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I’m lying facedown on my chiropractor’s fancy table this morning.
The conversation flows from adjusting my hip to adjusting what we scroll through on those phones figuratively attached to our hips. The alerts that ping. The anxiety that builds. The lure of that next dopamine hit.
I suggest it’s high time for a fundamental realignment — one that’s well beyond the reach of my chiropractor.
I’ve got my back up tonight, in part, because of a new report from the BBC as part of a documentary, Inside the Rage Machine. In that report, “more than a dozen whistleblowers and insiders laid bare how the (social media) companies took risks with safety on issues including violence, sexual blackmail and terrorism as they battled for users’ attention.”
For instance, a Meta engineer revealed how senior management wanted Facebook to allow more “borderline” harmful content — including misogyny and conspiracy theories — in users’ feeds to compete with upcoming competitor TikTok. Over at TikTok, an employee gave the BBC access to evidence that complaints involving politicians were prioritized over reports of harmful content involving children.
In case you forgot, a few years ago Canada deemed TikTok a national security risk and banned federal employees from using the app on government phones. Last week, Ottawa changed course and welcomed TikTok to stay in Canada amid vague promises of “support for Canadian organizations working on online safety and digital literacy.”
All this has me worrying that whatever agency we once had is running on fumes. We know the role these platforms play in aiding and abetting racism, fomenting hate, sowing discord. And yet, we largely shrug — and keep scrolling.
Today’s digital-platform tycoons have heard the concerns coming their way, but they too have done little more than shrug.
That’s increasingly what governments are doing as well, even if their shrugs are preceded by overt shows of concern, like the recent calling on the carpet of OpenAI’s founder in the wake of the Tumbler Ridge tragedy.
I left the chiropractor’s office and headed to the office, where an inbox waited for me with no shortage of complaints from readers about what the Free Press did or did not do. Some of those complaints flow from red-hot rhetoric fueled and fanned by those big platforms and AI.
I’m accountable to our readers. After finishing this newsletter, I’ll start responding to those complaints as best I can.
Don’t get me wrong; I want to hear from readers regardless of whether it’s good, bad or ugly. After all, readers are the backbone of the Free Press.
But I wonder if it isn’t high time we demand more than we currently get from the tech giants who increasingly rule our lives — or for the powers that be in government to grow a spine when it comes to protecting the public interest.
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