The real dangers of internet centralization

Since around 2010, people have become super lazy in how they consume content and in turn, have stopped looking around for good content and just wait for their favourite echo chamber platform to serve them up content that an AI system thinks they will enjoy. In case you have not figured it out yet, depending on how extreme a company has been infected with politics, they may want to adjust the training data of their AI to include a political slant or for less the less infected platform, they will optimise the AI to serve videos they pander to the users’ own viewpoints in order to improve user engagement and keep them on the platform for longer.

What is the problem with giving a few websites all of the traffic?

When you give websites traffic, you are giving those in charge of them more “power” over the content you consume and unfortunately, it is human nature for people who know they have the power to start to abuse that power in order to advantage themselves. This has been known to happen to webmasters who suddenly get really popular and get ban happy with comments they disagree with, which as you know that ultimately a company is run by people who will be vulnerable to human nature.

What about if I agree with the actions of the tech monopolies?

I know that a lot of people are happy to see technology platforms kicking off far-right content creators, but the slippery slope is not just some fallacy, but in the interest of these big corporations as the far-right is not the biggest threat to these large corporations. The left-wing are generally against corporations becoming monopolies and gaining an amount of control over the population but by censoring people we disagree with, they pacify the protests against the monopolies, which gives them unlimited powers to silence any opinions that do not profit the company. Left-wing ideals are eventually going to be in the firing line, as they are also not profitable for large corporations and leaves no one left to protect them as any centrist are not going to protect people who consistently call for censorship of their political opponents.

How the media encourages censorship

The media companies know how to harness outrage culture for their own means and big corporations want to maintain a clean image for advertisers. Knowing this, all a activist “journalist” has to do in order to censor someone they dislike by writing an article which will claim that some content creator has political view’s that some or a lot of the public find distasteful or offensive, leading to outraged people to flood social media to harass the social media manager, which in turn puts pressure on the pressure to drop the user in order to stop the harassment of there employees. Of cause in the background, there may be other employees in places like the human resources department that will encourage the company to come to “correct” choice and get rid of the “undesirables” and turn the company into one massive echo chamber, allowing them to have more control over the organization. But getting on topic and away from the ranting about politics in HR departments, when a company has had a few hit pieces made, they will find out that they have to do what the modern “mafia-type " media, wants or they will be “forced” to write an article about the controversial user, which starts a censorship cycle. The hit pieces and the bias in the mainstream media is why I don’t feel sad at all that news organisations are going out of business at a record pace, their business model deserves to die.

How can we take back control from the tech monopolies?

If we want to take back control from the large tech companies, we need to break them up like into multiple smaller corporations who have less power to control the minds of the world. This is will piss off California but spreading out the tech companies will improve access to information.

Published: 28th January 2019