Privacy advocates tried to explain that persuasion was just the tip of the iceberg. Commercial databases were juicy targets for spies and identity thieves, to say nothing of blackmail for people whose data-trails revealed socially risky sexual practices, religious beliefs, or political views.
Now we’re living through the techlash, and finally people are coming back to the privacy advocates, saying we were right all along; given enough surveillance, companies can sell us anything: Brexit, Trump, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, and successful election bids for absolute bastards like Turkey’s Erdogan and Hungary’s Orban.
It’s great that the privacy-matters message is finally reaching a wider audience, and it’s exciting to think that we’re approaching a tipping point for indifference to privacy and surveillance.
But while the acknowledgment of the problem of Big Tech is most welcome, I am worried that the diagnosis is wrong.
The problem is that we’re confusing automated persuasion with automated targeting. Laughable lies about Brexit, Mexican rapists, and creeping Sharia law didn’t convince otherwise sensible people that up was down and the sky was green.
Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros.
Tag: Social Media
Being Big Isn’t Illegal
... the U.S. antitrust approach places the consumer at the center of the analysis. We don't punish businesses because they have been exceptional at meeting consumer demand. Rather, the government steps in if a business engages in anti-competitive activities that harm customers, like obliterating the competition with low prices before jacking them up on consumers that have no other option—classic monopolistic behavior.
Doesn't that just make sense? Consider the alternative. The government could break up or limit any firm that is simply a great competitor. Consumers are actually served well by this giant. But their competitors of course will grumble for their nemesis to be taken down a few pegs.
In this conception of antitrust, the government essentially protects the bottom lines of competitors who can't keep up. Before U.S. courts settled on the economics-grounded consumer welfare standard that has guided U.S. antitrust for decades, trust-busting activities were often little more than handouts to interest groups.
Not only would court cases counterintuitively seek to keep prices high, to the detriment of consumers, judges worked a host of non-antitrust hobbyhorses into their decisions. Maybe one judge had a particular fondness for "social equality." The antitrust decisions he handed down might have aimed for that totally unrelated, arguably impossible outcome.
The European approach to antitrust is more like the muddled U.S. approach before it settled on the consumer welfare standard. Some in the U.S. would like our antitrust posture to be more like Europe's, but at least for now, it is limited to the scribblings of theorists in the land of the free.
With that crash course in antitrust theory under our belt, we can now ask: What will the U.S. do about Facebook and Google?
Is A Single Universal Social Media ID In The Works?
Perhaps the most existential question regarding the Web’s future is what could turn the tide against online toxicity? The rise of horrific speech, terrorism recruitment, cyberbullying and all other manner of toxicity has undermined the initial advances the Web made in granting a voice to the formerly voiceless. Much has been made of the Web’s ability to transform Dr. Jekylls into Mr. Hydes, bringing out the worst in ordinarily level-headed individuals and turning even teachers and professors into raving founts of hate. The Web’s anonymity has frequently been cited as a root cause of this transformation from in-person congeniality to online hate monger, raising the question of whether replacing the digital world’s anonymity with real-world personas would restore digital civility or make things worse?
Twitter has in many ways become the public face of online toxicity. While there are many reasons for this such as its broadcast nature, one driving factor is its reliance on anonymous user accounts in which hateful individuals can hide behind the protective cloak of an anonymous username.
In contrast, LinkedIn, with its focus on accounts that directly tie users back to their real-world identities, including schools, employers and professional connections, is far less associated with toxic discourse.
Twitter’s anonymity is equivalent to a protest march in which participants are wearing masks to shield their identities. LinkedIn is the equivalent of everyone wearing name badges and the logos of their employers and schools on an identifying vest.
This connection between online persona and real-life identity mirrors the mediating influence connectedness once had through the geographic ties of community. In the physical world that predated the Web, community reigned supreme, whether on the scale of a small town, an urban neighborhood or a professional society. Members knew each other and had deep ties established through friendship, family, schools, workplaces, social organizations and other connections. This meant that even when community members disagreed, there were costs to deviating from civil discourse. Two neighbors might vehemently disagree about politics, but their physical proximity and need for mutual cooperation typically overruled emotional irrational impulses.
