Profit is key to bring tech overlords in line
The Security Minister has the right idea for making internet entrepreneurs tackle online extremists
For the first time over the Christmas holidays, my sevenyear-old daughter encountered Amazon Alexa – an internet-connected “intelligent personal assistant”. It was striking that, whenever she asked it a question, she stood up. I joked about how her generation, growing up in a world immersed in social media and digital technology, would have to get used to standing for their robot overlords. Yet the truth is, we humans are already becoming subservient.
Internet companies track our every movement online, so they know what we want to read and buy before we do. We are losing the ability to use maps for driving because our phones can tell us the quickest route. We sit in pubs barely talking to our friends because we are staring at screens. And with virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Home offering answers for every question – some of them, I noted, incorrect – we are at risk of losing the powers of critical thinking and research.
This seemingly unstoppable sleepwalk into becoming a species of cyborg has been actively encouraged by social media giants. In 2017, a number of former Facebook, Google and other tech company executives and industry insiders admitted that features such as likes and refreshes encouraged addiction. We users have been complicit in this, to an extent, by failing to read the terms and conditions of every app and platform we sign up to. And, ultimately, it is possible for any one of us to quit at any time.
But it is also arguable we have been duped, en masse, by a brightly coloured, linguistically matey and childish brand image that is, in fact, about profit above everything else. As the Security Minister, Ben Wallace, said of the tech giants this weekend: “We should stop pretending that, because they sit on beanbags in T-shirts, they are not ruthless profiteers.”
This profiteering, Mr Wallace says, is being put ahead of assisting the security services in tackling terrorism and extremism, making Britain more vulnerable to attack – something which keeps the minister awake at night. Given that Mr Wallace served as an officer in the Scots Guards in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, this is no mean feat.
It seems perverse that our individual privacy is eroded on a daily basis through our internet search and social history, yet internet companies cry civil liberties when they are asked to help stop extremists using encrypted services like Whatsapp to plan terror attacks, just as they cry freedom of speech when asked to take down bomb-making guides from Youtube.
As a result, British security services are having to spend millions on human surveillance and deradicalising those inspired through social media and the wider internet. A recent report by Policy Exchange found that the UK is the fifth-largest audience for extremist material online. For their part, the internet companies insist they are tackling extremism, with Twitter removing hundreds of thousands of suspect accounts and Facebook using technology to remove extremist images, videos and text.
Yet the Government says these companies are failing to track down the main sources of this extremism. Tech giants do not want to round up the main perpetrators for fear of turning into “outsourced” intelligence assets of MI6 and MI5. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Youtube minimise their enabling role by using the escape route of “platform, not publisher”, which they say means they cannot be held responsible for extremist content. This faux-hippyish philosophy goes hand in hand with Silicon Valley’s workplace decor of the nursery playroom – and both are intended to disguise their fears that going down the route of responsible publisher, with close monitoring of terrorist and extremist users, will cost them profit-dressed-up-as-likes.
The only solution to this intransigence is, as Mr Wallace suggests, some sort of windfall raid on their vast profits – less the language of primary-coloured social media likes and shares, more the black-and-white language of hard cash. Because what is ultimately ruling our lives isn’t a virtual world of digital technology, but the humans behind them, making money from our insecurities and laziness – and allowing terrorists to run free.