Facebook is governing human expression more than any government does or ever has," said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. "They have taken on the task of defining hate speech and other unacceptable speech, which is a quasi-sovereign power... and we the public have no opportunity to contribute to the decision-making, as would be the case if the decisions were being made by a government."
Indeed, despite company executives' paying lip service to the concept of democracy from time to time, Facebook is structurally monarchical.
To the University of Virginia media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, campaigners against Facebook need to come to grips with the global nature of its threat.
"The US got off easy in 2016-- the same year that Rodrigo Duterte took over the Philippines by riding Facebook to victory, and two years after Narendra Modi took over India by riding Facebook to victory. Much of the world suffers from all of the Facebook maladies much worse than the US."
Vaidhyanathan argued that solutions to Facebook's ills cannot be achieved with oversight from above but will require a more fundamental shift from below. "The root of Facebook is the fact that it is a global intrusive surveillance system that leverages all that behavioral data to target both ads and non-ad content at us."