Facebook has been accused of bias and manipulation by those at either end of the political spectrum in India. They allege that Facebook edits flagrantly biased content selectively and favours the other side’.
It doesn’t matter whose side Facebook is on.
Pay attention to the larger issue.
Can the algorithm game democracy’?
This is a post-truth world. If the main parties in India accuse Facebook, surely it is an important thing to examine. The repercussions are very grave.
Our society is indeed polarised. There is hardly any middle ground. But, this is endemic and unique to the human species. Nature itself has no polarity. It has predator and prey but even they comprise parts of one organic ecosystem. What is unique about human society is that we are in a position to form an opinion and proselytise it.
The work of physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi is about networks – metabolic and genetic networks, social networks, internet networks and ecological systems as a web of interdependent species. By investigating the topology of the World Wide Web, Internet, cellular and social networks, he has discovered that networks follow a common blueprint, having scale-free characteristics. To that extent, Facebook and others are being accused of using the scale to artificially prompt a false sense of reality.
The presumed eventual ‘near monopoly’ of WhatsApp-Facebook -Instagram is a concern for many. Yet, it’s very hard to break these companies on the basis of old industrial anti-trust benchmarks. The Guardian’s US correspondent Ganesh Sitaraman wrote this about the book ‘Zuck: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe’ by Roger McNamee. “An early investor in Facebook and an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, McNamee’s central argument is that Facebook is a threat to the economy, public health, and democracy. It is being used to stoke confusion and division. The economic critique rests on the problems of monopoly capitalism, including, for example, Facebook’s ability to buy up potential rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp before they might have had a chance to challenge its dominance. Democracy cannot survive without debate and deliberation. ButNewsFeed pushes us into bubbles, so we increasingly are cut off from different opinions. And that is in addition to the trolls and bots, fake pages and groups, misinformation and outright lies.”
The growth of online networks has not been a democratic force beyond the loud expression of divisive opinion. You hear more of what you like. Your opinion is heard by folks whose thinking and views are similar. This system is run by an algorithm. It’s that algorithm which has concentrated power beyond our comprehension. In America, these concerns have been voiced loudly. A huge percentage of American voters –almost half -rely on their social media feed as the primary source of news and opinion. The alleged manipulation of what gets served as news is the biggest threat to participative democracy.
The algorithm can be tweaked. It is subject to commercial considerations, That is very serious power. Regulation of social media as publishers of content ought to be a universal requirement. Don’t forget that unlike a TV channel or a newspaper, Facebook has your data too. Social media companies must be accountable to the democracies that make their businesses possible. Major technology companies- such as Facebook, Twitter, Google – define the information ecosystem in much of the world. Barely regulated and hardly accountable, these companies are completely transforming the public sphere.
Will we be condemned to be subjects of motivated machine intelligence that learns incomparably faster than us and has no restraint upon it? This is a classic ‘input-output’ issue. We, as a mass cohort, are gullible enough to believe the output but we have no visibility or understanding of what, or who is on the input side.
This networking power is operating above national sovereignty. These corporations –Facebook, Amazon, Google – are so huge that no national government can hope to individually control or restrict their behaviour. This includes the government of the United States of America. This is the grid on which surveillance capitalism operates.
James Lovelock – the scientist who developed the “Gaia Theory” about Earth’s life and climate and who turned 100 this year -along with Bryan Appleyard has written ‘Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence’ a brief but thought-provoking book that predicts that cyborgs may eventually evolve to supplant carbon-based humankind.
If you don’t like that eventuality, take charge and hold your social networks accountable for a start.