While some in the US administration are calling for the dismantling of major players on the web and the EU is heavily taxing them, it is interesting to read the opinion of an actor evolving at the heart of this business.
The text below is an abstract of an article of Time of January 28th, 2019, written by Roger McNamee who has been a Silicon Valley investor for 35 years.
« It owns your data. It owns your friends. It has your credit cards. It hears your conversations. It follows you everywhere. And you can’t go a day without it. I helped create this mess. Here’s how to fix it.
Democracy: Facebook, along with Google and Twitter, had undercut the free press from two directions: it has eroded the economics of journalism and then overwhelmed it with disinformation. On Facebook, information and disinformation look the same. The only difference is that this information generates more revenue, so it gets better treatment.
Regulate: Google and Facebook are artificially profitable because they do not pay for the damage they cause. Google Amazon and Facebook has followed the monopolist’s playbook and built « no go » zones around there core corporations … The economy would benefit from breaking them up …Our parents and grandparents had a similar day of reckoning with tobacco now it’s our turn, this time with internet platforms.
Make it human: The Next Big Things … shifting the focus of technology from exploiting the weakest links in human psychology to a commitment to empowering users.
Addiction: every pixel on every screen of every internet app has been tuned to influence user’s behaviour. Not every user can be influenced all the time, but nearly all users can be influenced some of the time
Protect children: we have allowed unsupervised experiments on millions of people. The political and social power of Facebook and other internet platforms is unhealthy and inappropriate in a democracy like ours. We must hold them accountable and insist on real-world solutions, not more code. »
Didier – Citizen of the World
Image: Social media collapse by Didier