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.” Read More