Private ownership of social media and AI leads to Fox News, X, and Grok AI, all deadly poison for democracy. Public ownership could change that.
A decade ago I wrote a piece dreading what would happen if a major portion of social media, thinking of Facebook back then, got taken over by leadership with an agenda of lies and corrupting influence. At that time the reality had become clear of Fox News showing how very influential media, TV news, could abandon trying to be neutral and instead push a particular agenda with no regard for truthfulness. My concern was, what if the same happened to Facebook?
Then it was only a concern. Google’s search system still used their slogan of “don’t be evil”. Twitter was neutral and its public ownership, it had publicly traded stocks, made it unlikely to go strongly one way or another. Mark Zuckerberg still seemed to be running Facebook in a neutral way. But what would happen if, say, Fox News bought Facebook? It would be disastrous, just as Fox News had been to the country via TV news, only much worse because of how much we allow social media to influence us.
Of course that did happen. Elon Musk bought control of Twitter and turned it into the Fox News of social media.
That earlier piece was eventually published by Reader Supported News in 2018. I will suggest it is worth a read, not as a self promotion, but because going back now and reading it years later I am shocked, surprised, and frightened by how much it predicted, and how it has all happened.
What I pointed out then, and still now, is the core of the problem is private ownership. Musk and Zuckerberg can make their platforms do anything they want. Google’s leadership can do the same. Compare that to something that is not privately owned, email. No, I’m not suggesting we all go back to just email, but it’s a model of a publicly owned system. There is no private ownership that can limit who can be part of it. Anyone with a computer can download free, open-source software to make a home computer into an email server, connect it to the internet, and it instantly becomes part of the enormous spiderweb of systems that all take part in routing any email, from anywhere, to eventually find its way to the right location. Yes, Google and Microsoft try to dominate this process but there are still small hosting companies and even home-based tech nerds with one computer who are part of the system. So it’s a system that hasn’t been forced to bend to the agenda of any one person or corporation or group.
Now we face a much, much more serious version of the same problem as back then. AI. AI is finding its way into the daily use of people who have never been on the leading edge of tech. People who have used Word for decades but never got sophisticated enough to make templates in it are using AI to write their important emails, craft how best to approach the boss about a raise, tweak a recipe so they can pretends it’s their own, and get suggestions on how best to approach a problem with their spouse. Its spread is like a Western wildfire raging before ferocious winds. Companies are envisioning buttons you’d wear on your lapel that are an AI device, so every tiny aspect of your life becomes an endless conversation with a “being” which seems to have all the answers, fetched from the deepest knowledge.
But it’s privately owned. How can the motivations of money and people with agendas possibly not end up controlling significant chunks of it and twisting it, and us, to their goals? It’s (link1) already (link2) happening (link3).
Most of the biggest AI services available are privately owned. There is OpenAI that started as open source and nonprofit but which has already had spasms of almost becoming for profit, and that’s surely not done. It’s a repeat of the pattern of Google losing its “no evil” image and Zuckerberg clearly no longer running his social media apps as a peoples’ system for the benefit of people but as a maximum profit system regardless of effect on society.
There have been people proposing ways to make AI into a publicly owned system that operates in a widely distributed and open way. Something akin to the way email works. It’s possible that could succeed. It’s also an enormous climb in the face of those profit and agenda motives hoping to simply roll over it by sheer weight.
But it is existential to democracy and to the human rights of each individual. That’s not a casual statement. As surely as a person cannot eat a damaging portion of arsenic everyday and expect to avoid soon dying from it, a free society, a democracy, a nation of rights, cannot feed on a steady diet of lies and expect to avoid succumbing under it.
In that earlier piece I suggested our becoming aware of the danger of Facebook or Twitter suddenly going Fox News, or rather if we had become aware, was like absent-mindedly walking into a minefield and then suddenly, shockingly, becoming aware of where we are. That is, it’s not a case of danger ahead to be avoided. It’s a case of we are already deep in it and it could go off anytime. It already has. Musk buying Twitter, and that having some part in the corruption of truth and the election of a truth-avoidant and democracy- and rights-avoidant president was like one landmine going off and we’ve lost a leg. Now the mines are bigger, and getting out is harder, and if we don’t…
The privateness of it is the key danger, but it’s also the hinge point, the leverage point, the opportune point that if grasped and turned would change the whole picture.
