The hidden risks in the global dictatorship of the big social networks
By suspending and two days later reinstating the accounts of journalists who covered the travels of billionaire Elon Musk, Twitter showed how the big social networks can be erratic and unpredictable, affecting the lives of many people, without being accountable to anyone. It also showed how the internet has become an instrument of egotistical businessmen like the controversial new owner of Twitter whose personal decisions can override that of the nearly 450 million active users of the social network of the blue bird, all over the world.
It’s as if Elon Musk alone ruled all of South America, where 430 million people live in 12 countries. That’s a lot of power in the hands of a single person and a strong warning about the risks we take when so many people depend on the flow of data, facts, and information on Twitter. It is also a political and ideological risk because Musk is reportedly a supporter of Donald Trump, the leader of the US extreme right.
It is now known that the megalomania of the new owner of Twitter is just the beginning of a far-fetched plan. Musk wants to turn Twitter into something much bigger than a messaging platform. He wants to create a super-network similar to the Chinese WeChat, where, in addition to exchanging messages, the user can pay bills, make investments, buy everything, see doctors, and access all kinds of entertainment. In short, Musk’s future Twitter wants to be as indispensable to people as electricity and water.
Musk is just the most controversial and hyped case, but he is not the only one, nor the most important one. Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, can influence the lives of 2.9 billion active users of the largest social network on the planet, which is almost 6.5 times bigger than Twitter. Zuckerberg also controls WhatsApp and Messenger, which allows him to potentially affect the daily lives of approximately 6.2 billion people, theoretically almost 4/5 of the world’s population.
If we add the number of active users of the five largest social networks in the world (Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram) we arrive at a total, also hypothetical, of almost 10 billion human beings (1). The economic weight of the group of companies controlling the two largest social networks (Meta/Facebook and Alphabet/Youtube) is equal to the Brazilian GDP of 2021 (1.4 trillion dollars). (2)
All this immense economic power was built based on information left by users of social networks, a free raw material that today feeds databases worth billions of dollars. It is the most valuable raw material in today’s economy, as it serves as the basis for almost all industrial and commercial activities today. In 2021, the data accumulated by Facebook earned it a net profit of 28.8 billion dollars while Twitter’s revenue in the first quarter of 2022, after all, taxes, reached 513 million dollars.
The dream turned into a nightmare
The concentration of power in the hands of egotistical and unpredictable billionaires goes against the whole initial spirit of the Internet whose creators were visionaries without economic interests and saw the network as a kind of democratic nirvana. The dream of an internet without hegemonies was buried by the obsession for profit, after young and audacious, and often unscrupulous, entrepreneurs transformed projects, initially revolutionary, into oligopolistic platforms that would make the tycoons of the world oil industry jealous.
The political audacity and arrogance of digital tech billionaires is matched by their economic power. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, dared to challenge both the government and the press in the United States by threatening to block the publication of news on his American network if Congress, in Washington, approved a regulation of social networks to impose greater control over the flow of information on Facebook.
So far, Australia is the only Western country that has managed to force a social network (Google) to pay for the use of news originally published by the mainstream press. This is because the conglomerate News Corp, owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, took advantage of a moment of electoral weakness for then Prime Minister Scott Morrison to obtain a regulation of social networks from the conservative parliament. Not even the all-powerful World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has successfully campaigned against the big platforms.
Undemocratic showcase
The ambitious marketing of the “global virtual square” told in prose and verse by Twitter since 2013 by the directors of the network actually hides the idea of centralization and verticalization of public debate, denying the basic principles of democracy. In the edition of the 13th of this month, The New York Times published an article by columnist Ezra Klein, where he states that a “global square run by a single man (Musk) is not a square, but a shop window”. This statement goes to the heart of the problem of oligopolistic social networks. They are structurally opposed to informational diversity and decentralization because this would limit their economic and political power.
The risks of being subjected to Big Brother-type entities are no longer hypothetical, but frighteningly real. The control of the flow of news through social networks is already a fact, as successive denunciations involving Twitter and Facebook, for example, prove. Here in Brazil, Zuckerberg’s network, since 2021, has ignored warnings from company officials that the far-right organization Ordem Dourada do Brasil publishes denialist content and fake news about the Coronavirus pandemic on its Facebook page. In the United States, the network’s own lawyer, Jim Baker, was denounced by journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, as the censor of content published by both on the Twitter Files podcast. These are just recent examples of a long succession of cases in which platforms have assumed the power to decide what is good or bad for their users.
The weakness of mega networks
Although defined only as technological platforms, social networks do influence the formation of personal opinions. Communication specialists, such as Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, author of the article News as a New Form of Knowledge, claim that the overwhelming majority of people today develop knowledge from informational “pills” transmitted by social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. People no longer have time to read long texts, so they absorb just a few sentences, the content of which ends up accumulating in individual memory, where opinions are formed. Without informational diversity, people end up accepting baseless ideas due to the lack of different versions and that is where the main risk of the centralized standardization of large networks lies.
Despite all the enormous power they have over the world’s information flows, large digital platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Telegram and Instagram have a weakness. They sell a social image and free services to attract users, but they actually function as an oligopoly, a set of monopolies with some degree of specialization. They harshly defend this power because they know that their main raw material, information, is extremely volatile. User discontent can spread quickly, as it already does today with the migration of Twitter clients to the Mastodon network. If suspicion about Musk’s erratic conduct takes shape, the network might follow the path of the late MySpace and Orkut, which disappeared after dazzling existences.
User migration has so far proved to be an efficient tool to control the growth and power of large social networks. In addition to Twitter, Facebook has also been losing customers since 2020 in favor of larger networks like Tik Tok and smaller ones like Ello, Medium, Snapchat, Quora, Kwai, Post, Nostr and Tribel, as well as the ultra-right Social Truth, created by Donald Trump. Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the Internet, thinks that the empowerment of users through the phenomenon of migration between platforms can be an alternative to the complex process of regulating social networks. But this is already a topic for another article.
(1) Both in the case of Mark Zuckerberg’s companies and in the sum of the five largest networks, the total number of users is merely theoretical, because there are people who are in more than one network and, therefore, are added to two or more times. The world’s population is now estimated at just over eight billion people.
(2) Details at https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media/biggest-social-media-sites/
