Big Tech and Social Media: Monopoly and Social Abuse
Big Tech can be a net positive to society if it respects both (i) Americans’ right to think for themselves and see things differently, and (ii) the vision of our Founders who believed silencing speech was dangerous.
Frances Haugen, popularly known as the Facebook whistleblower, has made the headlines revealing something most of us already knew in our gut — but we lacked the documentary evidence — that big tech is purposefully amplifying hate, misinformation and political unrest, and harming our culture and our nation’s youth.
The problem with maximizing discord and divisiveness is that as humans with different life experiences, we naturally approach issues from different vantage points. But when everything is portrayed in angry, hateful and polarizing ways, it can mislead us into thinking we have nothing in common and that there is no basis or hope for any mutual agreement. Seeing everyone with whom you have a difference of opinion as an enemy isn’t helpful.
But for many, it isn’t merely that social media promotes division. Despite big tech’s constant warnings about misinformation, big tech is the biggest and most influential purveyor of false information — yet its cynically claims to be the ultimate unbiased source.
An obvious example is the collusion by big tech to make sure that credible allegations of the Biden family’s political corruption and questionable business dealings with hostile foreign powers was hidden from the American public. In the final month of the election anyone who mentioned it or linked to any of the well-documented news stories was blocked. And big tech cynically labeled the story “Russian misinformation.” That was provably false at the time, but that didn’t stop big tech from mobilizing to protect the extreme left from political accountability for the alleged corruption of the family of its standard bearer.
We now know from polling data, that a sizable number of the voters who voted for Biden would not have done so had they been aware of the corruption allegations. So big tech colluded to undermine the very purpose for which we have the First Amendment and Free Speech and Free Press — keeping the public well informed and preventing the public from being kept in the dark by censorship. This is a scandal of epic proportions.
But it isn’t as if the Internet is all bad. The Internet has expanded the ability to publish and broadcast ideas. It used to be that to publish anything, you needed access to expensive printing presses and had to buy ink by the barrel. I used to work for a think tank that in the infancy of the Internet spent most of its budget on printing, binding and mailing monographs, studies and newsletters. Now, think tanks can spend their money on research because publishing and distributing their results is relatively easy and inexpensive.
In fact, now individuals and groups can start their own radio or television shows and use the internet to broadcast the content. You no longer have to own million-dollar broadcast towers. So, the Internet and big tech has helped to make the flow of information easier and less costly — provided big tech won’t sent themselves up as the censors of what we can say and hear.
When social media first came along, it connected us with family and friends and allowed us to share life experiences. But it didn’t take long for big tech to become a tool of manipulation, suppression, and censorship. And if the Facebook whistleblower is correct, big tech is promoting its profits by incentivizing angry, polarizing and divisive content.
Some argue that government or some wise third-party should be determining what is trustworthy. But we already have that — big tech fact checkers, for example, who regularly lie and employ dishonest, shifting standards to achieve political results that they favor. It is dangerous to trust a third-party to be the arbiter of truth and reason.
Our Founders believed in a free and open press and in free speech because more speech and more logical debate are the antidote to erroneous speech. And they wanted everyone to listen, read and think about issues and to be their own arbiter truth.
Every totalitarian dictator has tried to control information and they always did so in the name of protecting the public from misinformation. They do not admit that they were trying to deceive or manipulate. They always claim that they were motivated by a “laudable” purpose.
So, we should be very wary of any solution that puts government or some corporate entity as a de facto Ministry of Truth. That is our job. If we hope to remain a free and self-governing people, we cannot let others think or reason for us. Only if the vast majority of Americans listen, read, and think, can we hope to have the sort of well-informed populace that is capable of self-government and capable of making wise, long term decisions.
That doesn’t mean we can’t do something about big tech’s divisiveness, manipulations and censorship. The marketplace gives us tremendous power if we will act. And if we’ve given big tech protections that they’ve taken advantage of, we can remove those protections. But we should not make things catastrophically worse by giving the role of arbiter of truth to the government or some third-party. We must all individually be informed and be our own arbiters of truth. More by the Author
