Musk accuses Facebook of manipulating public opinion

Facebook (a social network owned by Meta, whose activities are recognized as extremist and banned in Russia) manipulates people’s opinions, and therefore does not open the source code of its algorithm. This statement was made by the owner of X (formerly Twitter) Elon Musk.

“Facebook manipulates the public almost all over the world. That’s why they won’t open source their algorithm,” Musk wrote in X.

Thus, the businessman commented on the Sky News investigation. Edition figured outthat Meta is facilitating censorship of the platform’s coverage of the Australian referendum to recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the continent’s First Nations and secure their right to vote in the legislature.

In March 2018 Musk deleted their SpaceX and Tesla Facebook pages. This came amid a scandal surrounding the social network due to the fact that, as The New York Times (NYT) found out, Cambridge Analytica was collecting data from Facebook users in order to develop an algorithm for analyzing the political preferences of voters. After that, Zuckerberg testified to the US Congress.

Russian authorities have also repeatedly accused Meta of manipulation. In September 2018, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova statedthat the social network is becoming “a manipulative tool of the American intelligence services to clean up the information space from materials objectionable to official Washington.”

In Russia, Meta is recognized as an extremist organization, its activities are prohibited. The court made this decision in March 2022 due to the spread of materials on the corporation’s social networks calling for violence against the Russian military. The country also blocked social networks owned by the company – Instagram and Facebook.