In 2016, futurists at Wired Magazine declared that social media is "privatized Global Commons". A techno-utopia where public participated globally. The bogus bravado aside, social media has devolved into misrepresentation of society. The tech giants own spaces, which host conflict and hate, in order maximize profits. The conflict which is now visible inside many social media platforms. That most social media is not transparent nor democratic. Thousands of pages of internal documents, leaked by whistle-blower, former product manager Francis Haugen shows how Facebook's value is based on harvesting minds. Billions! Facebook is out to mess with public opinion and democracy, on a daily basis. In a recent hearing, Francis said "The company prioritized profit over safety.. has also tried to hide it's own research from investors and public. The social harm caused when Facebook is used to platform hateful content, without adequate moderation, especially for foreign languages". Based on her experience, while working as product manager, she began to notice, how Facebook's strategy for the global south (nations of Africa, Latin America and Asia) was causing immense harm, at a societal level as well as individual cases. "It is a great danger to democracy, but one has to admit to societal harm.. I looked at the choices made by Facebook in terms of the global south.. take the case of Ethiopia and Sudan.. the opening chapters of a novel, a very horrific read ... Facebook's AI is actually closing the doors on free-speech and action... Facebook is also ignoring the sharp rise of demagogues within it's sphere of influence.. we have that window of time to not let AI and Facebook's business rule public opinion and information".
What Greenwald is pointing to is not just the reality of American social media, but has proliferated it's ugly specter deep within nations like India, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, Israel, Hungary, Germany and nations of Africa and Latin America. China being an exception to the list, because it's "exclusive leadership" maintains a complete (vicious) grip on all Chinese social media, way more efficiently than what Facebook, Google, Apple and Twitter can achieve as of now. The censorship and AI based manipulation has spilled beyond social media. Rapidly emerging as future technology, we expect to see soon, even more wicked and hyper-competitive arenas which boldly brag that "Everyone else will find themselves in a perpetual game of catchup...."
Facebook and Twitter are two platforms which aggravate polarization and tribal behavior. The following real life experiment goes to show how. In February 2019, a Facebook researcher created a new user account to experience the social media site as a person living in Kerala, India. For weeks, the account operated by a simple rule: Follow every recommendation generated by Facebook - join groups, watch videos, click away and explore every new suggestion. The result was an inundation of hate speech, typical fake-news and "celebrations of violence". The track record of which was eventually sent to Facebook as a report. The user was following AI based suggestions, which included pictures of dead bodies of Muslim people killed in India, rally videos of Narendra Modi, Catnip products and skin creams directed at dark-skinned women. Nearly 390 million people use Facebook everyday in India (currently the highest national demographic for Facebook) People use it as a source of news, entertainment and business. The fascist nature of the state and of Facebook collude perfectly! Yet just temporarily?
"It moves into a country without fully understanding its potential impact
on local culture and politics, and fails to deploy the resources to act
on issues once they occur" states a new article on the nature of Facebook's tech-colonialism. It's messianic leader, Mark Zuckerberg is surely aware that eventually it's about the "colonization of minds" - investing billions into VR and AI, stoked with visions of a life where every second is mapped for pleasure, yet even as the empire comes under fire from all sides, sliding down in value, battling it's own faulty vision, bureaucracy and algorithmic emancipation. As an article in the New Yorker naively chides "Why Can't Facebook Fix Itself" - while ignoring the decisive point - Why can't the writer (and his society) stop using Facebook itself?
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