I While he generally disapproves of blood sports, he is willing to make an exception for hunting and luring Silicon Valley executives into Congressional committee rooms. But I like expensive, pointless glasses. And the waterboarding of a tech company CEO in Congress is exactly the kind of situation where fireworks go off, a moment of thrilling senselessness hits your retinas, and then darkness descends.
Last week’s critique of Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley ubermenschens was a classic of the genre. It was a front page, a headline, and a truly remarkable moment of awkwardness in which he was forced to confront his victim and apologize for the first time. Parents holding photos of children who died due to cyberbullying and sexual exploitation on his platform.
Less than six hours later, his company announced quarterly results and Meta’s stock price. 20.3% sharp increase The company’s market cap would increase by $200 billion, which would probably be a $700 million sweetener for Zuckerberg himself if you count him doing so as CEO. Those who heard the financial report said there was no mention of the children who died.
The next day, Biden announced that “if you harm Americans, we will respond,” dropping missiles on more than 80 targets in Syria and Iraq. Unless, of course, Americans are teenagers with smartphones. US tech companies routinely harm Americans, especially American children, but to be fair, they also routinely harm children of all other nationalities. There is. wall street journal I showed Meta’s algorithm Allowing pedophiles to find each other. New Mexico’s attorney general is suing the company, accusing it of being “the world’s largest marketplace for predators and pedophiles.” The British coroner found that Molly Jane Russell, 14 years old He “died of self-inflicted injuries while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.” This included an Instagram video depicting a suicide.
And while sending an elite force of Navy SEALs to Menlo Park may seem too promising, there are other responses the U.S. Congress could have mandated, including ideas and legislation here. Any law. This prohibits technology companies from treating deceased children as simply a cost of doing business.
Because requiring technology companies not to allow pedophiles to find and groom children is the lowest of the low-hanging fruit in the field of technology regulation. And that hasn’t even happened yet. America urgently needs to take antitrust action and break up these companies as a first fundamental step. Section 230 of the law, which gives platforms immunity from lawsuits for hosting harmful or illegal content, needs to be addressed.
We need basic product safety laws. Imagine that GlaxoSmithKline released a new experimental drug last year. It is a drug that has shown amazing effects, including treating certain types of cancer and slowing down aging. It can also cause cerebral hemorrhage and miscarriage of the fetus, but there’s no data on that yet, so we’ll have to wait and see. There’s a reason it doesn’t happen. They are called laws. Pharmaceutical companies have done years of testing. Because it has to be done. Because at some point in the distant past, parliaments and other legislative bodies around the world were fulfilling that duty.
But Silicon Valley’s latest highly disruptive technology, generative AI, was released last year without even the most basic federally mandated product testing. Last week, deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift, the most famous female star on the planet, flooded social media platforms, but social media platforms have no legal obligation to remove them, and therefore many do not. Ta.
But who cares? All that is being perpetrated against women is violence. It’s nothing more than non-consensual sexual assault, distributed by algorithms to millions of people across the planet. Punishing women is the first step in the deployment of any disruptive new technology, so get used to it. If you think deepfakes are here to stay for pop stars, good luck with that too.
Did you think the misinformation during the 2016 US election and Brexit vote was bad? Now, let’s see what happens in 2024. Are there any possible downsides to releasing this new, untested technology – one that allows for the creation of large-scale disinformation without any cost – at the exact moment more people are using it? Is it? go vote More than any other time in history?
You don’t really have to imagine where it will lead because it’s already happening.deep fake Target progressive candidates It fell a few days before Slovakia’s general elections in October. It is impossible to know what effect it had or who created it, but candidates lost and pro-Putin opposition candidates won. According to CNN, Deepfake message resonated This information was released by Russia’s foreign intelligence agency just an hour before the bomb was dropped. And where was Facebook in all of this? It typically refuses to remove many of the deepfake posts.
Back in Congress, going after high-tech executives is just what they need to do to fill the time between the difficult task of passing tech legislation. It’s been six years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Zuckerberg became the first major technology executive to be brought before Congress. This was a revelation, as he felt that Facebook might finally be defeated.
However, going out on Wednesday Zuckerberg’s 8th person. And neither Facebook nor the other technology platforms were defeated. The United States has not passed a single federal law. Meanwhile, Facebook is tech-cleansing its name to remove the stench of data scandals and Kremlin infiltration, occasionally subjecting its CEO to ritual slaughter on the Senate floor.
Symbols of the decline of America’s global dominance at the end of an empire, the collapse of Congress and takeover by corporate interests, the senator forcing Zuckerberg to apologize to his family while Congress was in session, and rebels finding each other. To understand that big white building that was stormed. on social media platforms – doing absolutely nothing to curb the singular power of his company. That’s as good a place as any to start.
It took us eight years to learn the lessons of 2016, and yet here we are.Britain responded as follows: weaken the body It protects our elections and degrades data protection laws. “Unlocking post-Brexit opportunities”. American Congressional committees have now become cargo cults of ritualized accountability. Meanwhile, new technological silver bullets are on the market that have the potential to create untold economic opportunities, deadly biological weapons, and destabilize what is left of liberal democracy. Probably both.
Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and features writer for the Observer.
