This is just a gross manipulation of societal discourse. Yet another reason the biggest tech companies need to be broken up or regulated like the public utilities they are.
I think it's funny that many technologists love to wax philosophical about how disruptive and world-changing tech is except when it comes to this one issue. We have to admit that this is an unprecedented issue in the history of democracy.
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.
Yeah, that bit is bonkers. A huge privately-owned tech corporation talking about 'public good'. We truly are entering the era of global corporate despotism.
This is all seems very Black Mirror, and I can accept the explanation given in the article that this was just a speculative design exercise. However, from a “social engineering” perspective, we don’t need to dig deep to find real life examples. For example, a number of prominent Silicon Valley companies enact politically biased content policies that amount to large scale social engineering. For those who support free speech, it’s clear that those with power ware very willing to abandon classically liberal values and instead just abuse that power. The solution isn’t to apply symptomatic fixes but to solve the bigger problem at hand, which is aggregation of power. These companies need to be split up and/or regulated like the utilities they are.
The "tech giants" are creating and controlling core forms of communication, both interpersonal and broadcast/public. That's too important and fundamental to the health of society to allow it to be arbitrarily engineered, filtered, and slanted for maximizing profit.
If they were acting like common carriers, it would be a completely different issue. But they're not; they have business models that necessitate the manipulation of communication.
Tech companys are paid to hack the customers brains in one way or another. The add buisness is nothing but a plausibel veneer for the "free services to exist" that allow to manipulate, observe and destroy.
The reason for the whole thing to be is obvious. Governments and companys are scared shitless of the multi-crisis coming up and want levers to pull that dont break and contain dissent. And they want to come out of the crisis, sitting on top of the ash heap. This is the actual buisness model and purpose to exist, not the friendly colorful sweets shop upfront.
Panopticon. Social egineering. Leviathancybernetics. Because solving problems for politicians is not a worthy endavour.
They want to solve the "meta"-problem that is the enraged citizen, the protesting org, the social unravelling forces that could uproot them.
Solution: Let them fight, blue vs greens, instead of discussing and forcing actual problem solutions.
Big Tech is now a integral part of the big problem in democracy.
Oh, this should be causing a massive outcry from the public, yet we are seeing none, these tech giants need to be controlled, else they will control us
It's a nuclear arms race for capturing and monetizing user behavior and attention across all tech giants.
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.
The only reason tech companies are doing this is because the democrats have a trifecta and they want to be in their good graces in order to avoid regulation. It's not about decency, it's about power.
I'm baffled how people support this behavior from big tech.
It almost seems like they think of themselves as immune to this somehow, like little sheep unable to comprehend that they themselves once will deviate will get the same treatment (assuming they have spine to stand for what they believe).
And honestly, this is why I'm ok with big tech getting highly regulated.
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 don’t care about what political party they belong to. Do they regularly argue to slash regulations on the basis of government=bad? Do they routinely try to convince people that technology companies should be in charge of social organization rather than the government?
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