SXSW TAKES A SKEPTICAL LOOK AT TECH

After years of rah- rah, firms such as Facebook face backlash for having too much control

AUSTIN – After years of being seen as a hothouse of exuberance about technology, this year’s South By Southwest conference has soured a bit on the industry’s prospects.

Social media in general, and Facebook in particular, have taken a beating in multiple panels, and one of America’s foremost tech entrepreneurs used his SXSW talk to warn about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

A Friday evening session about Facebook’s relationship with news publishers set the tone early on.

Facebook’s news head Alex Hardiman said the company, having recognized that its News Feed had traditionally rewarded “stuff that did well in raw engagement and clicks,” was trying to do better.

Her fellow panelist, CNN host Brian Stelter, acknowledged that progress but challenged the social network to do more for quality journalism.

“Shouldn’t we have a bigger conversation about Facebook paying more directly for some of the quality journalism that’s out there?” he said.

“Everything is on the table,” Hardiman responded.

After years of cheerleading by lawmakers and consumers, big technology is facing a backlash that even has its own term — techlash.

“The Web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms,” Tim Berners- Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote in a letter Monday.

Compounded by revelations that Russian operatives manipulated Facebook, Twitter and Google- owned YouTube to sway voters in the 2016 race, uneasiness has grown, increasing pressure from some to regulate political ads.

Traditional media, notably newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch, have renewed calls for Internet companies to better compensate the news outlets whose contents they share.

The Internet companies have begrudgingly acknowledged that they play a role as media providers — apologizing for sharing conspiracy theories and faked Facebook posts around the election. But they’ve clung to their defense that at heart, they are technology companies that provide the platform, not the curation, for the content.

That attitude took a ribbing Saturday from Vox Media executive editor Kara Swisher and CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour.

Swisher mocked Twitter and Facebook for refusing to call themselves media companies and instead reciting the stock phrase, “We’re a tech platform that facilitates media” — a bit of useless vagueness that Amanpour criticized with a barnyard expletive.