Tech leaders lament the mess they've created
Tech leaders lament the mess they've created
By David Knowles Yahoo News • July 25, 2018
SAN FRANCISCO — In the wake of Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg’s congressional grilling in April over the platform’s role in
disseminating political propaganda during the 2016 presidential election, the
company rolled out a series of changes to its privacy and information-sharing
policies, backed up with ads that essentially apologized to its users.
As the spread of misinformation has proliferated with the
rise of social media, Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley powerhouse whose
business model has landed it in hot water with government and the general
public.
Adam Fisher, the author of “Valley of Genius: The
Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and
Freaks Who Made It Boom)”, says this is a moment of reckoning at many tech
companies. But he is skeptical that much will change because “there’s too much
money involved.”
“I talked to over 200 people in the valley — I’m talking
about CEOs, billionaires — for this book,” Fisher told Grant Burningham, host
of the Yahoo News podcast “Bots & Ballots,” adding, “Almost to a person,
they all expressed a kind of disappointment or fear or trepidation about what
it was that they had created with the best of intentions — almost in every
case.”
Fisher said Twitter co-founder and former CEO Evan
Williams liked the chapter in his book in which he concluded that the site has
morphed from a “platform where everyone was free to say anything to this
platform where really scary kinds of mob rule-type politics could foment and
gain power.”
Medium, Williams’s latest venture, can be seen as an
attempt at a corrective, Fisher said.
“It showcases long-form writing instead of short tweets.
It’s subscription- instead of advertising-based,” Fisher said. “It seems to be,
in its architecture, kind of a version 2.0. The question is, is that what the
people want? Do we want sophisticated, non-fake journalism and opinions, or do
we want the hot take?”
While it’s clear that the advertising revenue model
attracts users, Fisher believes that the problem of fake news won’t be solved
until companies abandon it.
“If you’re looking at a medium that’s supported by
advertising, you are essentially being bought and sold. Your attention is being
mined for profit,” Fisher said. As a result, sensational headlines and
outrageous content will always beat out carefully reported, factually accurate
journalism.
For all the innovation attributed to Silicon Valley, the
region is actually not likely to come up with a drastic change of direction
anytime soon, Fisher said.
“When we’re talking about Apple, Facebook, Google, we’re
talking about something that looks, to me, like Detroit in the ’50s, with Ford,
General Motors and Chrysler,” Fisher said. “You know, a big three, industry
town — and yeah, the tail fins go up and down; you get a new feature in your
messenger app or something — but essentially it’s the same. It’s locked down.
They have nearly global monopolies on what they sell. Really, nothing is going
to change. There’s too much money involved.”
Comments
Post a Comment