DashKite • Week In Review
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** Big Tech In Trouble, The Outrage Economy, And More
Week In Review, March 8th, 2021
Angry woman with steam coming out of her ears The new face of economic growth.
This week: Disinformation is the mother of existential threats, YouTube wants Trump to make them money again, outrage powers our economy, more privacy breaches, what does the appointment of Timothy Wu portend for Big Tech, no one can reproduce the results of most AI papers.
Warning: Our Inconstant Editors have decreed that we use more emojis. 🤗
In past newsletters, we’ve sometimes featured an In Case You Missed It section. Which made sense because, judging from our traffic, you definitely missed it. 😄 But, frankly, no one was clicking on those links either. So we figured we might try a different approach.
If there is one thing we here at the Newsletter Division [That’s not a thing—Ed.] want you to take away from our work, it’s that we should stop extending the Assumption of Good Faith to Big Tech. If it seems like all our content shares that theme, it’s because…well, it does. Lest it seem like we’re being dramatic, it’s perhaps worth summarizing some of our earlier content each week to clarify the big picture.
** The Big Picture: Disinformation
Let’s kick this feature off with disinformation. Disinformation is the mother of existential threats to human civilization. Yes, we just issued a disclaimer about being dramatic in the previous paragraph, but bear with me. The argument goes like this: how do you solve a problem people don’t believe exists? Especially if solving it requires collective action?
We saw this play out with the COVID-19 pandemic. You could make a strong case that millions of people died due to disinformation about the virus (https://khn.org/news/article/lie-of-the-year-the-downplay-and-denial-of-the-coronavirus/) . We’re still dealing with that in the form of disinformation about the vaccines (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01056-1) .
We pitch DashKite as a social impact company. When people think of social impact, they typically think about things like climate change. But, just as with the pandemic, climate activism runs into a brick wall of disinformation. It’s so bad that at least one person (https://www.greenbiz.com/article/decoding-disinformation-machine) has resorted to studying QAnon for clues on how to get Republicans to support policies aimed at fighting climate change. Fighting disinformation is the prerequisite for fighting climate change, among other things.
We believe social Web platforms have an ethical obligation to help inform people. It’s not okay to allow disinformation to flourish, let alone to amplify it. We discussed our approach to disinformation (https://byline.dashkite.com/post/dashkite/w_ljVZkIbMtrtkekpwUnBg/facebook-and-twitter-promote-propaganda-and-disinformation) in our first post of 2021. We also argued that Big Tech wants us to believe (https://byline.dashkite.com/post/dashkite/93Mq7ygR0bPK-K8o-wXdDw/the-myth-of-the-hard-problem-of-moderation) that the problem is intractable, which gives them an excuse for inaction and slows momentum for regulation. Disinformation works, and nobody understands that better than Big Tech.
** Noteworthy
The crisis of ethics in Big Tech is almost beyond farce. Almost. (https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1367583401553854469)
YouTube signals that they’ll allow Trump back (https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1367610070519984135) on their platform. Which is totally not (https://twitter.com/AngelSDiaz_/status/1367871488817299467) because of the money (https://www.mediamatters.org/google/youtube-let-march-4-qanon-conspiracy-theory-spread) . 🙃 So I guess it must be the racism (https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/7/22318369/google-hr-advised-mental-health-leave-racist-sexist-behavior) . (Sure, we could build a diverse and inclusive culture. Or you could just, you know, take the hint (https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1368659740520108032) .)
Social media is training us to be perpetually outraged (https://twitter.com/chris_bail/status/1367504617601458181) . And they do that to sell ads. Companies purchase ads to sell us stuff. This implication: we’ve effectively turned the Internet into a machine that converts anger into consumer spending. 🤯
Big Tech has failed so badly (https://gizmodo.com/hackers-just-looted-passenger-data-from-some-of-the-wor-1846417692) at privacy that we’ve reached the point (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/at-least-30000-u-s-organizations-newly-hacked-via-holes-in-microsofts-email-software/) where we should probably just assume that bad actors (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/03/chinas-and-russias-spying-spree-will-take-years-to-unpack/) can find out anything they want about us. 🙁
Is the tide turning against Big Tech? Federal lawsuits are pending against both Google (DOJ) and Facebook (FTC). And Biden just appointed Tim Wu (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/tech-critic-tim-wu-joins-biden-admin-as-tech-competition-advisor/) , the law professor who coined the phrase Net Neutrality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality) , to the National Economic Council. Wu told WIRED magazine he believed Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram was illegal (https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-explains-why-facebook-broken-up/) , which should give you some idea of where he stands. If he’s representative of the people from whom Biden is taking counsel, Big Tech should be very afraid.
(Big Tech should be very afraid.)
AI is mostly pretend (https://bdtechtalks.com/2021/03/01/papers-without-code-machine-learning-reproducibility/) . 👾
** (Still) Upcoming
Thanks to our Inconstant Editors, we don’t have any of the exciting content we promised you last week. Apparently, the Research and Development Division invented a way to speed up the Internet? 🤓 Anyway, it’s been all hands on deck for that. But I promise we will try to sneak in a feature or two next week. [That seems unlikely—Ed.] * Part 2 of It’s Right There In The Name (https://byline.dashkite.com/post/dashkite/GH21Ybucp0psXIGEnSe9kQ/right-there-in-the-name-part-1) * What should we make of Block Party (https://www.blockpartyapp.com/) ? * Does Section 230 need updating? If so, how? * What does it mean when you fire your ethicists?
As always, if you enjoyed this post and want to support our mission, please subscribe (https://subscribe.dashkite.com/lets-stay-in-touch) to our newsletter. Thank you! 🙏
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