George Soros: Facebook and Google are a menace to society // ‘Trump would like to establish a mafia state’
Facebook and Google
have become “obstacles to innovation” and are a “menace” to society whose “days
are numbered”, said billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros at
the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday. “Mining and oil
companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the
social environment,” said the Hungarian-American businessman, according to
a transcript
of his speech.
“This is particularly
nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave
without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences
on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.” In addition to skewing
democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their
attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and
“deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he
said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”.
Tech's terrible year: how the world turned on Silicon Valley in 2017
In March, the Times of
London revealed that YouTube had paid, via an advertising revenue share,
Islamic extremists to peddle hate speech, leading to a boycott
from many major advertisers. A second boycott started this month after
brands discovered that their ads were appearing
alongside content being exploited by paedophiles. In May, the Guardian’s
investigation into Facebook’s content moderation policies revealed that the
social network flouted Holocaust
denial laws except where it feared being sued. Four months later, Pro
Publica discovered that Facebook’s ad tools could be used
to target “Jew haters”. “The power to shape people’s attention is
increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. It takes a real
effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind’.
There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age
will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political
consequences.”
Soros warned of an
“even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies
such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with
state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places
such as the Philippines. “This may well result
in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or
George Orwell could have imagined,” he said. The companies, which
he described as “ever more powerful monopolies” are unlikely to change their
behaviour without regulation… read more:
