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Big tech is catching heat. Countless exposes, scandals and critiques have seen the firms dragged in front of parliamentary select committees and Congress. On almost every topic – from how they handle hate, fake news, Russia, and cyber-bullying on their platforms, to who they ban, and what they amplify – they seem to get it wrong. This phenomenon even has its own name: the ‘techlash’.
As I’ve watched this fall from grace, there has been something I’ve struggled to reconcile. Over the last decade, I’ve grown to know people working within all of the tech companies. And rather to my disappointment, I’ve never met the crazed, Ayn Rand-reading digital libertarian of our collective nightmares. None of them want to destroy governments or states. None of them wish the laws and ethics of normal life to dissolve away.
At least from my experience, the vast majority of them are thoughtful, reasonable people who are genuinely trying to do the right thing and act with a responsibility equal to the power that they know they hold. They worry about the harms their platforms have created, and genuinely try to do the right things to prevent and mitigate them.
So why are they unable to convince us that they are making good faith, reasonably un-biased decisions about difficult, complex and new problems? Why do we never give them the benefit of the doubt?
By their own admission, some of the decisions the tech companies have made have been dramatically out of step with their consumers and society. Facebook apologised for the “breach of trust” exposed by Cambridge Analytica. Apple (kind of) apologised for deliberately slowing down iPhones as they aged. Twitter first said they wouldn’t ban conspiracy theorist Alex Jones because he hadn’t breached their rules. Then, in the face of rising criticism, promptly changed their position and banned him. Google apologised for running ads next to videos espousing terrorism (yet not for the videos themselves).
The list goes on. Google has been fined more than $7 billion by the European Competition Commission over eight years for anti-competitive behaviour, and social media platforms are currently being criticised (again) over the self-harm and pro-suicide content on their sites. And in my eyes the most serious of all, Mark Zuckerberg apologised for ridiculing the idea that Russia had used their platform to influence the 2016 American election.
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