Going Into Uncharted Waters

Taiwan, formally known as the Republic of China (and hereafter in this article referred to as Taiwan), featured prominently in the news recently. As late as September 13th, the Biden administration was mulling changing the name of America’s de facto embassy in Taiwan, a democratic self-governing island nation that has been separate from mainland communist China since the Chinese Civil War, from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office to the Taiwan Representative Office. This pondering of a decision contributes to and comes amidst a backdrop of increasing strain in the relations between the United States and China, formally known as the People’s Republic of China (and hereafter referred to as China, mainland China, or some variant thereof).

The subject of Taiwanese sovereignty is a controversial issue for China, as China is pursuing a One China Policy that aims to reunite what it sees as a renegade province under mainland control. A symbolic shift toward recognizing the independence of Taiwan, even if in name only, by the US runs counter to this long-standing policy. Indeed, such is the sentiment in China toward this issue that their state media warns of severe military and economic measures by their country against Taiwan should the US act on this policy. It should be noted that China has traditionally taken a firm line against other countries recognizing Taiwan through halting trade and recalling their diplomatic presence in such countries. China’s attempts to woo Taiwan, despite the latter’s growing popular preference for a distinct identity from the mainland, toward unification can be seen in its volume of economic trade with the island that makes Taiwan China’s 5th largest trading partner. Taiwan in turn recognizes the danger of being too dependent on a power that wishes to directly control it and has pursued a policy of economic decoupling from China by diversifying its trade partners.

The Chinese passion for reunification is motivated by a need to erase the remaining vestiges of its Century of Humiliation, which was a time when foreign powers held colonial designs over China, and that such a nationalistic act would give greater legitimacy to the ruling Communist Party. The return to mainland China of territories like Hong Kong was thus a piece of this project of reunification. While Hong Kong’s return to China was conditioned on China adopting a policy of “One Country, Two Systems” that would allow the city to enjoy autonomous self-rule until 2047, China effectively reneged on this promise through its 2021 security law. Should Taiwan too fall to mainland China, this would mean that its formidable $600 billion economy would be added to China’s already massive economy and it gives the mainland access to Taiwan’s advanced technological dominance in the semiconductor business. A Chinese controlled Taiwan would also mean that China would have an easier time engaging in power projection in the Pacific Ocean.

China’s foreign policy has become more assertive on the world stage as they have not shied away from publicly verbally denouncing American foreign policy even when they are on American soil. China’s assertiveness has not stopped at words as the US Coast Guard reported that they spotted Chinese warships in August near Alaska. The Chinese have, however, done much more than threaten the United States, Taiwan’s great power patron, but have also engaged in aerial incursions of Taiwanese airspace as recently as September 17th. Indeed, the Chinese have repeatedly broken records in the number of aerial incursions and the scale of incursions over Taiwan in recent years. In addition to the campaign from the air, the Chinese have engaged in a campaign of trying to demoralize Taiwan by raising doubt about the credibility of American promises of defense of the island in the aftermath of the Afghanistan debacle.

Should Taiwan fall to China this would further damage American prestige at home and aboard. Taiwan’s current defense strategy recognizes the huge military imbalance against itself in a scenario of a hostile Chinese invasion. It therefore seeks to make such an invasion as costly to China as possible through a variety of countermeasures. Yet, there are major concerns over Taiwan’s capacity to fully carry out its strategy. The Taiwanese defenses against a prospective Chinese invasion are lacking given that their tanks are old, with the earliest tank being from the 1970s, and the new 108 tanks that Taiwan purchased from America are not scheduled to be delivered until 2023. Taiwan’s 2017 changes to its conscription system, which downgraded the conscription service from one year to four months, has been criticized as dysfunctional and causing manpower shortages in front line units that are vital to Taiwan’s defense strategy. Taiwan’s armed forces are noted as being undersupplied and underfunded their logistical units with the result that a lot of their combat units are far below military readiness needed to enact Taiwan’s defense strategy. It is in part as a response to these concerns over the preparedness of Taiwan’s military that the government recently announced a $8.69 billion boost in military spending.

A spat over Taiwan is not just a matter of international concern but regional concern. Japan, China’s long standing Northeast Asian rival, has warm ties with Taiwan and has taken a keen interest in the island nation. In July, Japan released its annual defense whitepaper which unprecedentedly cited Taiwan explicitly as being “important for Japan’s security.” Japan has followed up on this announcement by conducting unprecedented bilateral talks with Taiwan over the issue of security in August, which angered China. The issue of Taiwanese independence has increased weight in the halls of Tokyo who see the fate of the island as linked to Japan’s own security in their rivalry against China. The fact that Taiwan’s independence is seen to be vital to Japan’s security, attains greater significance when one considers that a Japanese 2015 law enables Japan to participate in collective military operations providing that the situation threatens Japan’s survival. This represents a remarkable shift from Japan previously declining to comment publicly on whether it considered the fate of the island vital enough to Japanese interests to potentially engage in militarily action to help defend it against China. In addition to these verbal declarations of commitment toward Taiwan, Japan has also ramped up its missile defenses on Ishigaki island, which is near Taiwan, as both a self-protective gesture and to cover Taiwan from potential attacks.

Taiwan remains one of many hotspots between the two biggest global powers, China and the United States. Taiwan has the hallmarks of being strategically and symbolically important to a growing China while having some strategic and symbolic importance for American policymakers as well. A humiliating loss of Taiwan would be a mighty blow to already damaged American prestige and credibility particularly in Northeast Asia. It would in turn create an increased sense of insecurity in America’s allies in Northeast Asia, such as Japan, and damage their belief in the value of their alliance with the United States. Increased Chinese pressure on Taiwan via its aerial incursions are already contributing toward a sense of insecurity on the part of both Taiwan and its allies. The question of whether this hotspot will erupt into a full-blown crisis that threatens to become an active war is a relevant one. America’s desire to regain international credibility post-Afghanistan coupled with a bygone unipolar mindset and Chinese overassertiveness mixed with a sense that time may not be on their side when it comes to uniting with Taiwan lead towards a scenario, where China feels compelled to act.

Such a crisis would have regional dimensions as well as the fact that the Japanese have taken a direct interest in the security of Taiwan presents China another obstacle in its attempt to reunite the island nation with the mainland. At present, American policy toward China is a confusing one of being “competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, adversarial where it must be” whereas China sees such a policy in reality as seeking to undermine China and contributing toward a zero sum Cold War mentality. Ideally, a Cuba-level crisis over Taiwan can be averted to American’s advantage but should it happen, it may clarify American policy toward China and may solidify how China sees its prospects and the timeline of reunification.

On August 26, 1960 Presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy gave his views on Israel to a convention of American Zionists, “Israel was not created in order to disappear—Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom.”

This Zionistic sentiment stands in contrast with Ilhan Omar, another member of the same Democratic Party, who tweeted that, “It's all about the Benjamins baby.”

Although Israel is not above criticism, and even supporters of the Jewish state can legitimately disagree over the US’ exact policies towards it, the divergence between two leading Democrats’ views on Israel over a period of six decades could not be more stark. JFK waxed lyrical over the virtues of the Jewish state. When discussing the pro-Israel lobby in the US, Rep. Omar did not hesitate to invoke an antisemitic trope regarding Jews and money. (It is true that she apologized for her Tweet, but only after being scolded for it by mainstream Democratic leaders.) Nor was this attitude toward Israel due to some greater ideological commitment stemming from isolationist or more neutral sentiments about the Middle East.  Blatant antisemitism such as this emerges from a political milieu in which the most extreme and unjustified accusations against Israel (“apartheid”, “racist”, “terrorist”) are bandied around as political commonplaces. And such attitudes have practical consequences.

In September 2021, passage of a short-term government-spending bill was stalled in the House of Representatives, not by the Republican minority, but by members of the Democratic majority. Opposition came from a small cadre on the party’s left wing, referred to as “the Squad”. The original members of this grouping – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan – are thought to represent a section of the youthful demographic of Democratic voters. This is not the first time that they have challenged the more centrist leadership of their own party on an issue they disagree with. This time, however, the bone of contention was an item in the spending bill that would have funded the replenishment of Israel’s Iron Dome missile system that had been depleted in the course of defending Israeli civilians from Hamas rocket attacks during the missile war launched from Gaza in Spring 2021.

So, what were they so upset about?

Alan Dershowitz is one of many who have highlighted the grotesque nature of the opposition to funding the Iron Dome program. He points out that the anti-missile system is purely defensive in nature, is not intended to kill or injure, allows Israel to prevent casualties amongst its own population without inflicting any on Palestinian Arabs and was supported by President Obama. As such it seems to be a strange target for left wing critics of Israel, who tend to couch their critique of the Jewish state in terms of its alleged abuses of Palestinian Arab human rights. Why not oppose American funding for an offensive weapon system? The answer to that question illuminates the nature of a segment of the left’s opposition to Israel.

David Hirsh is a British sociologist, a long time (but no longer) member of the British Labour Party and a fierce opponent of left antisemitism, recently had this to say about some of the attitudes regarding the Jewish State that are widely shared on the antisemitic segment of the left. Amongst his comments, “Israel relies for its existence on the 'imperialist' states (read democratic states), yet Israel is also hugely powerful and influential amongst the imperialist states. Antisemitism does not exist, antisemitism is invented by Jews to silence criticism of Israel and Israel is responsible for antisemitism. After what they went through, Jews should know better than to behave like Nazis. Jews murder civilians, particularly children, carelessly, or carefully, in order to terrorize, or just out of pure evil. Jews are white and then white supremacist and so antisemitism is not a racism, it is not something which targets the oppressed or which makes its victims oppressed; Islamophobia is the new antisemitism, antisemitism is a thing of the past. Israel is the only illegitimate nation. Israel isn't a real nation, unlike all other nations. Israelis are vulgar and arrogant, and they behave badly when they travel.” 

When strung together like this, the varying and often contradictory nature of the allegations become obvious. The way in which Israel is portrayed as a supreme evil explains the central role it occupies in the demonology of the radical left. Given this extreme (and of course, inaccurate) view of the Jewish State, the animosity towards it is not going to go away. It will continue to manifest itself against every expression of support for Israel, no matter how innocuous. Iron Dome can be defunded, because anything to do with Israel is fair game. Israel is such an overwhelming, malevolent and an all-consuming threat that every opportunity to thwart it must be seized. Funding to save Israeli lives will be attacked, because – in this warped worldview – Israelis simply do not deserve to live. The overlap between this worldview and that of classical antisemitism is so obvious as to be inescapable. It should be noted that other potential explanations of the worldview from “the Squad'' toward Israel are difficult to make. Their attitude cannot simply be attributed as issuing from some greater ideological commitment to isolationism or from more neutral sentiments about the Middle East. This is evident by the fact that “the Squad” is happy to spend their country’s cash on overtly pro-Palestinian pet projects like UNRWA , the scandal-ridden UN agency dedicated toward perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem. The fact that, within a week, the funding for Iron Dome was restored by the more rational members of the Democratic Party, should not lull us into a false sense of security. Those who traffic in such vile views are now a constituency that must be listened to and mollified. And if anyone thinks that such views are doomed to remain marginal, have no further to look than the recent history of the UK’s progressive party, Labour.

Labour’s Love Lost

Britain’s social democratic party has generally had a positive relationship with Zionism. It unreservedly supported the rights of Jews to Palestine even before the famed Balfour Declaration was issued and  the party supported Zionist aims during the subsequent British Mandate for Palestine. The feelings were reciprocated, with British Jews voting in disproportionate numbers for Labour candidates. Although the relationship did exhibit ups and downs on the whole, the relationship was a happy one. What hostility there was to Jewish nationalism in British politics tended to come from conservatives with links to the oil industry, who wanted to maintain good relations with Arab oil producing countries. 

The UK’s Labour Party had always had an international outlook, maintaining close and friendly relations with like minded parties around the world. Since, from the pre-State era until the election of Menachem Begin in 1977, Israeli politics was dominated by its own social democratic party, it was easy for Britain’s socialists to see common ground with a “sister” party in Israel. All that started to change with the rise of the “New Left” in the 1960s.

No “summer of love” for the Jews

The nature of and reasons for the divergence between “new” and “old” left is too big an issue to tackle in this article, but what is important to note is a shift away from the left’s traditional roots in the working classes and towards domination by an academically trained elite. Such a cadre was capable of enunciating a well worked out ideology that marked them out as “purists” who did not compromise their socialist principles. In the ideological context of European socialist parties, this gave an intellectual minority the power of a tail that could wag the party dog.

Central to the new left’s worldview was anti-imperialism. Since the dissolution of the overseas empires of most European states was already largely completed by the late 1960s, the anti-imperialist imperative shifted to vaguer targets, such as supposed “neo-imperialism”. Within this worldview, Israel was seen as an “outpost” of Western Imperialism in the Middle East, a tool of shadowy forces bent on world domination. Israel’s success in staving off a policidal attack in 1967, and the subsequent extension of the Jewish state’s rule over territories largely inhabited by Palestinian Arabs made the Jewish State self evidently imperialist and even racist in the minds of the extreme left. From this point on, antipathy to Israel and Zionism became the shibboleth of left wing credibility.

War for Labour’s soul

Labour spent nearly two decades in opposition from 1979. When Tony Blair rose to the leadership of the party in 1997, he did so as the head of a pragmatic and non-doctrinaire version of the new left, for whom issues like gay rights, feminism and ethnic diversity were as important as economic prosperity. Although Blair himself is a supporter of Israel, the party as a whole became less so. The left wing of the party felt that Labour had sold its socialist soul “merely” to be in power. To this day, one of the most insulting epithets hurled by the left wing at their rivals within the party is, “Blairite”.

Sitting at the back of the Labour benches in the House of Commons was an undistinguished legislator called Jeremy Corbyn. An MP since 1983 one of his few distinguishing feats in Parliament was his prominence in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cycling! This unreconstructed 1970s crank was catapulted to the role of party leader by a revision of its arcane internal election rules, and quickly came to exemplify the new, radical direction the party was taking. When, as so often happens, criticism of Israel shaded over into antisemitism, Corbyn proved to be blind to it, indifferent to it, or in sympathy with it. Antisemitism became entrenched within Labour and a number of prominent Jewish party members and legislators left over the issue.

In 2017 Corbyn led Labour to a better than expected result (although not a victory) in that year’s general election. His comparative success was widely attributed to his radicalism and appeal to the youth vote. 

Gradually, the luster eroded from Mr. Corbyn’s leadership. No intellectual giant, he frequently performed poorly in media interviews. His radicalism had never been limited to antipathy to Israel and repeated expressions of support for IRA terrorists (and other unsavory causes) from the 70s and 80s arose from the dead like zombies to pursue him. By the time 2019’s election results were counted it became clear that Labour had suffered its worst electoral defeat since before WWII. In the wake of the debacle Mr. Corbyn was forced to resign, a more centrist leader (Sir Keir Starmer) was elected and the UK’s independent Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) reported that the party had been guilty of a number of instances of antisemitism.

The departure of Mr. Corbyn from the Labour leadership does not alter the fact that in 2019 one in three ballots cast was for a party that had been revealed to be antisemitic. Although few people voted for Labour because it was antisemitic, most of those who favored it with their vote were willing to do so despite it being antisemitic. Such are the consequences of a mainstream political party being subverted by Jew hatred.

Although Labour has taken some steps to place the Corbyn era behind it, the ghost of his leadership lingers. This anti-Israel (and frequently antisemitic) Corbynite section of the left is guaranteed by its very radicalism the role of the supposed conscience of the party. This means that, despite its paucity of numbers, it is now one of the established voices within the party and as such, needs to be catered to. Labour’s national conference in September 2021 saw the party adopt a policy in favor of sanctions against “apartheid” Israel. Clearly, once the antisemitic genie is out of the bottle it is difficult to put him back in and seal the cork.

Lessons for Democrats

It is one of the features of ideological politics that a dedicated fringe can exert disproportionate influence over the majority. Whatever one thinks of the growing membership of the Squad, no one can accuse them of indolence – certainly not where Israel is concerned. Just as Mr. Corbyn and his supporters dragged the British Labour party into institutional antisemitism, so too could Ilhan Omar and her cohorts do the same for the Democrats, unless the pro-Israel majority is willing to take a stand against them. It is not enough that an attempt to stem US funding for saving the lives of Israeli children was reversed, it should never have been considered in the first place.

In some ways, Squad members remind me of Holocaust deniers. Once you debate with a Holocaust denier – whether you defeat his argument or not – he has already won because his objective is to make the Holocaust the subject of debate. The Squad, and those who think like them, do not need to convince everyone that killing Jews is legitimate, they just need to make it an opinion worthy of discussion. Progressives need to make such views as inexpressible in their own political camp as support for lynchings are amongst conservatives.

On September 26th Germany elected a new parliament. The results confirmed what polls in the weeks before the election had predicted: The conservative Christian Democrat Union (CDU) party, which has been leading the government for the last 16 years with Angela Merkel, received dramatic losses and lost its first place in the parliament. While Merkel is still popular in Germany, the long-standing party leader did not run for the chancellery again. In her place, the CDU ran with a less popular candidate, Armin Laschet, who made some mistakes during his campaign for the chancellorship. 

In contrast, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) improved their vote count by 5% (compared to the last election) and is the clear winner of this election. Even there is only 1% difference (in their share of the overall count) between the SPD and  CDU , the SPD has celebrated the results of the September elections,  which stands in contrast to its poor showing in recent years. The SPD´s victory is particularly sweet for its candidate for chancellor, Olaf Scholz, since his previous attempt to become party chair failed due to his inability to gain the support of the progressive wing in the SPD, since he is considered a centrist, a political identity that allowed him to bring new voters out to support the SPD.  

Although the Greens, had been leading in the polls with 30 percent of the vote for about half a year, underperformed these polls by receiving under 15 percent of the vote like other small-medium sized parties. Their high expectations to lead the next government proved to be unrealistic given that many voters did not approve of their platform calling for banning things used in daily life in the name of enacting strong climate protections.

Also, the Greens were shocked that first-time voters (age 18-21), which they believed to be their base, were evenly split between them and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). FDP is a center-right liberal party, labelled by their political opponents as a party of and for the affluent, runs on lowering taxes, social services, and reducing the state’s role to only what they see as its necessary functions.

So why did so many young people also vote for the FDP? Because more and more students disagree with the radical climate thesis of the greens, with a left-wing model of society, and all the messages they receive from left-wing progressive teachers and university lecturers.

Also, the FDP has a very modern appearance and have used social media effectively in their effort to recruit younger voters.

The Left party, the former communist party in eastern Germany, declined by half of their strength and even finished a bit below the 5% threshold (but will remain in parliament because in the German election system a party gets its full strength represented in parliament even below the threshold if it wins three or more direct mandates ). Their campaign, aiming on a potential coalition with SPD and Greens for a clearly leftist government, did not succeed.

In the light of those results, many Germans wonder: who will become the next chancellor? In Germany, the chancellor is elected by the parliament. Because no single party has a majority of votes, they have to build a coalition. Three possible coalitions are realistic: the SPD with the CDU, the SPD with the Greens and the FDP, or the CDU with the Greens and the FDP.

The current government is a coalition of the CDU with the SPD, but both parties prefer not to continue their cooperation. After the first results got published on the night of the election, the FDP and the Greens announced that they would meet each other first and then decide whether to go together in a coalition with the SPD or the CDU. The FDP has positions closer to the CDU, the Greens have positions closer to the SPD.  These coalition talks started already a few days after the election: After the FDP and greens met to discuss potential cooperation, they each met separately with the senior parties, the CDU and SPD respectively.

Meanwhile, in the CDU, a growing number of senior members have started to speak out publicly against party chairman Laschet and blame him for the poor result. In January, when Laschet became CDU leader, and later in May, when he became the chancellor-candidate of CDU and the Christian Social Union party (the CSU being the Bavarian sister party of the CDU), he promised a strictly non-populist campaign, in contrast to his rivals within the CDU (who wanted to focus more on the differences between the CDU and other parties) and focused on the issues of relevance to the CDU. As a result of running the campaign Laschet did, he did not communicate the positions of CDU clearly to the voters and in a live TV press meeting with victims of the flood, he was caught laughing which was seen as offensive and insensitive. This likely played a role in his poor approval ratings and the CDU’s disappointing finish in the recent elections. On the night of the election, as the first results came in , he shrugged off the huge losses of CDU and announced that he intended to build a coalition lead by himself and the CDU anyway.

Additionally, the CSU, the Bavarian sister party of the CDU (as the CDU does not run in Bavaria), also jumped in to criticize Laschet. This comes after the head of the CSU, Soder, had already criticized Laschet’s poor performance during the campaign itself.

Laschet´s only chance for a future in politics is by becoming chancellor of a coalition with the Greens and the FDP, otherwise he will have to step back from the party chair. Already a few people of the CDU leadership committees showed interest in becoming the party chairman, and Laschet declared two weeks after the election to moderate a process of finding a new leadership for the CDU (although it was not clear from his statement whether he steps back or not).

He still has high hopes in the coalition negotiations going on. The FDP and the Greens have a lot of differences, and the SPD has not found a way to overcome those differences, (do you mean they haven’t been able to achieve a compromise to move past these political differences) such as the FDP’s desire to lower taxes and promises not to raise tax rates, while the Greens and the SPD want to establish new taxes.

During the first coalition negotiations between the FDP, SDP and Greens, details of the negotiations were kept from the press. However, in the two meetings involving the CDU, (one meeting with the Greens, another with the FDP), discussions were leaked, almost word by word to the press. Unsurprisingly, this led to the FDP and the Greens feeling disgruntled because the leaks had created an atmosphere of distrust and showed the CDU’s (and Laschet’s) inability to guarantee the privacy and confidentiality needed to negotiate and make a deal, away from the public eye. It’s likely that Laschet´s competitors from the CDU board are actively trying to undermine those negotiations.

However, this does not mean a coalition of the CDU with the Greens and the FDP is totally impossible. Right now, a coalition lead by the SPD has by far the highest chances, but if these negotiations fail, the CDU is an alternative senior coalition partner. The precondition announced by the potential coalition partners is a settled leadership of the CDU, since these days the whole CDU party leadership will be reelected in the coming months and the CDU has no clear leader now. As of now, the person with the greatest chance to become the next German chancellor, is the man with the remarkable political comeback, Olaf Scholz.

On October 4th, Facebook and its subsidiaries (Instagram and Whatsapp) were hit with an almost 6 hour long outage that saw the company lose around $65 Million in Ad revenue and 4.9% of its stock value  by the time it was over. The incident came at a sensitive time for Facebook, with the congressional testimony of a former company executive (in its misinformation branch) set to take place the following day of October 5th, where Frances Haugen accused Facebook of not doing enough to combat misinformation and preventing the spread of harmful data, painting a picture of a company pushing indifferent or delusional to the negative ramifications of Instagram’s impact on its users and society as a whole, with particular focus on how Instagram has affected the mental health of its users under age 18. The social networks recent debacles have further amplified public focus on the extent to which billions of people (cite) rely on Facebook and its companies and the power that it and other information technologies command, not only because of its success financially, but also as a result of its ability to control all of its associated user data.

Facebook's abnormally (approximately) six hour long online hiatus, was tremendously costly for Mark Zuckerberg and his company as a whole and its primary losses may have even not been easily measured in money. The outage will likely have a powerful but immeasurable effect in its consumer relations and shake public confidence in its ability to secure and protect its network Following its offline fiasco, Facebook released a statement on the matter filled with a bit of coding jargon explaining the cause of the incident as stemming from "changes" on the" back bone router that coordinate network traffic between our data centers, (that) caused issues that interrupted this communication" and also assured the public that they "have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime". The error allegedly caused by the backbone router not only took Facebook and all its associated companies offline, but actually locked its employees out of its offices (due to in an inability to use their electronic ID’s) further complicating efforts to restore its connectivity and accentuating chaos at its headquarters.

The issue of Facebook's data and its protection (or lack thereof) of the privacy of its users has already been a public concern for some time. In 2015, British consulting firm Cambridge Analytical used an app called This Is Your Digital Life to collect data and build profiles on an estimated 87 million Facebook users, to help the political campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump to enhance their marketing strategy by identifying relevant audiences for their advertising efforts. Although Facebook later apologized and took action to destroy the data and remove the app in 2015, the issue of Cambridge Analytica highlighted the explosive nature of social media data and its potential usage, an issue that will only gain more relevance in the foreseeable future.

Even if we accept Facebook’s assertion that there wasn't a breach of its data during the recent outage, the catastrophic danger of Facebook’s data (as well as that of other social media sites) in the wrong hands remains. Certainly, it is in Facebook's interest to have sufficient measures to safeguard the data of its billion plus users and very likely has extensive and sufficient measures in place. However, if at some point in the future this changes, the societal implications would almost certainly be massive. It’s important to consider that the nature of the data collected and later sold by Cambridge Analytica was relatively impersonal (it reportedly built psychological profiles of Facebook’s users to determine and target a specific political preference) to what it could have been. For example, assuming every person that has had or has a Facebook, Instagram and/or Whatsapp account (and uses these accounts for messaging others), had every single one of their messages now visible online. Unless those people were squeaky clean and had never sent an angry, hypocritical or otherwise inappropriate and embarrassing message, there could be tremendous societal upheaval. Privacy helps humanity to function because it allows us room to be imperfect (often very imperfect) and grow by learning from our mistakes. Undoubtedly, any rational person would admit (if they were being honest) that no person is perfect and that at some point every person has made a mistake and everyone almost certainly has at least one or two words that were later regretted and learnt from (or perhaps not).  The idea of two separate sets of behavior thoughts and words (depending on whether a person is in front of a crowd or a single friend) is scary because it insinuates a level of hypocrisy, but humans are not robots or saints. Everyone has said things to a friend at some point in their lives that they wouldn’t in front of a crowd and how would humanity function if every phone call, word or message exchanged was held up to public scrutiny? George Orwell’s 1984 gives a chilling vision of a dystopian future, in which he describes a society controlled by technology and beset by paranoia and fear as a result of a complete lack of privacy (for example the constant monitoring  by the thought police), even in their homes, leaving no room for error.

Social media is defined by people sharing what they WANT others to see, creating an illusion of a life filled with moments disproportionately more happy and exciting then their own (having an unquestionable impact on mental health). Aside from exciting trips or memorable meetings with friends, it can often paint a picture of a person more moral then he or she really is, because no sane person enjoys sharing actions or beliefs that they believe are negative (others may have a much different view though).

The real threat doesn’t only stem from known companies such as Cambridge Analytica, but may come from inside Facebook, from a company official who could be incentivized to sell a user (or users) data to an interested party with mal intent. Alternatively, this malicious actor may just hack Facebook’s data by itself. Regardless the day is coming (if it hasn’t already) when Facebook’s data will be used to ruin someone’s reputation or life for political or economic gain (although I pray I’m wrong). Building support to address this concern (of data privacy) can be challenging, because the issue of data and likely human hypocrisy goes to a vulnerable, sensitive and very imperfect, human place. Unquestionably there are levels to a person’s hypocrisy and the difference to public and private behavior/faces of an individual and what we can and should tolerate. However, before passing judgment on this person (or persons) whoever they may be, we should ask ourselves two questions, have we ever been in hypocritical in this way or a similar/comparable way? Do we have friends who we accept and care about who have been? If the answer is yes and we’re considering to join the chorus condemning this individual anyway, it may be wise to heed the warning of Everlast (in his song what it’s like) to not judge others, otherwise, “then you really might know what it’s like, to have to lose”.