Soon, the
internet will be impossible to control - from the telegraph.co.uk
From big companies to governments,
the ability to censor what we do online is about to get a lot harder
By Jamie Bartlett
3:03PM GMT 10 Dec 2014
We think of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as public
utilities, a sort of digital commons. Partly because we’ve got used to it all
being free, partly because it’s where the debates of the day are now publicly
thrashed out. Social media is now part of our political and cultural furniture
– exciting, raucous and noisy. Subsequently, we imagine it's neutral and
apolitical. Empty "platforms" to be filled with our clamourings.
This is nonsense, of course. Social
media platforms are public in the same way that a shopping centre is. It looks and
feels it until a security guard chucks you out for leaning over the railing, at
which point you realise you’re on someone else’s private property. Take
Facebook, with its 1.35bn monthly users. The company pays for and owns the
hundreds of thousands of servers that host all of our inane content, not to
mention the army of engineers and programmers required to keep the thing
running. That’s why Facebook allows companies to target adverts at us based on
the things we post – it means we don’t have to pay for it.
Then there’s all the social and
legal responsibilities. All social networks have terms and conditions which
forbid illegal, violent, threatening or abusive stuff. These reasonable
requests are frequently ignored and so Google et al need to hire hundreds of
"content managers" whose job it is to watch humanity’s bile (according to
a recent article in Wired, there are 100,000 of them, dotted around the world)
and remove it. Inevitably, this drags these usually American companies into
uncomfortable decisions: should YouTube remove all Isil-related content? Should
Twitter close down misogynistic accounts? Should Facebook proactively search
out extremist material and pass it to the authorities, as the
Intelligence and Security Committee has recently suggested? Important
social questions, which are inevitably dealt with in the legal or policy
department a company headquartered far away.
Because of the way the internet
works, these companies also get to subtly influence what we encounter online:
what we find, who we meet, and what we buy. Google’s search algorithm is
increasingly personalised to your own search history, which means you end up
finding stuff online it thinks you want. According to
one recent study, if you tell your friends on Facebook you’ve
voted, they are more 0.39 per cent more likely to vote too. Given that Facebook
could decide through its newsfeed algorithm who gets to see your declaration of
civic duty – that power could affect change the result of an election.
This is not the fault of these
companies, who I think err on the side of free expression, and generally want
to create a free, public service. But thanks to market forces and expediency
the result is a public space that isn’t really controlled by the citizens. It’s
curated, controlled, monetised, and censored, often from behind closed doors.
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