Chasing crazy dreams, our would-be Big Tech Emperors are hastening the destruction of any kind of healthy democracy
Five years ago, when Facebook hit two billion global users, no one imagined that we would start referring to the company in the past tense as something that used to matter, with a slumping valuation now lower than Home Depot, the big box store. Nor did anyone think that Twitter, then at the center of whatever was happening right now — Game of Thrones!, @RealDonaldTrump!, Beyonce is pregnant again! — would become the icky plaything of the world’s richest man and on the verge of an employee meltdown.
But here we are, watching the creative destructive forces of capitalism (plus some state sponsorship from China) steadily steal oxygen from these once high-flying Big Tech platforms. Along with the concurrent collapse in online advertising revenue, which is dragging down Alphabet/Google’s valuation, and the chill in consumer spending that is causing Amazon to cut back its workforce and nipping at Microsoft’s profits, we’re seeing the humbling of the high flyers of the last decade. If you’re a critic of Big Tech’s monopolies, it’s tempting to raise a glass and cheer. Finally something is bringing the barons down to earth.
I’m not so sanguine, for a bunch of reasons. Even if the doomsayers, like my friend Dave Karpf of George Washington University, as sharp a digital observer as any, turn out to be right in the long run about the impending dissolution of Twitter now that it is falling into the hands of Elon Musk, the damage that the barons of Big Tech are doing to our societies may well get much worse before their gilded offices close and the last executive with the last golden parachute turns out the lights.
First, it’s just infuriating how little Big Tech has done to address the spread of hate, disinformation and extremism on their platforms, despite years of intensive efforts by civil rights organizations to alert them to the problems. Meta, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube have all paid lip service to the issue, doing very little to actually shore up their systems for protecting election integrity, most urgently. As a new report from sixty affiliated groups led by Free Press points out, “All four companies fail to close what they call ‘newsworthiness’ or ‘public interest’ exceptions that give prominent users a ‘get out of jail free’ card and allow them to post as they choose. Every promising protective policy seems as though it could be circumvented with each platform’s arbitrary ‘newsworthiness’ or ‘public interest’ exception.” While some proliferators of hate speech or disinformation get removed, others are allowed to stay on these sites without penalty.
Considering that Meta basically disbanded its civic integrity division after 2020 and lost the staff with the most historical knowledge and commitment, this isn’t all that surprising. But Mark Zuckerberg’s headstrong decision to bet the company on the metaverse, spending tens of billions with little to show for the effort so far, along with longtime COO Sheryl Sandberg’s departure, has meant that there is essentially no high level attention to the problem. There’s no way the public belief that the 2020 election was “stolen” would be as prevalent were it not for Meta’s limp efforts to label, downgrade and remove that kind of content. Back in late 2020, we saw that when company leadership wanted to, they could alter Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm to drastically reduce the amplification of election falsehoods. But that move towards content quality also reduced overall engagement, a cost the publicly-traded company apparently wasn’t prepared to pay. When you consider how much stock value Zuckerberg is willing to burn on his seemingly crazy quest to dominate the “metaverse” compared to how quickly he backed away from stewarding the actual news-verse, well, all I can say is I guess our boy emperor just doesn’t care if Rome burns.
Speaking of Rome and its emperors, today, on the verge of closing his off-again, on-again purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk declared in a note addressed to “Twitter Advertisers” that he believes “it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.” He said that he was buying the company not to make more money, but “to help humanity, whom I love” and he promised that under his leadership it would not become “a free-for-all hellscape.” This is being immediately interpreted as Musk trying to reassure major advertisers that Twitter will still be a place they want to buy eyeballs from, which makes sense. But I think Musk’s good intentions are about to enable a whole new set of sins.
As I wrote here on Medium back in late April, I think Musk is planning to turn Twitter into a digital Colosseum. His regular references to it being a “digital town square” have to be read in the context of his own experience of the platform. Beyond the kicks he gets from instant feedback and groupie-levels of online adoration, he loves to use it to float ideas, including controversial political ones like appeasing Russia in order to end the Ukraine war, and to poll his followers on whether they support them. Years ago, he said he was going to start a site called Pravda that would involve the public in rating news articles and reporters for their credibility. Now, with Twitter in his hands, there is nothing to stop him from using the entire platform, not just his follower base, for such ends. Imagine the eye of Sauron with a flamethrower aimed at whatever it points to — that’s what Musk’s Twitter could easily become.
The rulers of ancient Rome understood that in addition to bread, they needed to keep the people entertained with circuses. Hence the gladiatorial battles of the Roman Colosseum, which could hold 80,000 people, one-tenth of Rome’s population, for grand spectacles that kept people entertained and attention centered on the Emperor, who alone judged each gladiator’s fate. Like Zuckerberg with his mad quest to invent a whole new meta-circus, Musk may ultimately fail in his attempt to turn Twitter into a digital town square. But on the way I think both men are going to do much more damage, and while I hope their stocks crash and burn, I hope we don’t too.