, if they want, they make users pessimistic or if they want, they make them optimistic, by distributing corresponding messages with the Facebook app. Of course, it is difficult to convince a Facebook resident how bad what he is doing is, and how someone smarter can manipulate him through what he is doing. This difficulty in convincing the user of Facebook and related social media about the problem is due to something else, which was also found with live psychological experiments. Recently (just on January 8, 2015) Ohio State University published a study that reached conclusions that were not at all flattering for the victims: posting selfies contained seeds of psychopathological narcissism, and the more selfies there were, the more serious the case of the party-goer. In other words, this is where the problem of distrust of narcissistic users comes from and is fed back, as they experience Facebook as the mirror of the fairy tale that always tells them that they are the most beautiful, and so they do not break up with it even if they find out that it is working for them.
The pessimism that this situation exudes is somewhat eased by the announcement of the Europe v. Facebook case. Because, it is not just that there were 75,000 users who were angry and did not forget it, but that there was (for the first time) a judge who wants to see the credibility of the complaints. Complaints that make up a frightening list. In detail: (1) unenforceable privacy policies (2) unauthorized use of data (3) participation in the surveillance program of citizens by the American NSA and the corresponding British GCHQ, through the global telecommunications surveillance program PRISM (4) recording users' browsing of websites through apps and through the like button (5) illegal use of the Graph Search search engine that was integrated into Facebook in 2013 (6) provision of users' personal data to third parties, without authorization, and (7) interconnection and evaluation of all databases (Big Data) for the purpose of analyzing and measuring users' interactive activity.
One can easily shudder at what is being reported and remains to be proven. The bad thing is that this shudder will probably never reach the backbone of the Facebook community, a community that is none other than the one that (also) very quickly forgot the recent serious cases of Manning, Wikileaks, Assange or Snowden. Cases that should normally change the fate of the internet, but are already unclaimed and carefree joy prevails in cyberspace. Thus, it is up to Austria to make history in April, where for the first time Facebook in the form of people (who will represent it), will be tried for what is being attributed to it. In Ireland, where the offices of Facebook's international administration are located, similar trials have not even begun, since according to the provisions in force there, such a large number of plaintiffs "threatens public order". Probably right, if you consider how so many plaintiffs would react, angry at the outcome of a trial that would affect their dignity. In Austria, they are not afraid of reactions. Because, either they have a terrible police force or they simply have complete trust in the forgetfulness of the people.
