Big techs don’t move for their freedom – 05/17/2023 – Conrado Hübner Mendes

Digital platforms have fueled political upheavals for nearly ten years. The collateral effects of this communicative revolution are already drawn, the collective hallucination already televised, the deaths counted, the extremist violence spread. Its millionaire lobby has already corrupted electoral competition and public civility. This has never been seen in the history of democracy.

They generated expectations of individual liberation and collective rapprochement. With no limits on their algorithmic model of engagement, they also facilitated manipulation, domination and radicalization. Its emancipatory potentials have been overshadowed and surpassed by its ability to alienate, profit and engender chaos.

“Chaos” is not a hyperbolic idiocy, but a concept invoked in two influential books on the subject (“The Engineers of Chaos”, by Giuliano Da Empoli, and “The Chaos Machine”, by Max Fisher). They are not passive machines used by evil agents of the conspiracy. Conspiracy promotion is built into its very architecture, which promotes and rewards liver-stirring content. Like fear and hate. Not to mention deeper effects.

Many will remember that the causes of chaos are “more complex”. The appeal to the complexity of the world, however, is as correct as it is trivial. It serves to problematize every attempt to decipher cause and effect relationships. And it loses sight of the objective simplicity of certain causal devices that operate to aggravate a “more complex” problem. Don’t underestimate this tip of the iceberg.

The crudest version of this error says that the “fault” is not the big techs, but the bad users. The argument refers to the “National Rifles Association”, a noble American entity with the power to block any attempt to control the spread of firearms in that country. With each new attack, the NRA tries to teach that the evil is in the shooter, not the guns. And fanatics continue, for example, to murder in schools.

Others will come to warn that lies have always existed in politics. They ignore that the current concern did not emerge from a belated discovery of the obvious, but from the unprecedented technology that segments recipients based on psychological profiles and distributes customized content in a torrential and permanent way.

They are not megaphones in the public square, where the liar deserves his corner. They are massive, intelligent triggers that determine who listens to what and when.

Some will still come to scream for freedom of expression. Down with censorship. They feel like Chico Buarque who was prevented by censors from releasing a song during the dictatorship.

They are anachronistic spokespersons for John Stuart Mill, who 200 years ago formulated a famous argument for freedom of expression: that speeches must run free so that, in the face of lies, the truth wins and remains alive.

Mill did not even know radio technology, but he already pointed out that certain damages can justify restrictions on freedoms. That part gets buried in recent debates. Millions still borrow from George Orwell the frightening image of “ministry of truth” to further mess up the debate. And they don’t seem to notice that algorithms already censor and discriminate. No public discretion.

We already know that, without a competent political and legal reaction, modest and provisional conquests of life together will submerge. Political competition disciplined by shared legal rules, where the losers respect the result and know they can continue to play, will not survive without rules such powerful technologies of destabilization and concentration of wealth.

The Brazilian Parliament is late as the clock of the democratic apocalypse turns. A law on fake news needs to deal with several intricate issues: definition of disinformation, attribution of responsibilities for illicit acts, supposed effects on religious freedom and parliamentary immunity, creation of an independent regulatory authority with technical capacity. I will return to this later.

Without a good law, the existential threat will remain. The STF is alone acting in the regulatory dark. For good and for bad. This institutional improvisation has already expired its expiration date.

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