It’s getting harder and harder to control digital innovation
(Translated from a Portuguese text using Google Translator and Grammarly)
Many professional journalists may not take it for granted, but digital platforms today perform the same role that Johannes Gutenberg’s printer played in the 15th century when it radically changed the way in which information circulated in social communities. Printed newspapers and social networks on the Internet, each in its own time, expanded the dissemination of news, allowing an extraordinary acceleration in the production of knowledge and, consequently, in the progress of humanity.
But evolution often takes a toll on transitioning from one model to another. The analogue era in the press created industrial empires, millionaire families and enormous political influence, but all this went into decline with the new digital information and communication technologies, responsible for the emergence of new and revolutionary communication and information production systems.
Conflicts of interest inevitably arose among those who felt threatened by the emergence of new technologies, capable of generating the same type of accumulation of wealth enjoyed by the barons of the press. The current verbal, financial and political war between journalistic conglomerates and digital platforms is a contemporary manifestation of the traumas associated with all the great technological innovations that occurred throughout human history. Gutenberg’s invention, for example, provoked serious political and religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics during the 16th century.
Faced with the predominance of economic and political interests, the current argument between journalism entrepreneurs and owners of digital platforms loses the characteristics of a war between good and evil, between right and wrong. What is really at stake is the resistance or not to the changes provoked by technological transformations that result from the inevitable advance of human knowledge. And when this happens, innovations generally generate positive and negative developments from the social point of view.
An avalanche of problems
The press has already been associated with pejorative adjectives such as yellow (in the United States) and brown (in Brazil) to qualify publications responsible for reprehensible news practices such as sensationalism, fake news and hate speech, very common at the beginning of the XXth century. Ironically, these same qualifiers are used today by journalistic conglomerates against digital platforms that host social networks involved in criminal attitudes such as right-wing extremism, homophobia, xenophobia and racism.
In fact, we are dealing with two different types of communication platforms: the analogue platform that serves as the basis for the production processes of the conventional press, and the digital one materialized in social networks of all kinds, from the big ones like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube to small ones like Medium, Kwai, Mastodom and the ultra-conservative Gab and Gettr. It is a conflict whose solution needs to take into account the socioeconomic and technical-scientific context in which it occurs, otherwise, we end up regretting losses that could have been avoided.
Digital platforms need to be legally regulated because this is a condition accepted by all members of a national community. They cannot be an exception, in the same way, that the press needs to accept that new technologies have changed the information context of the analogue era. It is unfeasible to regulate digital platforms and social networks using analogue laws and values, in the same way, that the press crisis tends to get worse as it ignores the fact that the rules created for print are inapplicable in cyberspace. Analog copyright rules don’t work in the digital world.
Artificial Intelligence, to complicate things further
The digital age has made the public a direct protagonist in the production of information through social networks. People are no longer mere consumers of news on the internet. They also began to publish texts, audio and videos, which, in theory, also places them among those who should be rewarded by the platforms. In addition, as all content published on the Internet is in binary code format, it is not easy to identify when someone has copied something, which makes the task of fixing a value for what it has been reproduced enormously difficult.,
And as if the complexity of the decision on regulating social networks and digital platforms were not enough, we now have an even more complicated problem: artificial intelligence (AI), responsible for corporate earthquakes in the digital world and concerns that border on panic in the legacy communication industry. An anonymous text by an engineer from the company Google leaked recently to the press, implies that big techs will have to work in an open-source regime (sharing discoveries) if they want to survive in the race for innovations using artificial intelligence.
This simply would make obsolete current efforts to regulate activities on the internet using outdated political and legal procedures. Technology is advancing faster than humans’ ability to pass laws and regulations. This generates a mismatch which in turn generates enormous uncertainty, especially among political and corporate decision-makers. And we’re going to have to get used to this because the other possibility would be to freeze scientific and technological evolution, which is unthinkable.
