Ways Big Tech Doesn't Fix Their Flaws (But Perpetuates Them)

Facebook has rolled out big ad campaigns, sleek videos, and impassioned press releases about how they're dedicated to combating misinformation, but a significant chunk of their userbase uses Facebook for the misinformation. If Facebook is where you go to agree with other people that COVID-19 was created in a lab funded by George Soros to discredit Donald Trump's presidency, enforcing the borders of reality will drive some people away. Around the same time that Facebook was pledging to be more responsible, the head of their news feed was giving a mealy-mouthed explanation to CNN about why they gave Alex Jones a massive platform to spread Sandy Hook hoaxes.

Jones was later banned, but Facebook is simultaneously aspiring to be a bastion of accuracy and every internet user's central hub of information, even if that user likes to talk about how vaccines will make your penis shrink. This is a company that managed to bungle their stance on Holocaust denial when Mark Zuckerberg said it should be allowed on Facebook because "I don't think they're intentionally getting it wrong." They had to walk that one back in a hurry.

News is also not fundamentally important to Facebook's business, and previous experiments -- like the time they annihilated a bunch of websites and beloved comedy video creators with false data -- could be considered, shall we say, oopsie doopsies. Facebook cares about news in the sense that they don't want their mishandling of it to make them look bad, but it's not paying their bills. Facebook makes money from selling ads, and users who think that colloidal silver will keep the New World Order from reading their thoughts are as valuable as the users who just want to read The Atlantic. So when Facebook says they care about fighting misinformation, just mentally add "when it affects our public image."

No, they're not surreptitiously promoting one method of seeing Iggly's sweet, supple penguin flesh over another, but they do respond to business interests and government pressure, and those responses have spiked since the 2016 election. They've promoted major advertisers over their less lucrative competitors (which Google said they would never do), blacklisted sites from appearing in certain searches (which Google also said they would never do) and have helped Russia and Turkey, among other countries, censor search results (which Google never denied doing, because their official motto shifted from "Don't Be Evil" to "How Many Yachts Will Evil's Money Buy Us?" a while back).

Google, like Facebook, is torn between needing everyone to use their service and acknowledging that some people use their search engine to demand information on why abortion doctors are murdering toddlers. Employees and executives have "disagreed" on how active a role Google should take in giving people easy access to complete bullshit, but there's certainly no hesitation in stomping on the competition: employees at DealCatcher, a coupon site, woke up one day to find their traffic cut by 93% for no apparent reason, and Google never provided an explanation.

Amazon, meanwhile, changed their search engine to prioritise their most profitable products, rather than products that had the best reviews or strongest sales. This move also wasn't publicised, and it also followed a lengthy internal debate, with some of the stiffest opposition coming from lawyers who were worried about getting hammered by antitrust lawsuits. Some more extreme ideas were walked back, but the world's largest retailer is now explicitly favouring its in-house label, sales of which are expected to jump from $2 billion in 2018 to $31 billion by 2022. We'll just have to wait and see how many small businesses get curb stomped along the way.

After being badgered for comment on the basis of "Hey, what the hell, you guys," YouTube eventually stated "We realise that many may find the viewpoints expressed in these channels deeply offensive," "many" presumably including historians, political scientists, and anyone with a functional brain stem. Then then essentially said "But hey, that's life, what are you gonna do?" Again left unstated was the fact that seeing content from an alternate universe is the only reason many people use their service. When PewDiePie, their most popular creator, is endorsing a channel that uses racial slurs while promoting white supremist talking points, enforcing remedial history will cost you money.

Meanwhile, a growing number of studies are linking YouTube to far-right radicalisation, because vulnerable, impressionable people can start watching what they think is an innocuous video about history, then six months later be telling anyone who will listen about how feminism is going to cause North America to be overrun by foreign hordes. If that sounds like hand-wringing, here's the story of a 15-year-old who used YouTube to watch Call of Duty highlights, then followed its winding trail of recommendations into Holocaust denial.

So YouTube is cracking down on extremist content... as long as it's unprofitable. As for, say, PragerU, which denies climate change, argues that all Muslims are extremists, teaches that Nazis were liberals and now they're trying to destroy Christmas, and argues that colleges with their elitist "books" and "accreditation" are just Marxist propaganda factories, well... they have 2.4 million subscribers and a large advertising budget, and while the world they propagate may not really exist, the money they make for YouTube certainly does.

Mark wrote a book and is on, ugh, Twitter.