It was an extraordinary moment. British Prime Minister David Cameron had already lambasted the big internet companies from the Despatch Box for their failure to cooperate adequately with the security services in fighting terrorism — a failure which, he suggested, had played a significant role in the savage murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby. But then Jack Straw, from the Labour benches, asked him: “Is there not a cultural problem among the leadership of some of these companies, which have a distorted libertarian ideology and believe that somehow that allows them to be wholly detached from responsibility to governments and to the people whom we democratically represent in this country and abroad?”
Cameron responded: “I agree with everything the Rt Hon Gentleman has said.” What’s going on? Put simply, politicians are no longer awed by the tech giants — they are scared of them. They are not alone, either. The internet age has spawned a new breed of corporate leviathan, whose reach spreads into every corner of our society. In fact, gigantism seems to be baked into the system, due to how quickly such firms can scale up their operations and the way in which an early advantage tends to translate into an enduring monopoly. Facebook is heading towards 1.5 billion active users. Google is searched more than 3.5 billion times a day. Apple’s market capitalisation hit $0.7 trillion (Dh2.5 trillion). Alibaba, in China, recently sold $9.3 billion worth of goods in a single day.
These are unimaginably gargantuan numbers. The influence of such companies stretches far beyond the economic. When Apple launches a major software update, a planetful of people find themselves changing their working habits. When Google tweaks the way it displays its search results, it can mean life or death for thousands of companies. In Italy, 40 per cent of adultery cases now cite the use of the messaging service WhatsApp. As for Facebook, there has been a serious argument made recently that the most powerful man in the entire media is not Rupert Murdoch, but a 26-year-old called Greg Marra — because he is the man responsible for overseeing the company’s “News Feed”.
As more and more of us get our picture of the world via the internet, the people who determine what the internet shows us grow more and more powerful. There was outrage, for example, when Facebook appeared to downgrade the importance of the first wave of race riots in Ferguson, Missouri, because its algorithms thought people would be more interested in celebrities taking the Ice Bucket Challenge. The problem in this case, however, is not what Facebook shows us, but what we put up there ourselves.
Playing host to all human life means, unfortunately, that you get exactly that — all human life, in the criminals, terrorists, racists and lunatics. Jamie Bartlett of Demos has analysed the ways in which Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and its propagandists use the site to campaign and communicate. Then there are organisations such as the Right-wing hate group Britain First, which garnered half a million “Likes” by cleverly mimicking more mainstream content.
Facebook’s argument has always been that it cannot, and should not, be held responsible for what its users post. And there is s certainly something to that. Keeping tabs on more than a billion people would be a huge technical challenge — witness the fact that the company had no idea about the key message in which Michael Adebowale, one of Rigby’s killers, described his murderous fantasies in graphic detail. Building a proper system of surveillance would require enormous resources, involve huge intrusion into our privacy and throw up all kinds of false positives.
In short, it is not just impractical, but probably impossible. But while this argument is valid, it is also enormously convenient. It allows the company to keep its customer services team — the number of people devoted to interacting with other human beings, with all the mess that involves — as small as possible, thereby raising profit margins and ensuring that most of its staff can get on with doing cool things with code. And it also allows it to wash its hands of the social consequences of the software it produces.
Facebook is not alone in this, of course. The vast online community site Reddit has played host to all manner of racism and sexism, including the leaking of naked photographs of celebrities hacked from their private accounts. Amazon has found itself selling algorithmically generated T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Keep calm and rape a lot’. Daesh’s official app was available on Google’s Play Store for several months.
Many of these problems can be ascribed to a lack of resources, or willpower. Yet, the telling thing about the Rigby row is that it is also the product of a fundamental philosophical difference. Facebook’s loyalty, it believes, is to its users — especially given the need to reassure them, in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, that their personal data is not being piped directly to America’s National Security Agency. (And as Bartlett points out, if they do suspect that, they will promptly vanish to any number of other sites that are even harder for the authorities to monitor and police.) So while the company’s algorithms might not have detected Adebowale’s key message, they did flag up and close down seven accounts he created.
Facebook, however, saw no need to pass this information on to the security services. As the ISC report said: “This company does not regard themselves as under any obligation to ensure that they identify such threats or to report them to the authorities.” Even now, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters has had access to only six of the 11 identified accounts Adebowale created. Governments and the technology companies have long been uneasy bedfellows. Silicon Valley often sees Washington and Whitehall as sluggish, inefficient and packed with mediocrities hung up on pointless, unimportant details, while technologists blaze ahead their revolutionary work.
Politicians and civil servants counter that the computer geeks are all too often unworldly and uncaring, head-in-the-clouds profiteers who give no thought to the consequences of their actions. The Rigby affair — and, indeed, Europe’s recent threat to break up Google — shows that we may have reached the point where these tensions can no longer be contained. The tech companies have become so powerful, and so much a part of our lives, that their decisions are just as important as those of our elected leaders, if not more so.
Cameron is saying, in effect, that Facebook must use its enormous power wisely and responsibly — or the state will step in to ensure that it does. Facebook is saying that it is a tool of its users, not of governments. The old order is asserting itself against the new and the new against the old. Even if an accommodation is eventually reached on this particular issue, it is a racing certainty that they will clash again.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2014
