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With Twitter, its CEO Jack Dorsey, and the Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth under fire after adding a fact-checking button to one of the US president Donald J Trump’s tweet yesterday, things are breaking apart in the social media realm. The president has ordered an executive order on social media after his tweet about mail-in ballots being a sham and not the way any election should ever go in America. This will put social media giants such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter in the limelight and the question of what they are as companies, whether they are actually platforms open for debate on all sides of the fence, no matter your political interests, no matter what you think, allowing for freedom of choice, thought, and opinion, or if they are in fact publishers who are the arbiters of truth and will dictate and determine what users are exposed to.
What do you think though?
Is it wrong for the big tech companies (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter) to become the arbiters of truth? Should we be worried when they start censoring people who do not align with what they think or believe in? What does it mean for these companies, who control so much attention, who harness so much power, to become the people who shape what we learn and think?
Things could be dire if, say, Hitler was allowed a YouTube channel. But even then, blocking him would be a disservice to the right to freely think and speak. Wouldn’t it? Having the opportunity to say what we do think, is how it should be. No matter the ramifications. No matter if it leads to backlash and hate.
In Zucked, written by Roger McNamee, he discusses this very topic and the danger for these companies to not only obtain so much data about every single one of us, but shape what we see each day, thereby impacting our emotions. And in this episode, I discuss these topics and more.
If you enjoyed this episode, let me know by leaving a comment below or hitting me up via email. Thanks so much for tuning in.