– Dave
www.pbs.org/video/social-media-as-insidious-and-predatory-manipulation-upyjcu/
Maria Ressa, a Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, and news media executive has been sounding the alarm about what investigations have found about how and why global subversive organizations use social media, and the predatory nature of big tech and its effect on politics. Here is some of what she said:
“The big question, I think, is how you address the institutionalized corruption that is these social media platforms.
The first is that I’ve been dealing with it for over a decade. In 2016, I was getting an average of 90, nine zero, hate messages per hour. But the second thing I realized is that it is both a blessing and a curse, because the attacks are, you know, it is meant to change the way you feel. It’s, free speech used to pound you to silence when you’re targeted. The way we were, the way I was.
And then I thought, oh my gosh, wait. If you’re targeted with 90 hate messages per hour, I’m going to take them all. I’m going to get the data. I don’t have to ask anyone for the data, any company, it’s all coming my way. And that allowed us to analyze it to understand how it works.
We took apart clusters of messaging with the distribution networks that put out these messages. I used to travel for CNN, my beat was counterterrorism, right, to look at terrorist networks. And I began to look at these virtual world networks like terrorist networks and their recidivist networks. These [social media] companies know them. But the more they work, the more money they make.
And then it became in the Philippines and now in many other countries around the world, including in the United States. Then it became state sponsored or state enabled. When your President, when President Duterte in the Philippines was the one attacking me, the government apparatus worked hand-in-hand with the recidivist networks of disinformation. And that’s how you began to spread fear.
Social media at that point, hacked our biology. It changes the way we feel about the world, changes the way we see the world, the way we act, the way we vote.
That’s our public information ecosystem. It’s massively corrupted. It’s insidious manipulation. And I’d say the same thing that’s happening in the physical world that’s causing all the wars. Impunity is the exact same tactics used in the virtual world by the CEOs of these tech companies.
But the way I describe big tech today, because it is the least regulated industry globally, right, is predatory. It’s predatory and extractive and it takes our data. It takes our humanity and runs it through a machine to be able to insidiously manipulate us for profit.”
…..
“What should happen is legislation should protect the public the same way that like, you know, it’s a public safety issue. And what the tech lobby has done very well is to present it as a free speech issue.
It’s a safety issue, right? The same way that this building will not fall down around us because they had codes in place. They had the law in place. We don’t have any of that in the virtual world.
Everything in the physical world is going to be, is moving to the virtual world. And yet that virtual world is in the hands of private companies running for profit, running the virtual world for profit. That’s the corruption of our public information ecosystem.
And actually, it’s not just big tech that gave up on public safety for profit. It’s also democratic governments, starting with the United States, that enabled Silicon Valley. I had hoped after January 2021 that after Silicon Valley since came home to roost on Capitol Hill, that America would have learned.
But no, you know, governments, democratic governments abdicated responsibility by not building a public interest tech stack. A tech stack in the virtual world that allows real people to talk to real people without insidiously manipulating us. It’s the same way that, you know, broadcasters in the past, we were independent from government, but there were laws in place that if we, for example, lied repeatedly we would be held accountable for it. None of that is happening in the virtual world.”