BIG TECH GIANTS

Have you ever pondered why the technology we use today has
downtrend the pace of transformation?

Well this is what this blog is about and I hope that you'll get most
of your questions answered, but before starting I’ll recommend
you to tighten your seat belts as it's going to be one hell of a ride.

Going down the memory lane, 1960s- 1970s was the period when
the Digital Revolution transpired; it was a great leap for mankind
but since the 2000s the pace of revolution has reduced
drastically.

But this was the period when Social Media ushered in, be it
Facebook co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 or be it Twitter
co-founded by Jack Dorsey in 2006 which are among the
foremost valuable and well-known companies across the world.

With big fame comes big responsibilities, but my question is

whether or not these companies lived up to their user’s
expectation? Well, the answer is controversial so let’s discuss
both the aspects very well.

I still remember the time when a severe earthquake struck Nepal

in 2015 it had been the “Safety Check function” of facebook that
saved over seven million users in Nepal by notifying several
connections worldwide. Various programs like internet
accessibility to remote areas, solar array projects, tackling
educational injustices are the foremost commendable jobs done
by these tech-giants. These corporations are required to embrace
the role of social actor. These platforms can have an impact on
the philanthropic activities of a private.

But that’s not the sole case. We even have a dark side of those
companies which I will discuss well

Take the instance of Facebook, they purchased their potential

competitors WhatsApp and Instagram. Walmart also used its
economic power to occupy Flipkart.

This is not the tip of the story, a number of these companies have
grown up so powerful that they're bullying cities and states into
showering them with taxpayers handouts in exchange for doing
business. This can be an awfully serious scenario.

We can take the instance of Twitter a social media platform which

came into existence 14 years ago so before we discuss what
twitter is, let’s speak about what twitter was alleged to be and
here is that the preamble to its original rule that claims “ Each
user is accountable for the content he or she provides”. We
do not actively monitor and cannot censor user content, except in
limited circumstances”.

In other words twitter was alleged to be a neutral platform where

you may say anything to anyone with only a few rules. Twitter
prayed itself on being anti censorship platform especially after
playing a job in Arab spring Uprising 2011. Twitter commitment
to free speech was break into design and structure.
 Twitter began as a radical experiment in free speech but over
time that experiment sorted to crumble because the identical
features that made twitter so attractive also made it an ideal
environment for trolls, neo-Nazis, supremacist and misogynists.
These users realized that they may use twitter as a structure to
focus on and harass people they didn’t trust and for long twitter
had a peer problem on their hand status users like journalist,
celebrities and authors leaving the platform due to twitter’s
inability to cater to harassment.
In 2015, former CEO Dick Costolo told their employees “We suck
at managing abuse and trolls… and we’ve sucked at it for years
… the remainder of the globe talks about it daily. We lose core
user by not addressing simple trolling issues”. Twitter radical free
speech experiment have failed. So this is often where things
began to get really dicey because twitter needs to answer this
basic but massive question.

Is Twitter really a neutral platform like Verizon or Comcast

offering public platform without caring about what happens on it.
Or twitter becomes something else i.e., a community moderator
that cares about the content and behavior of its users.
So far twitter answer has been confusing.

Alonghand the company is clearly moving away from its radical

free speech roots. Twitter has slowly introduced tougher and
tougher rules on dealing with harassment like violent threats and
statements to harass. These are positive developments for victim
of abuse but enforcing those rules is asking twitter tougher and
tougher questions about user content. To be honest there is no
neutral way to answer these questions. Twitter is stuck between
these competing visions with responsibility to its users. Which is
how we end up with a ban of white supremacy content but
verifying actual white supremacists account. By starting to
crackdown on abuse twitter is kind of opening Pandora’s house.

Let’s analyze it this way in earlier times when people wanted to

express their feelings they used to have debates, interactive
sessions, get together and much more which never was directly
impacting the Freedom of Speech of any individual or citizens in
general. But in today’s world the control is in the hands of
netizens, people are still expressing themselves but with many
restrictions. If someone one wants to take a stand and criticize the
government on certain matters he or she is labelled as an anti-
national. This is not the world we wanted.

The major reason for such a condition are The Big Tech Giants
controlling social media be it Facebook, Twitter or any other
Company for that matter. On October 29 Facebook and Twitter
had been asked to testify in the senate. It all started with Section
230 of the Communication Decency Act 1996 that said that the
websites cannot be held responsible for what people post, no
matter how offensive it is. The law allowed companies like
facebook and twitter to grow their operations deep into people's
lives without fearing about any legal action.
But in recent times both The Democrats and Republicans want
this law to be scrapped out.
One of the major reasons for taking this manoeuvre now can be
traced back till May when Donald Trump tweets a false claim
about mail- in voting, this was the first time twitter had placed a
label on it. But it’s not just The Republicans in this race even The
Democrats have also criticized the law immensely as Joe Biden is
also of the view that this law should be revoked immediately.

These social media services don't seem to be free, people are

paying for them with very valuable items. We’ve seen a lot of
cases of information breaches, dissemination of false election
which undermined the 2016 US elections.

There used to be a time when the masses had the control over
the world and the tech used was just a means to achieve it. But
today it's the other way round, the Tech giants are running the
world and there's nothing that the people can do.
There are daily reports of perfectly legitimate speech being taken
down, accounts being flagged for some hate speech, and it’s not
only on Facebook but on all other social platforms. These sites are
under tremendous pressure and are trying to moderate the
contents on their sites and they’re doing it badly. Governments are
perfectly happy to come and take advantage of community
standard guidelines to how speech taken down that they would be
very uncomfortable taking it down officially
In my opinion we should not double down, if something is not
working practically then we shouldn’t be doing the same thing
again. One thing we can do is to take the money that were invested
in having more and more content moderators and investing it in
small group of companies making big decision about the internet
experiences and invest it in user tools so that users can have more
control over internet experience. and additionally what we can
examine our mistakes and rectify them. Above all we must have a
right to appeal so that the people who have their account
suspended or content down can have a chance to present evidence
and can have a explanation.