Google’s unofficial company motto, at least until it was restructured into Alphabet Inc in 2015, was “Don’t be evil”. That is not a normal thing to have to say. It should have been a warning to us all that big tech’s default position might, in fact … be evil?
Facebook’s was the slightly less worrisome: “Move fast and break things.” Slightly less worrisome, at least, until seven or eight years ago when Trump took to the platform for campaigning purposes and it became clear that one of the things Facebook might break was democracy. People had been warning that the social media behemoth might wield too much power since at least 2011, when it became central to the Arab spring uprising. More alarm bells sounded when the company expanded into Myanmar without, seemingly, taking advice from experts or activists as to what such an advent might do to a country with no free press or independent institutions. The Rohingya massacre was felt by many to have been fuelled by Facebook’s lack of due diligence beforehand, and its laissez-faire attitude to the hate speech that proliferated later.
