For Big Tech, there is no such round

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Noam Cohen

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In prize fights, there is one less than excellent path to victory known as “stealing the sleeve”. Your opponent can hit you at the beginning of the 3 minutes of boxing, or even for the first two minutes and 50 seconds, however, in times of turn decline, you arrive strongly in front of the ring judges to be declared the winner. on their markers.

It’s a century-old strategy, you might even call it a trick, to defeat a tough enemy, and her masters have included titans like Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. And I would recommend that the round flight strategy also be so that titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai were judged by the public as victorious, or at least deserving of their enormous power. Critics are not easy to dismantle.

On several occasions, when their corporations were accused of irregularities, allowing misinformation theories and conspiracy to flourish on their platforms, or their monopoly powers to dominate the smallest competition, they absorbed the blow, granted the point, and, at the last minute, agreed. to solve the challenge by throwing cash and workers. They were reactive in design, responding only after the hounds discovered the irregularities and sometimes accepted so temporarily that they were not offering a target to their critics.

Yet whether in the ring or in politics, this strategy is collapsing in the face of our determined minds and overwhelming opposition. The number of crises observed only this week, a global pandemic that achieved terrible new milestones and a president supposedly at odds with the democratic procedure, yet it has given Big Tech’s war-to-star parties the team to effectively challenge their operations and call for change.

We may consider this era as a culmination, in terms of the monetary functionality of corporations, as well as their ability to interact seriously with critics. It cannot be offering a hasty reaction and saves lives to accusations of promo promotion of charlatan opposed to Covid-19, or boast of the exciting new voter data portal he has created as President Trump suggests on social media. November elections due to fabricated considerations of mail-mail ballots. What’s at stake is too high to make a wonderful display for the audience and I hope to move on.

That the game’s regulations have been replaced in a way that we’ll take a look back when Silicon Valley’s aura of invincibility became apparent Wednesday when the four executives — from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet — gave the impression before a Competition Judicial Subcommittee. Array Armed with subpoena emails and informed through interviews with those devastated by the overwhelming market strength of those companies, subcommittee members deepened to get executives to admit that they used their monopoly forces to break all competition.

A clear line of consultation from Zuckerberg through Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) focused on whether Facebook is copying the features of its competition to intimidate them into agreeing to be purchased. Zuckerberg insisted that they were not ruthless capitalists, but committed product developers, whose “job is to make sure we create the most productive so that other people can bond with all the people they care about.” However, in the end, Jayapal concluded dryly: “Facebook’s very style prevents new businesses from thriving separately, damaging our democracy. It harms family businesses and consumers.”

Much of the audience focused on the express abuses of monopoly force: the competitive acquisition of potential competition in the early stages, Google’s promotion of its own content in its search results, or how the value of a diaper box was replaced after Amazon acquired the parent company. Diapers.com. But the real objective was the absence of duty as a precept of operation of these undertakings. And this has a specific bite during a time of global crisis, during which his virtual team has helped us submit to search cases and at the same time sell the kind of isolation and false impression that can make it even more difficult to get out.

Rep. David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island), chairman of the Subcommittee, has moved the verbal exchange over covid-19 conspiracies that are flourishing on Facebook, and has not skimped on his words, insisting that the platform “lethal content” – which is content that leads the public to harmful actions, either by seeking harmful “cures” or resisting prudent measures such as dressing in a mask. But Zuckerberg’s insistence that Facebook has “a relatively intelligent track record of fighting and suppressing many fake content and disseminating authoritative information” fails to appease users and legislators when it comes to a scourge that has claimed 150,000 lives and that, unlike, for example, leaks non-public data.

To be honest, major platforms have insisted that there are two exceptions to their practical technique in the face of hatred and incorrect information that appear on their platforms: public aptitude and democracy. So far, they may simply assume that these third-party rails would not be breached in the United States in such a destructive and undeniable manner. Facebook, for example, was credibly accused of contributing to the genocide in Myanmar, but was in the other aspect of the world; and Amazon and YouTube, as well as Facebook, have helped publicize campaigns opposed to immunization during the training years, endangering young people’s lives, but far from the scale of Covid-19 misery. Simply put, it is highly unlikely that this anticipation or pandemic will pass out to the next scandal.

In January, Andrew Bosworth, Zuckerberg’s closest confidant and vice president of real augmented and virtual on Facebook, wrote a candid statement about his company’s role in putting Trump in power. “So Facebook is guilty of the election of Donald Trump?” Bosworth asked. “I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons no one thinks. He did not choose for Russia, incorrect information or Cambridge Analytica. He chose because he carried out the most productive virtual advertising crusade he’s ever seen from an advertiser. Period.”

Six months later, with a fatal virus spreading relentlessly in the United States and a president wondering whether to hold elections, I don’t think Bosworth will rewrite those words, let alone in such an informal way. According to the polls, Trump is much more hated, and deeper, now than at the beginning of the year. But it’s attractive to have a review of Bosworth’s idea process. Citing the ethical philosopher John Rawls, he states that “the ethical way to make a decision is to move absolutely away from the specificities of all the people involved”, and this reasoning prevents him from “limiting the scope of the publications that have earned his audience, unsightly their content would possibly be for me and even for the ethical philosophy that is so expensive to my heart.

He temporarily added the well-known warnings: “That doesn’t mean there’s no line. Things like incitement to violence, voter suppression, etc. are things that the same ethical philosophy would allow me to safely exclude.

Responsibility is going forward for Big Tech. Not only because Congress has had an impressive hearing, but because the confluence of crises now requires action, even in accordance with the logic of non-intervention by those companies. There is still no selection to regain the out-of-control force exercised by those platforms. It’s not just that Facebook spreads fake remedies and represses voters, or that YouTube sends its users to conspiracy and hate, or that Apple and Amazon are essential in the way we source data and entertainment and the way we trade. It’s a consultation of how a country protects its people.

Perhaps in larger times, we can simply assume the most productive of those platforms and be influenced by their promises to solve the problem. But when our country is tested as it is now, we settle for impromptu answers and the assurance that it already has a way to do better next time.

Mike Tyson had a clever way of solving Silicon Valley’s existing inadequacy to deal with the crises he faces: “Everyone has a plan until they’re given in their mouths.”

Photographs: Graeme Jennings / Getty Images; LMPC/ Getty Images

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