I wouldn't put it past tech giants in democratic nations not to tweak their algorithms to push their own political agenda, much less tech giants in non democratic nations.

It's too powerful a tool not to abuse, I know it, and you know it too.

I do think private companies should be free to run their platforms as they wish. I also feel really, really uncomfortable with the amount of power they have to control political discourse.

(Though, the validity is undermined by a separate question on global corporations, and the methodology in general can be called into question.)

And then, 'correction' camps for people that do not fully fit this new beautiful society.

Twitter has been interfering in elections by selectively deplatforming candidates that they don't like. It is so obvious that the biggest threat to the integrity of American elections is big tech. I can't believe that there are some that think that Russia buying a few thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads is a bigger threat than Google.

I'm generally against pervasive government regulation and oversight as a fellow tech enthusiast, but I fear where humanity is headed if these companies are left unchecked to their own devices, in an era where echo-chamber outrage amplifying newsfeed algorithms are subverting democracy as we know it.

In many ways they're _ALREADY_ more powerful than state actors. They were pretty open about their attempts at manipulating the last presidential election, and I personally think it was a gigantic mistake for them. It's only going to get worse imo.

I always thought that the Internet would be a democratic platform that would improve the debate in society. Maybe we would go back to a democracy without intermediaries.

I was wrong.

We are entering a dystopian world where the profits of a handful of companies are more important than the rest of society.

People use Facebook/Whatsapp/Twitter/Reddit for many of the same things they used to use email and personal blogs to do in 2005. But with centralized control and the ability to shape what messages get broadcast to whom, it's far too great of a concentration of power.

Google is probably the most extreme. Consider the "Evil Larry" thought experiment. If Larry Page woke up one day in 2016 while he was still CEO and decided to use Google and YouTube purely to further his own goals, how many national elections could he tilt while maintaining plausible deniability from the outside?

My guess is, it would be quite a few. It wouldn't have to look that different. Counter-narrative results would still show up in search. They'd just be down-regulated. Links and videos supporting EL's preferred candidates and positions would be up-regulated and be shown up perhaps 10% more often than previously. With plausible deniability, election after election could be tipped by a few percentage points. That's often enough to change the outcome.

There are almost certainly some internal company safeguards that would have made this kind of crime a difficult, uncertain proposition and I do NOT think the real Larry Page would ever have done this. But being completely unconcerned would be a grave mistake. Giant tech companies already lobby extensively in nations all over the world and do not have goals perfectly aligned with each of those nations—e.g., Free Basics in India.

It's naive to dismiss concerns about such extreme concentrations of power being wielded to suppress speech along political lines simply because we're currently benefactors of the action.

While Im on the total opposite of the spectrum of Donald Trump and his crowd - and not even in a US sense - in actual left/right spectrum - these calls for big tech literally deciding what people can hear, see, and think can not be labeled anything but literal censorship. You cant go full feudal on people when the results of an election is not to your liking.

Nobody on the planet consented to give the feudal overlordship of content, politics or the Internet to big tech players. At this point, the US big tech acts as a literal extension of the US corporate-state establishment, pushing its policies to everyone on the planet - to the extent of trying to overthrow other countries' governments to censoring information for any other country. It even helps the US government target any specific individual or country, as can be seen from Assange, Snowden leaks and other leaks.

There is absolutely no reason why other countries would continue to allow the US big tech to influence their own societies without those countries' regulations and laws regulating them. If an app or service is acting according to a specific country's policies and against a specific country's own laws, it means that it is an unregulated foreign agent. At this point many of those who read this text will think that such things are 'for the good' of those countries' people for things like fighting 'authoritarianism' and so on. But that's a false consolation that is an escape from cognitive dissonance: First, the US tech corporations push US corporate-state policies that have nothing to do with any kind of 'authoritarianism'. Second, if there was any fight against any such evil being done, the first to go after would be those who lied and murdered people on lies like nonexistent WMDs. Third, nobody gave you the right or authority to decide what is 'authoritarian' - especially if you are living in a country that kills its people when they cant pay for healthcare and you are consenting to it.

Countries already started to take measures to regulate US tech companies that operate on their Internet. More alignment between the US tech and US corporate-state establishment would just end up in more regulation abroad, and ultimately exclusion of such apps and services from those countries' Internets and domestic alternatives taking their place.

Again - many of you may err in thinking that this philosophy of big tech companies being de facto feudal lords of information is something that is 'for the good' of others, and its 'better' for not only Americans, but the entire Internet to be literally regulated by private American corporate entities. That is arrogant and utterly hypocritical. This philosophy originates from the country that kills its people if they cant pay for healthcare. That country ireats its homeless people as if they were animals. In that country, millions of working families go hungry despite multiple parents working. It regularly invades and murders other people in other countries to suck their oil and whatever. The war criminals who facilitate that are celebrated as prominent figures without any censorship or 'visibility filtering' in all US tech apps. If you are not putting your wallet where your mouth is and dealing with the elephant in the room, stop being so arrogant as to think that you 'know better' - less, thinking that you have any right to dictate what is 'good' to anyone else.

The only thing missing to make this reality a full cyberpunk dystopia are corporate superhuman ais, but not for the lack of trying.

Instead, I believe the approach to GoDaddy is a better example: that bad policy will hurt politicians’ ability to maintain support.

The Internet, and thus the industry, has enormous reach with voters (and lobbyers like GoDaddy). Swaying the support system is our best bet, and much more honest.