It’s only Tuesday and its already been a rough week for big tech. These companies that rose quickly to dominate the Internet seem not so much sinister, despite the intent of some of their users, but rather wildly unprepared. That should be a lesson for other emerging industries. Although a company may control the product it creates, it does not control its users.
Early Tuesday morning, President Trump attacked big tech on Twitter, calling Google “RIGGED” and accusing companies of censoring conservative voices — despite, of course, the president’s own daily use of Twitter. Being dragged (again) in the murky waters of U.S. electoral politics, however, is something that tech companies have been trying and learning with some success to navigate since the 2016 election.
More troubling is the United Nations Human Rights Council report, released on Monday, that directly implicates Facebook in the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. That report explains, “Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate, in a context where for most users Facebook is the Internet. Although improved in recent months, Facebook’s response has been slow and ineffective.” The report continues, “The extent to which Facebook posts and messages have led to real world discrimination and violence must be independently and thoroughly examined.”
For Facebook, these are serious charges. They are also clear indicators that Facebook was unprepared for its social media platform to have contributed to genocide and was unable to quickly create a response. Now, scrambling to curtail bad press, Facebook has decided to ban the military leaders accused of perpetuating and allowing the violence.
Twitch, a video streaming service, is also facing scrutiny after it inadvertently offered viewers a livestream of the shooting at a video game tournament in Jacksonville Florida over the weekend that left three dead, including the shooter, and several injured. Twitch has since indicated that it will remove any videos of the shooting but that, of course, did not stop Internet viewers from watching the carnage play out on screens across the country.
Those criticisms also come as social media companies are coming to grips with their services being used to manipulate and attempt to manipulate electoral politics. On Tuesday morning, Twitter also revealed that it had uncovered yet more disinformation campaigns originating in Iran and aimed at spreading discord in the United States — the latest in a series in thwarted attempts caught by Twitter and Facebook in recent weeks, raising questions about what has gone unchecked in the past and how platforms have become rife with manipulative content.
Although tech companies have made efforts to respond to these incidents, for users that have come to count on these platforms, it may be too little, too late. That is bad news for the companies who depend on users for market value and to generate revenue. This should also be a lesson for rapidly developing tech companies.
To be clear, this is not to say that governments, which have even less understanding of the technology than do the companies, should regulate new and emerging industries, but that these industries need to be better prepared internally. The heady success is, as the saying goes, all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
As Facebook has learned, it would have been far better to have asked the difficult “what if” questions — and come up with answers — before the United Nations implicated the company in genocide.
