You don't hate big tech, the entertainment industry, democracy, or capitalism. You just hate people.

[John Dule]

I have been meaning to post about this for a long time, ever since the first cries of "big tech isn't doing enough to combat conspiracy theories" reached my ears. The proliferation of online conspiracy theories like QAnon and Flat Earth are often cited nowadays as evidence that the tech industry needs reining in. Anticapitalist complaints like this are not new; they echo similar sentiments from the #MeToo era about how celebrity magazines and reality shows "objectify women" and "present consumers with unrealistic expectations for themselves." The thesis here is that companies-- not consumers-- are to blame for the suboptimal social costs we're seeing from these products, and that the solution is to regulate advertising, tech, and entertainment.

For the record, this is why I (and my fellow libertarians) say that anticapitalists disrespect and degrade humans. To put the consumer squarely in the category of "victim" when it comes to this issue is to deny the consumer their agency, and to ignore their ability to make better choices.

Why do you think that YouTube's Flat Earth channels received so many views? Was it because the corporate overlords decided to push pseudoscience upon the masses? No. Those videos were made by average people, for average people. They received views because people genuinely liked them. And when YouTube's algorithm began recommending Flat Earth videos to other people, was that due to YouTube's malicious intervention? No. It was because the algorithm determined that people like these videos and want to see more of them. That's it. No smoke, no mirrors.

Similarly, Facebook is currently being raked over the coals for not "standing up" to QAnon and other far-right conspiracy theories. Why? If someone bought reams of paper from a department store and printed anti-Semitic flyers on them, would you go after the paper supplier? If a white supremacist used a cell phone to conference in his followers, would Nokia be the prime culprit? Yes, Facebook can do more to prevent the proliferation of these ideologies-- and they should-- but by treating them as the villain, anticapitalists are ignoring the fundamental truth that these conspiracies arose organically from the public. The nefarious social engineers are not sitting in a conference room in Silicon Valley. They are in their homes all around this country, spreading lies and deception through their mobile devices. I would almost prefer it if this social rot had come from big tech directly-- but it hasn't. Rather, big tech has revealed these people for who they truly are.

For decades, the left has misdirected its ire. When a racist wins the presidency, we don't call for the abolition of democracy. But when racism infiltrates a corporate structure, suddenly the rose Twitter brigade is crying out for the abolition of capitalism. The hard truth is that a system is only as good as the people who participate in it. If you have a population of selfish, angry, racist, ignorant, bigoted cultists predisposed to messianic thinking, they will inevitably pollute and destroy whatever system they are let loose in, whether it is democracy, capitalism, or social media. The left's real problem is with the average American-- the "working class" they love to pretend they are the champions of.

In order to win the battle against misinformation (a battle in which I am 100% on the left's side), leftists need to come to terms with an inconvenient truth: scapegoating Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and the handful of other tech moguls who created these platforms will not get them anywhere. Yes, these people gave bullhorns to the mob. But shouldn't we be more concerned about what the mob is doing with those tools now? It's very easy to pin our social ills on a small cabal of privileged rich people, especially when doing so allows us to conveniently ignore the insidious ignorance that exists in everyday society. But the real enemy is the mob itself, and we must not let anything distract us from that fact.

[PSOL]

Obviously I cannot speak for everyone, but in my idea of “reining in” such sectors, that usually is a testament in trying to change the behavior and influence the system currently in place either letting them go do this without punishment or discouraging such practice altogether. The ideal though is placing them in a different system altogether where such actions do not occur in the first place.

I purely do not like the system and would like major structural change, irrespective of the composition of the top brass, although such a change would likely stop such people seeking profit and power over the benefit of all consumers, from advancing that high in the first place.

[John Dule]

Obviously I cannot speak for everyone, but in my idea of “reining in” such sectors, that usually is a testament in trying to change the behavior and influence the system currently in place either letting them go do this without punishment or discouraging such practice altogether. The ideal though is placing them in a different system altogether where such actions do not occur in the first place.

Punishment for what? Which practices are you referring to? Do you mean creating a product that consumers then voluntarily chose to use for nefarious and destructive purposes?

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

This is the most Hobbesian thing I've read all year. And I mean that in the best and worst ways possible.

[PSOL]

Obviously I cannot speak for everyone, but in my idea of “reining in” such sectors, that usually is a testament in trying to change the behavior and influence the system currently in place either letting them go do this without punishment or discouraging such practice altogether. The ideal though is placing them in a different system altogether where such actions do not occur in the first place.

Punishment for what? Which practices are you referring to? Do you mean creating a product that consumers then voluntarily chose to use for nefarious and destructive purposes?

For malpractice under the assumption that putting the costs higher than the savings to do malpractice will discourage the practice under costs and perhaps legal action.

Most products which could be used in nefarious and destructive activities have labels warning on such, and most lawsuits go through with unneeded legal barriers to file as it is.

[Sumner 1868]

Why do you think that YouTube's Flat Earth channels received so many views? Was it because the corporate overlords decided to push pseudoscience upon the masses?

Obviously. They've been controlling those algorithms with a totalitarian grip for years. If they didn't want Flat Earth pushed it wouldn't be.

[The Houstonian]

Similarly, Facebook is currently being raked over the coals for not "standing up" to QAnon and other far-right conspiracy theories. Why? If someone bought reams of paper from a department store and printed anti-Semitic flyers on them, would you go after the paper supplier? If a white supremacist used a cell phone to conference in his followers, would Nokia be the prime culprit? Yes, Facebook can do more to prevent the proliferation of these ideologies-- and they should-- but by treating them as the villain, anticapitalists are ignoring the fundamental truth that these conspiracies arose organically from the public. The nefarious social engineers are not sitting in a conference room in Silicon Valley. They are in their homes all around this country, spreading lies and deception through their mobile devices. I would almost prefer it if this social rot had come from big tech directly-- but it hasn't. Rather, big tech has revealed these people for who they truly are.

Facebook's algorithms are designed to maximize the period of time users spend on their website, and they do this by inundating politically-engaged users (of all stripes) with content that they want to hear, which generally means content that confirms and strengthens their opinions and content that maximizes their emotional reactions. This is harmful to democracy, which benefits from informed voters, not misinformed voters. Therefore, Facebook, along with the system that promotes the maximization of profits above all other considerations, is at fault for such phenomena as QAnon.

[Averroës Nix]

It's not the company or the consumers. The challenge of "disinformation" emerges from the medium itself. It is an emergent property of allowing millions of humans to communicate directly with one another.

As an example, the most pressing concern with algorithmically-ordered content is not that it has a particular agenda, but that it has none aside from maximizing its hold on human attention. Its only ideology is that of a cancer cell. What matters to the survival of an idea is its reproductive fittedness to its environment, and social media has created an environment in which information spreads (A) extremely rapidly and (B) without regard for anything other than how receptive wetware is to lingering with it.

The calls for more control over information involve a stunning level of trust placed in the tech moguls and their retainers, but one no more stunning than the level of trust necessary to relying on these tools in the first place. After all, what fraction of human relationships are mediated through them? For many people in the United States, the answer is virtually all that reach beyond the household. Their relationship with social media is already, by default, one of submission, because it exercises a radical monopoly over basic human functions.

My suspicion over the past couple of years has been that there is no good way to use the tools that have most rapidly metastasized. They rob us of the communication skills and interpersonal know-how that we need to function without them; they undermine forms of collectivity that do not rely on them; and they are powerful enough to make it virtually impossible for people to focus on their own experiences.

[John Dule]

For malpractice under the assumption that putting the costs higher than the savings to do malpractice will discourage the practice under costs and perhaps legal action.

Most products which could be used in nefarious and destructive activities have labels warning on such, and most lawsuits go through with unneeded legal barriers to file as it is.

What malpractice did the tech companies commit? Your complaint about them is that they gave a voice to the despicable sentiments that were already present in the populace at large.

Obviously. They've been controlling those algorithms with a totalitarian grip for years. If they didn't want Flat Earth pushed it wouldn't be.

In that case, you're just completely ignorant of how algorithms work. Search algorithms like the ones employed by YouTube are designed specifically to run autonomously without the need for human intervention. If you're seeing Flat Earth videos in your recommendations list, that is due to your worldview, not YouTube's.

[John Dule]

Similarly, Facebook is currently being raked over the coals for not "standing up" to QAnon and other far-right conspiracy theories. Why? If someone bought reams of paper from a department store and printed anti-Semitic flyers on them, would you go after the paper supplier? If a white supremacist used a cell phone to conference in his followers, would Nokia be the prime culprit? Yes, Facebook can do more to prevent the proliferation of these ideologies-- and they should-- but by treating them as the villain, anticapitalists are ignoring the fundamental truth that these conspiracies arose organically from the public. The nefarious social engineers are not sitting in a conference room in Silicon Valley. They are in their homes all around this country, spreading lies and deception through their mobile devices. I would almost prefer it if this social rot had come from big tech directly-- but it hasn't. Rather, big tech has revealed these people for who they truly are.

Facebook's algorithms are designed to maximize the period of time users spend on their website, and they do this by inundating politically-engaged users (of all stripes) with content that they want to hear, which generally means content that confirms and strengthens their opinions and content that maximizes their emotional reactions. This is harmful to democracy, which benefits from informed voters, not misinformed voters. Therefore, Facebook, along with the system that promotes the maximization of profits above all other considerations, is at fault for such phenomena as QAnon.

You are faulting them for providing a service to people who want it. Yes, I'd say it's akin to selling artery-clogging food to an overweight person. It's bad for them and it'll probably kill them. If I were in charge, I would certainly cut them off. But at the same time, blaming the service provider means refusing to acknowledge the role of the consumer in making these choices.

I do not blame someone for making a choice available to someone else. The chooser alone is to blame.

[parochial boy]

Honestly, the problem I have is not so much that Facebook, Google et al's algorithms direct people towards that sort of content, it's the fact that we have allowed a tiny, powerful and unaccountable tech elite to become the arbiters of what content should be available and of how to determine how visible it should be made.

There's despairingly little way for us to maintain a genuinely free and fair media at the same time as having a tiny number of private platforms control whether or not content is visible, or even available. The proliferation of hate speech and conspiracy theories is just a symptom of that, and the unique focus on it even winds up being harmful distraction when it means people simply shouting that twitter should ban Trump or whatever instead of focussing on what the real underlying problem is.