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We need to insist on some sort of a user Magna Carta that limits the rights of these tech monarchs over our rights.
I’ve been thinking about various efforts we have seen over the years to break up the tech giants. It is possible to liken the tech giants, Google, Facebook and the like as empires who control vast territories. How did these empires come to be? Well, we, the inhabitants of the internet subscriber universe gave it to them.
Has anyone other than the occasional attorney ever read the user agreement that we all sign when we are given our access to the tech empire we chose to inhabit? Doubtful. I certainly haven’t. Who the hell has the time?
It is sort of like we are, as the general internet-using public, a strange land that has been discovered by a more sophisticated society. They came, planted a flag, took over and created an empire. (If this reminds you of an Eddie Izzard bit, that is not accidental.)
The flags of today’s tech empires are their logos and brands.
But there is another similarity involved here. Exploitation. History is chock-a-block with examples of the resources of one geographic area being exploited, or extracted, by another. European countries have exploited African states for centuries. The native people would find themselves under a whip digging into their own soil to extract, minerals, diamonds, gold, etc., only to find the wealth from this work in a vault in London rather than in their own hands.
The American Colonies and then the Southern States engaged in stealing the humanity of Africa to enrich themselves—a fact that many to this very day are defending. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, stated that slavery was actually a job training program from which slaves actually reaped a benefit.
Britain attacked China and took possession of Hong Kong to enforce opium trade in China, all for the pure profit despite the human addiction and misery generating that money.
The tech giants are nothing if not clever—far more so than their colonial predecessors but nevertheless the comparison is there. Instead of enslaving bodies and extracting the wealth of a region by force, they have enslaved the fingers and eyeballs on their clients through algorithms and user agreements.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a value provided by Facebook and Google. They are now right up there with the US Post Office as core drivers of the economy as tools for facilitating commerce. (This is, by the way, not the least bit sarcastic.) But their algorithms are geared to exploit the chief commodity that we users provide: Attention Span.
Meta (the Facebook parent company) and Google were recently found negligent in a trial about the harms created by social media algorithms. There have been many other settlements over the past years because of other abuses particularly by Facebook which has been used by some very nefarious actors. The military Junta in Myanmar used Facebook to cause a genocide against Rohingya minority in their country forcing them to flee. More famously was the case of Cambridge Analytica mining Facebook users for data that was then used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency troll farm in Saint Petersburg to sway the American electorate in 2016.
Not only are the tech giants behaving in an empirical fashion, they have a lot to answer for.
The funny thing is that operations like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads (all coincidentally owned by Meta), Reddit and even the now Nazi-infested X all actually provide a useful service. And it is a service they have a right to be paid for, granted. One of the greatest promises the internet gives people at every level of society is a communication system. Yet, these company’s abuse their customers on almost every front.
How do we strike a balance?
A possible answer may lie in a pattern demonstrated by users and advertisers on Twitter (now X) after it was purchased by Elon Musk. Many advertisers left Twitter after Musk suspended content moderation and gave full support to Nazi and white supremacist posters. The company was losing some very significant streams of income. And unsurprisingly, for a Ketamine addict anyway, instead of fixing the issues his customers objected to, he sued them.
Elon sidestepped the revenue loss problem by simply folding what remained of Twitter into his AI company xAI, which he then folded into SpaceX. This will allow him to bury his losses and expenses in the avalanche of money the SpaceX IPO will generate later this year. In other words, he is sticking his future shareholders with the bill.
In spite of the fact that the advertiser boycott of Twitter/X did not produce a lasting result it did demonstrate a weakness and vulnerability. The tech giants want to control us because they need not only our eyeballs and attention span, but something even more important: Our Clicks.
When you click on a sponsored link on any social network, two things happen: The advertiser gets billed and the network makes money. What would happen if we all just stopped clicking or better yet, registered our disapproval of all the ads we come across. On Facebook at least you can simply close them. Or you can spend a little extra time and use the “three dots” tool and register your disinterest. Whatever the method, start closing this revenue stream.
Since your preferences are part of the data Meta sells to other companies, this is a way you can skew and reduce the value of that tracking data.
For lack of a better idea, lets call it The Great Click Stop. Just don’t click on ads on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Google search results, you name it. If everyone does this, these companies will be faced with a revolt by the very things their fortunes depend on. After a while, as their stock values descend, their funding for endless data centers and AI operations will become harder to find.
Then comes the deal. Will the giants make a deal with their users? I’m not sure. But maybe, just maybe, we can get them to let loose of the idea that we somehow owe them all of our data and attention for free. We need to insist on some sort of a user Magna Carta that limits the rights of these tech monarchs over our rights.
The tech giants should no longer be able to have free reign in every direction.
Marty Kassowitz
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
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