Tech Giants Recast as Social Menaces
Intelligence Committee will hold a hearing on the matter.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, has been talking about the “large gaps in opportunity across the U. S.” and announced a $1 billion grant program to promote jobs.
But the companies’ first imperative remains to do right by their stockholders.
Ross Baird, president of the venture capital firm Village Capital, noted that when ProPublica, the investigative news organization, tried last month to buy ads aimed at “Jew haters” on Facebook, the platform did not question whether this was a bad idea — it asked the buyers how they would like to pay.
“For all the lip service that Silicon Valley has given to changing the world, its ultimate focus has been on what it can monetize,” Mr. Baird said.
Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, recently wrote that the “monetization and manipulation of information is swiftly tearing us apart.”
If social media is on the defensive, Mr. Zuckerberg is particularly on the spot.
“Zuckerberg and Facebook are violating the Number 1 rule of crisis management: Overcorrect for the problem,” Mr. Galloway said. “Their attitude is that anything that damages their profits is impossible for them to do.”
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, said the network was doing its best.
Some social media entrepreneurs acknowledge that they are confronting issues they never imagined as employees of start-ups struggling to survive.
“There wasn’t time to think through the repercussions of everything we did,” Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, said before he rejoined the service last spring. He maintained that Twitter was getting an unfair rap: “For every bad thing, there are a thousand good things.”
Most investors, consumers and regulators seem not to have changed their behavior, at least in the United States.
In Europe, however, the ground is shifting. Google’s share of the search engine market there is 92 percent, according to StatCounter. But that did not stop the European Union from fining it $2.7 billion in June for putting its products above those of its rivals.
A new German law that fines social networks huge sums for not taking down hate speech went into effect this month. A spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain said the government was looking “carefully at the roles, responsibility and legal status” of Google and Facebook, with an eye to regulating them as news publishers rather than platforms.
For some tech companies, the new power is a heavy weight. Cloudflare, which provides many sites with essential protection from hacking, made its first editorial decision in August: It lifted its protection from The Daily Stormer, basically expunging the neo- Nazi site from the visible web.
“Increasingly tech companies are going to be put into the position of making these sorts of judgments,” said Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s chief executive.
The picture is likely to get even more complicated.
Mr. Prince foresees several possible dystopian futures. One is where every search engine has a political point of view, and users gravitate toward the one they feel most comfortable with. That would further balkanize the internet.
Another possibility is the opposite extreme: Under the pressure of regulation, all hate speech — and eventually all dissent — is filtered out.
“People are realizing that technology isn’t neutral,” Mr. Prince said.