Read: Everything is different now
The damage was done in places such as the village of Rainpada, in India, where a man was beaten to death after false rumors of a purported kidnapping spread on the Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp, and the streets of Mandalay, in Myanmar, which were convulsed with violence in 2014 after a fictitious claim of rape was disseminated on Facebook by an influential, hard-line monk.
Tech companies, when they finally—many of them begrudgingly—owned up to the issues they helped create in foreign countries, liked to point the finger at “media literacy” or “digital literacy.” This was Silicon Valley’s polite way of saying that users in these countries were too new to the internet, too naive to know that what they were seeing was fake, too easily misled by crudely Photoshopped pictures and doctored videos. While there is no doubt that this played a role, the overemphasis on this one issue, rather than a comprehensive look at the roles these companies’ own products played, seemed at times to border on calling people stupid and gullible. In the U.S., the thinking appeared to be, users familiar with the internet and fluent in the language of social media could tell fact from fiction, reality from illusion. Underlying this message was a tacit belief in, ultimately misguided, exceptionalism, that this could never happen in America. Until it did.
When rioters charged their way up the steps of the Capitol, they were of course different from the motorbike riders who roved Mandalay armed with metal tools and clubs, or the marauding bands of thugs who torched Muslim-owned shops in Sri Lanka. These people in Washington were wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, clad in anti-Semitic sweatshirts, and draped in animal pelts. Many espoused baseless claims that the election—fairly and resoundingly won by Joe Biden—was fraudulent, and that Donald Trump was the real winner, while others were fervent devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
This misinformation, and the plans to take violent action, like that found in other countries, received enormous levels of amplification on social-media platforms and little resistance from them. The resulting violence and deaths were appalling and yet unfortunately familiar, as was the reaction from social-media companies.
Caitlin Flanagan: Worst revolution ever
Following the mass U.S. deplatforming over the weekend, many of the loudest, most vile voices on the American right migrated to Parler, a social-media service popular with conservatives and far-right figures. Apple, Google, and Amazon kicked Parler off their own app stores and servers, effectively removing the service from the internet. John Matze, Parler’s CEO, has suggested that content on the app could be moderated by volunteers in a last-ditch effort to save his company’s prospects, a suggestion that was skewered on social media: unpaid laborers being put in charge of difficult decisions, deciding what content is potentially harmful and should be removed. But this is exactly what Facebook did for years in Myanmar, relying on an ad hoc group of well-meaning volunteers to flag problematic content to be passed up the chain to Facebook employees and eventually addressed. When Facebook executives visited the country in June 2018, they even asked some civil-society members to pay for their own bus tickets to Yangon to attend a community meeting focused on issues on the platform. The company eventually relented and ponied up the money, according to a person familiar with the event.
If Americans now expect a high-profile firing in response to what occurred, looking abroad can dampen those expectations as well. A damning series of Wall Street Journal articles revealed that Ankhi Das, a top Facebook executive in India, flouted Facebook’s own rules against hate speech in regards to posts by a ruling party figure in order to protect the company’s business in the country. Das was also found in personal posts to have supported Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a staunch Hindu nationalist, thereby confirming many of the widely circulated rumors about her political biases. Only after coming under pressure because of the mounting issues did she finally step down. Even before that episode, Facebook’s reputation in India was bad enough that when I visited its offices in Delhi the company’s signs had been scrubbed from its offices, a measure its employees in the U.S. are now being asked to replicate.
The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis wrote last year of the “American Rhino Problem,” the difficulty for the world that so many of the internet’s rules are decided in Silicon Valley by a small band of tech executives. The power these individuals wield over global affairs is astonishing. A consequence of that is that we—those of us who live abroad, whether we speak English or not—must look to the U.S. for how technology will be governed.
But in considering what social-media companies will do now—and what they are ultimately capable of inflicting on society—looking in the opposite direction, from America to beyond its borders, would be a wise exercise. If that is any guide, changes will likely come in halting increments, with little transparency or coherent explanation.
“Americans keep hanging on to the idea that the U.S. is somehow different, but what happened in the U.S. really came as no surprise,” Htaike Htaike Aung, the executive director of Myanmar ICT for Development Organization, an NGO that has spent years lobbying Facebook to do more to tackle hate speech, told me after the Capitol Hill riot. “We saw it play out across the world. Radicalizing speech and lies, particularly when coming from centers of power, can do major societal damage.”
“Myanmar was a case in point,” she continued. “We tried to warn you.”
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment