Living in the heart of darkness (Silicon Valley) for the past three months has taught me that we cannot pin our hopes for American democracy on the great media platforms: Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, et. al. Their leaders seem to know only how to make money from us, and the tools they have invented are out of control. The companies are proving incapable of dealing with the information dystopia they have created. Digital innocents think they are accessing an agnostic information universe when they click onto these platforms. Instead, we are getting the content most likely to confirm our prejudices, based on all the private information we have shared through our online search, posting, shopping and “like” histories.
Mark Zuckerberg is the man in the hot seat, forced to defend the tech platforms’ vampire business model to Congress. People are just beginning to wake up to the problems generated by these data-sucking companies. Facebook now has 2 billion members around the world, whose private preferences are the “product” Facebook has given to any “advertiser” that comes along. Because they know so much about us, Facebook’s clients–malicious Russian robots and conspiracy theorists included–can figure out exactly how to win our trust. Analysts who know Facebook intimately, including Kara Swisher of RECODE and Farhad Manooj of the New York Times, confirm that Zuckerberg and his peers have no idea how to deal with, or even measure, the profound social and political impacts they have unleashed.
Google, which has the most data of all, has done a marginally better job of weaning its search engine off robotic conspiracy theories. But it has failed to care much about the fake news and hate speech its subsidiary, YouTube, turns up as preferred content.
Belatedly, as the techlash gains force, some folks in Silicon Valley are thinking about software solutions. Below is one look at whether the algorithms that got us into so much trouble can reverse course, and nurture our better natures. This depends entirely on the values and priorities of the people writing the code for it. Given the track record so far, this is not reassuring. We need laws that companies must follow. This requires government policies, demanded by media literate citizens using their real intelligence.
I don’t think that ceding more power to algorithms is the best solution. It may be part of the response, but it can’t be the whole story. I like the idea floated by Markos Kounalakis: create a Mayor of Facebook. Create accountability through human, democratic systems, so that people can help other people when they are doxxed, their identities are stolen, and their safety is compromised by viral hate videos. Here is Markos’s brilliant idea: