Big Tech is bad news for news

If you are curious about what is really happening in Gaza, you cannot possibly rely on the internet or the major media outlets to find out. You need to be there, on the ground, but good luck trying to convince Israel to permit you to travel to the war-torn region. Dozens of journalists have been killed by Israeli defence forces, if only to prevent the truth from getting out. Why kill the messenger if the message is not to your liking? There is precedence to all of this.

The run-up to the Iraq war was inundated by fake news created by intelligence agencies and faithfully reported in major newspapers with global reach, such as The New York Times – lies that were parroted by presidents, prime ministers, and assorted politicians at the United Nations. This was long before Facebook, X, and other social media made their debut on the international scene. With the advent of OpenAI, I expect this to get even worse during the coming years. If Israel’s NSO group can hack into journalists’ phones, why not anyone’s phone? And why stop at hacking when journalists can be killed at will by drones whose targeting software is written by a whole host of IT companies in the US, Israel, and elsewhere.

It is highly unacceptable that IT companies are rarely held responsible for the unintended consequences of their innovations, especially the constitutionally guaranteed right to vote in democratic countries. Don’t the authors of these innovations think of the consequences before marketing them to the public? Most troubling of all is Donald Trump’s recent threat, under the guise of protecting free speech, to penalise countries that try to rein in American IT companies for their monopolistic practices and spreading disinformation. Trump’s primary targets are the EU, India, and Brazil.

IBM’s motto for decades has been a single word: ‘Think’. But was IBM really thinking when the company permitted its technology to be used to automate the bureaucratic processes for enforcing apartheid in South Africa, identifying those of Jewish extraction in Germany for subsequent extermination, identifying mixed-race individuals on the island of Jamaica for forced sterilisation, or using secret CCTV footage of New York City residents to improve their facial recognition technology’s ability to discriminate based on skin colour? Now, its CEO, Arvind Krishna, wants to replace thousands of human workers with AI. In an interview with Bloomberg, Krishna stated that up to 30% of IBM’s back-office jobs could be replaced by AI, based on comparative costs and productivity of people and AI.

The people most affected by IT company decisions cannot fight back since IT companies are authoritarian, not democratic. Moreover, these companies cannot be taken to court since company-client disputes have to be resolved through arbitration as per the terms of service crafted by the companies themselves.

Big Tech has a history of discriminatory treatment, overt or covert (through algorithmic bias), of people of colour and other marginalised groups, quelling dissent amongst their workforce by banning unions, and killing off their competitors by purchasing or co-opting them. The Washington Post, for example, is now owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. “I’m excited we’ll have the opportunity to include award-winning journalism from The Wall Street Journal – and other US News Corp properties – in our news tab,” said Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The Murdoch family, media barons across three continents, owns News Corp, which includes Fox News, the most rabid right-wing TV channel to dominate the airwaves in recent memory.

India, too, has its own version of Fox News with millions of followers. Diverse opinions are no longer to be found in most major newspapers, be they published in the US, UK, EU, or Australia, and, now, India. Dissent has become equated with terrorism, as can be seen in the prosecution of pro-Palestinian activists on terrorism charges.

Google has rebranded itself as “an AI-first company” in a world where “AI and its benefits have no borders”. Meta, likewise, has announced plans to make its generative AI programmes available to the public as open-source software. Both IT companies conveniently neglected to mention generative AI’s role in spreading disinformation during election campaigning and becoming the defining story of any election in any country. Like meat, one man’s free speech is another man’s poison. We should all be vegetarians.

The writer is a computer scientist, a newly minted Luddite and a cynic.