SXSW TAKES A SKEPTICAL LOOK AT TECH
After years of rah-rah-rah, big firms like Facebook now 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 asked.
“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 rapid growth of Facebook, Google and Amazon has fed fears that these companies control too much of the information that gets shared and, in Amazon’s case, the goods and services consumers buy.
“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,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote in an open letter Monday that proposed a regulatory framework to balance the interests of companies and Internet users. “This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared.”
Compounded by revelations that Russian operatives manipulated Facebook, Twitter and Googleowned YouTube to sway voters in the 2016 race, uneasiness with the most valuable tech firms has grown, increasing pressure from some — such as Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. — to regulate political ads on the networks.
Traditional media, notably newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch, have renewed calls for Internet companies to better compensate the news outlets whose contents they share. Conservative groups complain the companies’ politically liberal staff unfairly squash their views.
And former employees and investors have taken aim at the Internet companies and Apple for creating devices that addict their users.
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.
That’s a far cry from the uncritical reception that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange got for his appearance via remote video in 2014, a SXSW keynote that has not aged well. Then again, he also bashed Facebook in that talk.
“People are realizing the power that technology has in our lives and asking technology companies to be more transparent and responsible,” Heather West, policy manager for Mozilla and a speaker at SXSW, said in an interview Sunday. “And SXSW is an incredibly technologically savvy crowd who cares about these issues.”
In a talk Saturday, Whitney Wolfe Herd — founder of dating and networking app Bumble — said a lack of gender diversity in technology has led to social networks whose mechanisms can invite harassment and abuse of the sort that white men don’t usually experience online.
Name-checking Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, she said “these were not spaces built by women.” She set a goal for Bumble that other social start-ups would be wise to adopt: “Engineer kindness on our platform.”
The most depressing take on tech came from SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, a late-breaking addition to the SXSW schedule. In an onstage interview by Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan, he called for government regulation of general-purpose artificial intelligence, as opposed to the narrow sort that performs such tasks as allowing Tesla’s electric cars to drive themselves.
“The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads,” he said. “If humanity decides that digital super-intelligence is the right move, we should do so very carefully.”
Mike Godwin, a senior fellow with the R Street Institute, a Washington think tank, suggested that this skepticism represented a return to the climate of the mid-1990s, when SXSW first began adding tech programming. In an email, he called that “a historical moment that was eerily similar to what we’re experiencing now.”
“I always assumed this transition was going to be a bumpy ride, so the current wave of bumps doesn’t surprise me,” he added.