Big Tech companies have a lot to answer for, so it's only natural that they get a lot of the blame for problems in our world, including the way that our discourse has become toxic and conspiracy-filled.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/05/how-big-tech-monopolies-distort-our-public-discourse

1/

One popular explanation for Big Tech's role in this is the idea that Big Tech invented a powerful brainwashing system that used machine learning to predict how people would react to advertisers' messages, and this was hijacked by political operatives as a brainwashing tool.

2/

Exhibit A for this theory is Big Tech's own marketing claims - the things they tell advertisers when they're explaining why advertisers should pay them a lot of money to buy ads on their service.

But self-serving marketing claims should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

3/

People have been claiming to have invented brainwashing systems for thousands of years. Every one of them was either deluded or a charlatan. It's possible to change peoples' minds by appealing to their reason or by controlling narratives over long timespans.

4/

But the CIA/pickup artist/Cambridge Analytica claim that if you merely phrase your message in the right way, you can convince people that up is down and left is right? That always turned out to be a lie, a trick, or a coincidence.

5/

You don't have to believe that Big Tech has used machine learning to perfect the mind-control ray to believe that Big Tech is really bad for our discourse.

The industry's concentration means that it can control who speaks, and who hears what they say.

6/

It controls which facts are visible when we do research. it controls which media is at the top of the chart, and which is buried thousands of screens down. You can ABSOLUTELY condemn Big Tech for destroying our discourse without having to believe in mind-control.

7/

This matters.

If Big Tech HAS perfected mind-control, then "Big" doesn't matter. Indeed, breaking Big Tech in to smaller pieces just scatters mind-control rays into more hands.

8/

But if Big Tech's discourse distortion is about Bigness, and not mind-control, then we have an obvious remedy: antitrust, and its suite of tools, from breakups to merger scrutiny to structural separation.

9/

I am no tech exceptionalist. Big Tech is run by the same ordinary mediocrities that run any industry. They're not supergeniuses (though some, high on their own supply, believe that they are!).

10/

The same tools that tamed the oil barons and the rail barons and the phone barons will tame the tech barons. Tech is unexceptional, and so no exception need be made.

eof/