If Google, FB, Twitter are 'public spheres', they cannot censor content too
When talking among themselves, Silicon Valley big shots sometimes
say weird things. In an internal presentation in March 2018, Google executives
were asked to imagine their company acting as a “Good Censor,” in order to
limit the impact of users “behaving badly.”
In
a 2016 internal video, Nick Foster, Google’s head of design, envisioned a
“goal-driven ledger” of all users’ data, endowed with its own “volition or
purpose,” which would nudge us to take decisions (say, about shopping or
travel) that would “reflect Google’s values as an organization.”
If
that doesn’t strike you as weird — like dialogue from some dystopian
science-fiction novel — then you need to read more dystopian science fiction.
(Start with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s astonishingly prescient “We.”)
The
lowliest employees of big tech companies — the content moderators whose job it
is to spot bad stuff online — offer a rather different perspective. “Remember
‘We’re the free speech wing of the free speech party’?” one of them asked Alex
Feerst of OneZero last year, alluding to an early Twitter slogan. “How
vain and oblivious does that sound now? Well, it’s the morning after the free
speech party, and the place is trashed.”
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