Tech giants caught in own spin
Their earlier talk of being agents of change comes back to bite them, whereas some tech companies are under fire for creating problems instead of solving them.
and then billions of people flocked to its services. The chief executives were regarded as sages.
Disruption was the highest good. What is different today are the warnings from the technologists themselves. “The monetisation and manipulation of information is swiftly tearing us apart,” Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, wrote.
Justin Rosenstein, a former Facebook engineer, was portrayed in a recent story as an apostate: Noting that sometimes inventors have regrets, he said he had programmed his new phone to not let him use the social network.
On the defensive
Rosenstein, a co-founder of Asana, an office productivity startup, said in an email that he had banned not just Facebook but also the Safari and Chrome browsers, Gmail and other applications. “I realised that I spend a lot of time mindlessly interacting with my phone in ways that aren’t serving me,” he wrote. “Facebook is a very powerful tool that I continue to use every day, just with more mindfulness.”
If social media is on the defensive, Zuckerberg is particularly on the spot changed their behaviour. People still eagerly await the new iPhone. Facebook has more than 2 billion users.
Shifting ground
President Donald Trump likes to criticise Amazon on Twitter, but his administration ignored pleas for a rigorous examination of Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods. In Europe, however, the ground is shifting. Google’s share of the search engine market there is 92 per cent, according to StatCounter.
But that did not stop the European Union from fining it $2.7 billion in June for putting its own products above those of rivals. A new German law that fines social networks huge sums for not taking down hate speech went into effect this month.
A spokesperson 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.
“This war, like so many wars, is going to start in Europe,” said Galloway, the New York University professor.