'Big tech has been rattled. The conversation has changed'
The admission by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg was alarming.
“Things happened on our platform in this election that should not have happened,” she said in an onstage interview last week with Mike Allen, the journalist and Washington diary-keeper. “Especially, and very troubling, foreign interference in a democratic election.”
But Sandberg evaded a string of follow-up questions. What “things”? When exactly did Facebook notice the “things”? Was it a lot of “things”? Has the company taken care of the problem? And why should the public take Facebook’s word for it?
The Sandberg interview was part of a first wave of damage control by Facebook in a crisis that is just beginning to compound. Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter have been called to give sworn public testimony before a US congressional panel early next month about what happened on their platforms in the run-up to the presidential election, now almost a year ago. The companies have also been approached by Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating alleged ties between Russia and the Donald Trump presidential campaign.
For all the repercussions of Trump’s presidency, among the most surprising may be the hostile scrutiny that has sprung up of America’s star-dusted tech companies, as awareness dawns of how Russia took advantage of the companies’ platforms – and their highly profitable obsessions with targeting individuals and content sharing, minus oversight – to elevate Trump and attack Hillary Clinton.
“They’re being rattled in a way in which they’ve never been rattled,” said Franklin Foer, whose new book, World Without Mind: the Existential Threat of Big Tech, can be read as an uncanny prophecy of big tech’s public reckoning. Speaking on the phone from Washington DC, Foer said it would be a mistake to think the federal government was hitting the companies yet “with its heaviest blows”.
“It’s just to say that they’ve just been so unscathed for so long, that even these relatively innocuous calls to turn over evidence or to testify are culturally and politically significant.”
Foer’s book grew out of a cover story about monopolistic abuses by Amazon in The New Republic, the intellectually accredited, century-old magazine of public affairs at which Foer took two turns as editor. At the time, Foer was hoping to reinvent the magazine for the Facebook age after it was bought by a cofounder of Facebook. His personal telling of that story in World Without Mind recalls a previous book in which he used his nuclear-grade soccer fandom to explain globalization.
“I started working on this in 2014, and when I did, people looked at me funny,” Foer said of the new book. “It was like I was a hippy howling into the wind, it felt like, because of the prestige that these tech companies held. Then, suddenly, when the book came out last month, I had a radio host accusing me of spouting the conventional wisdom. The tide had turned so quickly.
“The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.”
Official and public outrage is growing at the tech companies with the realization that an army of Russia-linked bots and trolls operating as imposter accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other networks were able to buy ads and target an estimated hundreds of millions of Americans with political messages during the election. The techniques of the imposter accounts, which sought to inflame users over hotbutton social issues, have underscored a creeping sense of the country having been virtually invaded – and outsmarted.
The current scrutiny is all the stranger given that big tech has gotten a virtual free pass in its present incarnation. For the last 15 years, lawmakers have shrugged as Amazon bulldozed its way to a nearmonopoly in the book business and most every other retail business. And no one took much interest as Facebook manipulated users’ news feeds, inflated its metrics to advertisers and experimented with driving voter turnout. Few seemed to care as Google scanned libraries full of copyrighted material and, like Apple, moved billions in assets offshore to minimize tax liabilities. These companies continued to grow and squeeze nearly every competitor out.
The larger questions of potential dangers posed by big tech, meanwhile – as the companies collect endless data about US individuals to whom they endlessly sell products and devices designed to make our lives endlessly more convenient – have proven completely outside the government’s ken.
Like no other event before it, Foer said, the election of Trump has crystallized the feeling that the big tech companies – Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft – have perhaps been allowed to amass slightly too much power with slightly too little oversight.
“The election is the thing that’s changed the conversation,” he said. “For liberals, a lot of it has to do with this angry sense that Facebook was somehow complicit in the Trump victory. For conservatives, it’s their rote hatred of big media, in the sense that gatekeepers who are liberal will always rig the system in favor of liberals. But in the end, it’s a shared anxiety.
“There are clearly emancipatory powers lurking within these new technologies. But when that power becomes captured, and when individuality and our sense of agency becomes illusory – when power becomes so deeply concentrated in a small handful of firms on which we all depend, then we are skewing in the direction of dystopia.”
When Foer began working on his book, he was nearing the end of a highly personal lesson about how big tech could fail to live up to its own high-minded intentions. Two years earlier, the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes had devoted a sliver of his fortune to buying The New Republic and convinced Foer to take a second turn as editor-in-chief.
Hughes, Foer writes, was “a mythical savior – boyishly innocent, fantastically rich, intellectually curious, unexpectedly humble, and proudly idealistic”. The magazine built a new web site without a recognizable ad presence and eschewed search engine optimization and other dreary tools that modern media companies use in the quest for clicks and the ad money behind them.
The experiment ended after Foer published the Amazon cover story and Hughes, having realized how much money he was losing, hired a CEO from Yahoo! who rebranded the magazine as a “vertically integrated digital media company”. A staff exodus ensued, with Foer in front.
“I hope this book doesn’t come across as fueled by anger, but I don’t want to deny my anger either,” Foer writes. In World Without Mind, his critique of Amazon has blossomed into an elegant polemic against the giant companies whose ability to please consumers has for too long masked corollary dangers for the economy, for personal privacy and, ultimately, for the exercise of democracy.
“It’s not that we need to throw our iPhones into the sea, or that we need to place the idea of a search engine into an archive where only scholars with white gloves would be able to look at it,” Foer said. “We should be able to shape these technologies in a way that they don’t interfere with the workings of our democracy, they don’t addict us, they don’t manipulate us.”
Foer greets the question of what kind of regulation may be in order – an old-fashioned monopoly-bust? A federal data protection law? – by pointing to London’s decision to delicense Uber, and to the effort in Europe to tame Google.
“I’m really skeptical of the idea that there can be some regulatory body that can oversee Facebook and force it to behave in a virtuous sort of way,” he said.
“The Europeans are kind of groping toward the dismemberment of Google right now, by trying to sever the ad business from its search business. I think that there’s some similar sort of model that could be applied to Facebook that would have the effect of seriously wounding its monopoly and would have the effect of making it behave more virtuously.”
Foer also points to an effort launched this summer by a coalition of major newspaper and new media companies to get permission from Congress to bargain collectively with Facebook and Google over ad revenue and access to content. Even as they rely on the tech giants to find a broad readership, media companies have been starved of ad revenue, and pushed in some cases to extinction, by the same companies.
“That the media alliance is pushing for regulatory solutions is interesting,” said Foer. “That it’s not just quietly moaning about Google and Facebook, that they’re now actively pushing back. And I think it’s reflected in the coverage.
“It’s fairly stunning to look at the newspaper every day and to awaken to what seems like a fresh mainstream media assault on big tech, which is something I really hadn’t expected. New media had kind of laid prostrate before these guys, and basically accepted their fate as kind of being tethered to Facebook and Google.
“It’s like a post-Soviet state having a color revolution to watch media rebel against these companies.”
When power becomes so concentrated in a small handful of firms, then we are skewing in the direction of dystopia