Big Tech’s growing power is tearing our society apart
The woke biases of the Silicon Valley elite have made their platforms an enemy of enlightenment
This week the heads of some of the most powerful companies in the world appeared before the US Congress. Well they appeared virtually, at any rate. And while certain members of Congress seemed happy to present themselves as having given Big Tech a hard time, even that was virtual. “You’ve got confused between me and Twitter,” Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, told a Congressman at one point. The CEOS of Amazon, Facebook and Google sailed through the day, looking meek or understanding as the situation demanded. And then they logged off to continue their inevitable rise.
If this was the Seventies or Eighties, companies this large and monopolistic would have been broken up. But in our decade nobody knows what to do, other than attempting small-scale raids in hearings such as these and then resigning ourselves to their endless metastasis. Yet we should not be so sanguine or fatalistic. While Amazon parcels fly around the land, we praise the convenience of Big Tech. As Google and Facebook eat up the advertising revenues of the established media, we shrug our shoulders and lament the rise of “fake news”.
But even if the effects of all this on our businesses and media were not so provably devastating, still it would be wrong. Because the power that Big Tech has been gathering for itself is not power accumulated by some diverse and competitive group of companies. It is power accumulated by people living in a few square miles of California that constitute the most radically Left-wing corner of Planet Earth.
This is no exaggeration. A few years back I spent some time in Silicon Valley trying to work out what was going on with the algorithms that are increasingly dominating our lives. What I realised then was that Big Tech has more power over us already than anyone but perhaps the most demented conspiracy theorists can believe. For instance, I had assumed until then that Google Image Search did what it suggested. That when you asked it to show you something it did so. What I discovered was that it did no such thing. Sure, it gives you the impression that you are getting what you asked for. But tread across any of the social justice litmus issues of our time and you find a radically different set of results from those which you had asked for.
Try it yourself. Search Google Images for “Western Art” for instance.
You might expect some of the great culture of the world to appear in an array of images. Not so. Google has decided that what you are after is images of Native Americans, with paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Vermeer making an appearance way down its online pecking order.
How about trying “European Art” then? Type that into Google Images and you might be struck by the fact that almost every other image that is offered to you in the results is a painting of someone who is black. Of course there is no harm in showing people that the last seven or so centuries of European painting included some portraits of black people. But why should the search result that Google gives you back suggest that so many paintings in European art are of a person of colour?
The answer is that this is what the tech overlords have decided that you should get. People talk about the algorithms of the tech companies finding out what we want and then offering us more of it. And that might be the case when it comes to products that they can sell you and make a profit from. But when it comes to anything dealing with “social justice” issues these same companies have already decided what you need and they don’t mind telling you.
Their beliefs are based on a set of presumptions which are themselves bigoted. For example, the denizens of Silicon Valley have decided that the general public in countries like Britain and America are racists. They believe this was proven by the Brexit and Trump votes of 2016. What follows from that is that they think that we, the general public, need “correcting”. And all those failed Liberal Democrats and Obama-era appointees who have flooded into Google and Facebook in the past four years have only consolidated this belief. As has the appointment of former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to Facebook’s “oversight board”.
A solidly one-way political orientation is why these companies won’t give you what you ask for on certain pre-ordained subjects. They have decided that only a bigot would do an image search for “Western” or “European” art. And they have decided that they should do everything they can to dement or frustrate such people. As for anybody who doesn’t know? A young person, for instance, setting out on the path of knowledge. Well, if they happened to search for one of these retrograde and bigoted terms then they can be given an entirely erroneous view of history. One which suggests realities that did not exist, but which nevertheless better fits with the contemporary views held in those few square miles of California.
Of course in lots of ways the tech overlords are simply not as clever as they would like to think. In fact in lots of ways they are remarkably basic.
Every year or so, Twitter has a purge of conservative voices on its platform. In doing so it always suggests that it is expunging “hate” from its platform. But time and again its own parochial, Silicon Valley view of the world shines through. Never more than when they try to define what constitutes “hate”.
A few years ago Twitter booted the Right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos off its platform. Yet for years after that it permitted the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar e-taiba to run a Twitter social media account. The group that perpetrated the Mumbai massacre of 2008 was either deemed to be obeying Twitter’s community guidelines, or the bods at Twitter simply had no idea what they were dealing with.
The same oddity emerged this past week when Twitter temporarily suspended the account of Donald Trump Jr. His crime was tweeting a video clip which discussed the possible anti-covid potential of the drug hydroxychloroquine. Twitter’s justification for the ban included the usual warnings about “misinformation” and possible “harm”. Meantime, the Twitter account of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, continued without any hindrance. Just a week earlier Khamenei’s account had announced “The Islamic Republic of Iran will never forget the martyrdom of Hajj Qasem Soleimani and will definitely strike a reciprocal blow to the US”. Does that sound like something that could constitute “harm”? You and I might say so. But for Twitter that is just another double-standard which it is willing to sustain.
People have options of course. And we are constantly reminded that platforms like Twitter do not have to host you. The claim goes that they are companies, not charities. If you would like to form a rival company then you can. But the reality is that Twitter, like Facebook, Amazon and Google, got in at the bottom of the market and have spent years undercutting and crushing any and all competition. It is no good saying “use another platform” when one platform dominates a particular market. Any more than Jeff Bezos should be able to say “buy your books elsewhere” after his company has utterly destroyed the book-selling business in a country like Britain.
The Big Tech companies have certainly made our lives easier in certain, specific ways. But they have also made our societies more divided, more fragile and more contingent than at any point before on the whims of people who think they know better than any of us what we should be able to say or know.
Douglas Murray is the author of The Madness of Crowds
Influence is accumulated by people in a few square miles of California that constitute the most radically Left-wing corner of Planet Earth