Technology
Do technology businesses have the right to exclude users from their social media?
If there is no law enforcement, we should not stand by this role reversal
Originally written in Portuguese by Sergio Amadeu da Silveira, published on Folha de Sao Paulo, 22 of January 2021, 11:15pm
One of the great fragilities of the democracies in the current neoliberal organisations involves the so-called online social media: private structures that present themselves as public spaces. The way they act and operate are intentionally obfuscating. Their platforms create calculated consumers to receive contents which serves the interests of those who boosted it.
Users of these platforms are continuously allocated in samples with access sold to political and commercial marketing operators. This is the heart of those giant companies. Hence, they appeal for life’s spectacularization and for their users massive data collection with the objective to form consumer profiles in order to increase marketing efficiency and behaviour modulation.
In 2019, the turnover of the group Alphabet, Google’s controller, reached US$ 161.8 billion — that sum, with Facebook’s revenue of US$ 70.7 billion, totals US$ 232.5 billion. These two corporations earned, in the same period, the equivalent of 52.2% of the Argentinian GDP, 82.3% of Chile’s GDP, 97.3% of Portugal’s GDP and four times Uruguay’s.
In general, managed by algorithms-based systems from machine learning, the platforms control message visualisations in completely opaque forms. What is published is only made available to the user’s initial pages according to their algorithm systems. We don’t know if the contents of a social movement have had its visualisation reduced or even blocked except if social media assumes the deed.
Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, one former and the latter chief of the Executive Power, openly attacked science, creating waves of misinformation that led to serious problems to public health and encouraged open violence against democracy: in short, they committed crimes. Faced with this, the basic institutes of justice did not act to enforce the law and constitution. Then, social media acted by blocking those extreme right-wing leaders’ discourses. We should not stand by this role reversal.
There are numerous cases of censorship against the feminist movements in Facebook. The former culture minister Juca Ferreira had one post that contained an image of an artistic collection censored by the social media of Mark Zuckerberg. The episode of the podcast Tecnopolítica [Technopolitical], from my authorship, which dealt with algorithm racism, had restrictions after being considered “bizarre contents” by YouTube. A few days later, however, it was released without any explanation of what ought to be considered offensive or outside the rules of the video-sharing platform.
Democratic societies need to supervise platforms instead of being controlled by them. Facebook, Google and Twitter, amongst others, cannot be above the constitution; they cannot practise digital despotism — even if “enlightened” as in the case of blocking the coup messages from Trump.
Their privacy and community policies change all the time. They follow the profit logic. The collateral damage of delegating to technology companies the role that is placed upon the justice system and its elected counsel by society are the corrosion of democracy and the establishment of an “algocracy”, the arbitrary power of algorithms-based systems at the service of the platforms.
