Big Tech's double trouble: political heat from Trump and the left may signal reckoning ahead
Big Tech's double trouble: political heat from Trump and
the left may signal reckoning ahead
Trump’s timing of attacks on Google, Facebook and Twitter
could not have been better, as the three come under scrutiny in hearings
Donald Trump: ‘I think that Google and Facebook and
Twitter ... treat conservatives and Republicans very unfairly.
By David Taylor in New York Sun 2 Sep 2018 08.06 EDT
Trump and Russia may have dominated the political
discourse all summer, but last week the attention turned again to America’s
internet technology giants. They had enjoyed a few months out of the spotlight
following grueling congressional hearings in Washington late last year, after
evidence emerged of Russia’s use of social media fake accounts to try to
influence voters in the 2016 US presidential election.
But that respite ended last week after a tweet from
Donald Trump that electrified the news agenda from Silicon Valley to the
capital when, seemingly out of the blue – he posted a bizarre tweet. “Google
search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News
Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost
all stories & news is BAD,” he tweeted. Trump went on to allege that and
privileging voices from the left.
The next day Trump doubled down, this time citing
Twitter, Google and Facebook as being “unfair” to Republicans. “I think that
Google and Facebook and Twitter ... treat conservatives and Republicans very
unfairly. I think it’s a very serious problem because they’re really trying to
silence a very large part of this country, and those people don’t want to be
silenced.
“It’s not right. It’s not fair. It may not be legal, but
we’ll see. We just want fairness.”
And Trump’s timing could not have been better. This week,
senior figures from those three companies come under scrutiny during a new set
of high-profile hearings in Washington.
Suddenly, the political heat was back on Big Tech and
this time, they’re experiencing double-trouble.
Up until now most criticism of the tech giants has come
from the left, aggrieved at the ease with which Russians appeared to influence
the election via bots and fake accounts spreading divisive propaganda.
Additionally they have been accused of toxifying public debate, exploiting
people’s data and building monopolies that are distorting the US economy.
But now the tech giants face a whole new political
threat. And this time there is a growing volume of voices on the right from
senior Republicans who are incensed about perceived bias against conservatives.
A reckoning may be coming and the companies lining up to
defend themselves this week in Washington seem to be braced for some type of
regulation. And, whilst Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has declared himself open to
regulation, there’s some talk of the need to go further – to break up the
companies using antitrust laws.
“The ultimate solution is really to find ways to limit
the power of these companies through antitrust, to try to create the space for
competitors to emerge,” says Franklin Foer, author of World Without Mind: the
Existential Threat of Big Tech. “Because the real problem is that we have two
or three chokeholds globally for the dissemination of information.
“We have two or three companies that are the masters of
the global public sphere. That’s too much power to have invested in a small
number of companies.”
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, plus an as yet unnamed representative from Google,
will appear in Congress to give evidence on Wednesday to a Senate intelligence
committee examining the way Russia was able to manipulate American voters
through their platforms.
Dorsey will go a second round in the afternoon, with the
House energy and commerce committee demanding answers on Twitter’s use of
algorithms and content moderation.
Republican Greg Walden, who chairs that committee, said
he wants to “take complex, opaque algorithms out of the dark” and find out what
systems Twitter has in place to prevent undue party political bias.
Trump, as only he can, increased the heat this week when
he launched those attacks on Google, picking up conservative grievances about
what they see as built-in bias and declaring a fringe conspiracy to be
established fact.
By the end of the week, Trump was using an interview with
Bloomberg to further raise the stakes, claiming “conservatives have been
treated very unfairly” and said the companies may be in a “very antitrust situation”.
Foer, whose book is highly critical of the companies
which have amassed power with little oversight, said: “When Trump raises the
question about the internet and its power he manages to constantly make
arguments that are bastardisations of good arguments.
There is a carelessness when it comes to
Google, it dresses itself in scientific pretension about what it’s doing.
Franklin Foer
“When he attacks Amazon and when he attacks Google, he is
wrong in the specifics but he is spiritually correct.“
In other words, Google may not be inherently biased
against conservatives, but when people search online for Trump, the algorithms
will reward large media outlets over more fringe ones, partly because they are
trusted, publish quickly and have large readerships.
“The problem with Google is that it’s biased against good
results when it comes to a lot of questions – its algorithms are based on this
whole cocktail of rationale that can often yield bad results,” Foer said.
“There is a carelessness sometimes when it comes to
Google, it dresses itself in scientific pretension about what it’s doing, that
its results are derived from math, and that’s true, but its goal is to keep
people engaged on its site for as long as possible.”
Google defended itself against Trump’s claims of bias,
issuing a statement insisting: “Search is not used to set a political agenda
and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.”
Academic Tarleton Gillespie, author of Custodians of the
Internet, who works for Microsoft Research and Cornell University, wrote in
detail this week on Medium about the nature of search engines, saying of
Trump’s attack “it is potent, and it’s almost certainly wrong”.
But he added, Trump’s attack came at a moment when deeper
questions are being asked “about free speech, news, and how platforms subtly
reshape public participation”.
Even as Trump complains, he benefits far more than most
from the amplification of social media. As Kara Swisher wrote in the New York
Times this week: “Trump himself is the most voluble politician ever to use
digital media, and his entire existence has been amplified, echoed and
re-echoed over and over again by the tools that Silicon Valley has let loose on
the world over the past two decades.”
Trump appears to have short-term politics in mind –
casting Google as a new enemy rigging the system against him is a useful way to
anger his loyal base and get them out to vote in November’s midterms.
But the drumbeat for regulation of the tech companies is
growing – and the understated Democratic Senator Mark Warner may pose a bigger
threat to them than the obvious danger of a noisy skirmish with the president.
Warner, the senior Democrat on Wednesday morning’s
committee, has produced a white paper of potential policy proposals for
regulation of social media and technology firms, which said “each of them
deserves enormous recognition” for changing the world in positive ways, but
warns “these tech giants now also deserve increased scrutiny”.
He says the companies were caught repeatedly flat-footed
by Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and wrote: “The
speed with which these products have grown and come to dominate nearly every
aspect of our social, political and economic lives has in many ways obscured
the shortcomings of their creators in anticipating the harmful effects of their
use.”
Warner’s proposals include policies to deal with fake and
anonymous accounts. Tech companies could be made liable for defamation on their
platforms, he proposes. The source of political adverts should be disclosed to
stop foreign adversaries threatening democracy. Service providers could also be
placed under a legal duty to protect users’ data.
The European Union has already introduced general data
protection regulation to safeguard consumers so their data cannot be shared
without their consent.
California has also just passed the Consumer Privacy Act,
which would give consumers more control over their personal information –
including the ability to have data deleted and prevent it being sold to
advertisers and others.
Foer believes the California model – due to come into
effect on 1 January 2020 – is the most likely route for Congress to follow
nationally, although he predicts companies will try to shape and water down any
federal law.
“I’m of the school that clearly we need some sort of
privacy regulation, we need some data protection laws, that is screamingly
obvious, it’s gobsmacking that we don’t have one,” he said.
“But I’m extremely reluctant to impose regulation either
on algorithms or the way that they operate, because we see what’s happening in
China. It doesn’t require any imagination to figure out how a person like
Donald Trump would be able to exploit regulations for his own good.”
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