MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Facebook's decision to inform users of Russian pages that allegedly interfered in the 2016 US presidential election amounts to gathering intelligence on users and represents a new type of McCarthyism, Ajamu Baraka, a US human rights activist and the Green Party's nominee for the position of US vice president in the 2016 election, told Sputnik.
"Monitoring and identifying likes for so-called bad actors amount to an intelligence gathering operation for the state," Baraka said.
According to Baraka, such moves made by a state with the full cooperation of private companies to limit access to information by intimidation is the most dangerous challenge to the human right to information since the 1950s.
The human rights activist has also compared the politically-motivated tracing of social network accounts to modern-day McCarthyism, a period of anti-communist sentiment in US politics in the late 1940s and early 1950s which entailed so-called "witch hunts" against perceived Soviet agents and was named after US Senator Joseph McCarthy, with dozens of cultural and scientific figures being persecuted.
Facebook, along with Twitter and Google, have faced increased pressure from US lawmakers to be more transparent about Russian-generated advertisements and content on their platforms as well as the users who were exposed to them, with Congress as well as the US intelligence community accusing Russian media of using social networks to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
Russian officials have characterized the allegations as absurd and groundless, while President Donald Trump has called the probe into the alleged Moscow's meddling conducted by both Senate and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller a "witch hunt."
