Digital gangsters

By Arthur Coelho Bezerra

Technology giants such as Alphabet, Meta and Twitter want to prevent the approval of the Brazilian Internet Freedom, Responsibility and Transparency Law at all costs.

In the brief golden age of the internet, when personal blogs, chat rooms and peer-to-peer file sharing in the virtual environment proliferated (terms that seem to have fallen into disuse), French-Tunisian thinker Pierre Lévy gained fame with books that encouraged a kind of technoliberal utopia, projected by the potential of this new virtual world. Terms such as “collective intelligence”, “electronic democracy” and “universes of choice” made up the ideas of their cyberculture, whose human substrate would be in “virtual communities” formed by people interconnected in a network.

The examples that Pierre Lévy lists in his book Cibercultura, from 1999, to illustrate such virtual communities are prosaic: “fans of Mexican cuisine, lovers of the Angora cat, fanatics of a certain programming language or passionate readers of Heidegger, once dispersed across the world. planet, now they have a familiar place to meet and talk.” It is curious that, of the entire pantheon of philosophy, the frivolous choice (pun intended) fell on a German thinker who did not hide his sympathy for anti-Semitism and the Nazi party, of which Heidegger was a member from 1933 until its dissolution at the end. of the Second War.

If the anti-Semitic philosopher were alive and well at the age of 133, he would have no shortage of virtual communities to chat with his peers: as we know, the cyberculture of the new 2020s is full of fascist, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, scammer and all kinds of people who use digital networks to share hate, anger and bile. Hatred is a powerful affect, which generates identification with those who share it and indignation from those who do not share it (or, worse, are the target of it).

Therefore, both on social networks and on news sites (whether true or not), hate speech generates engagement – ​​not the old meaning of engagement, which refers to participation in protests, labor struggles, social movements or political parties. On the internet, engagement is not qualitative but quantitative, a phenomenon measurable by the interaction of network users with certain content. This interaction generates the production of data through clicks, comments, shares and views, increasing the big data of internet corporations.

There is another factor that is fermented by the cyberculture of our days and that results from this affective sharing of misogynistic, racist, homophobic, fascist and scammer communities, that is, the hypertrophy of hate: its corollary is the atrophy of reason, reflection, consideration, in short, of balanced, rational and reasonable thinking. The withering away of reason, in turn, has historically proven to be an efficient method for fertilizing the ground in which lies, fake news and other disinformation tactics will be planted by individuals and groups with political and economic interests.

Just like hate, lies also generate engagement on the networks: false news is shared by those who believe in them or by those who circulate them out of bad faith, personal interest or scoundrels, and are refuted, denied and denounced by those who act in defense of the truth of the facts. In both cases, returning to the big tech ledger, engagement is measured by the interaction of network users with this content, which generates data production through clicks, comments, shares and views, once again expanding the big data of internet corporations.

Sociologist Shoshana Zuboff uses the term “radical indifference” to refer to the stance of big tech in relation to what is liked, clicked or shared on their platforms, using the tired discourse of technological neutrality to exempt themselves from the content made available by their companies. users. However, consider the wide circulation on the internet of hate speech, political disinformation and scientific and environmental denialism, combined with the resurgence of flat earth, anti-vaccine and discriminatory virtual communities that finance the promotion of disinformative content on the networks, a practice that generates engagement among based on the relevance criteria of the algorithms that organize information on the platforms, which are designed according to the commercial interests of billion-dollar corporations. These are facts that, more than raising doubts, reveal the fallacies regarding the moral neutrality of platforms.

At this point, it seems clear why large technology companies such as Alphabet (owner of Google and YouTube), Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) and Twitter want to prevent, at all costs, the approval of the Brazilian Internet Freedom, Responsibility and Transparency Law, which aims to regulate digital communication platforms so that we have a healthier, safer and more reliable information ecosystem. PL2630, a bill known as the “Fake News PL”, provides new rules for the use of social networks, instant messaging applications and search engines.

The chapters of the project that deal with the accountability and regulation of platforms include topics such as remuneration for musical, audiovisual and journalistic content shared on digital platforms, the use of social networks by children and adolescents, the practice of crimes of racism, discrimination, terrorism and attacks against the rule of law, as well as liability (including criminal) for the mass propagation of false messages. All of the items listed generate profit for big tech, which constantly avoids taking responsibility for the content that circulates on its networks nor is it accountable for the algorithmic mediation practices that make this or that information visible or invisible.

After more than two years of discussions since its presentation in 2020, and after undergoing around 90 amendments to its original text (Bismarck said that laws are made like sausages), the fragmented and already weakened project was finally delivered to the Chamber of Deputies by rapporteur Orlando Silva on Thursday, April 27th, to be voted on the following Tuesday, May 2nd.

However, the day before the vote, the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper published a report about Google’s offensive against the Fake News PL. Journalist Patrícia Campos Mello, who wrote the article, presents the conclusions of a study by the Internet and Social Media Studies Laboratory (NetLab), at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), which points out that Google, Meta, Spotify and Brasil Paralelo advertise and run ads against PL 2630 in an opaque way and circumventing their own terms of use, indicating the search results of Google to negatively influence users’ perception of the bill.

On the same day, many researchers and Google users shared a print with the phrase “PL2630 could increase confusion about what is true or false in Brazil” printed on the search engine’s home page, which contributed to the decision to open a investigation by Minister Alexandre de Moraes to judge the company’s conduct. Nevertheless, big tech’s objective was achieved: on May 2nd, under pressure from Google, Meta, Tik Tok and the right-wing opposition (with a strong presence from the evangelical bench), the Chamber decided to postpone the vote by undetermined time.

Google’s stance in relation to PL2630 is reminiscent of the scandal involving the collection of data that Cambridge Analytica made from millions of Facebook users, to, among other things, manipulate the results of Donald Trump’s election in the United States and of Brexit in the United Kingdom, in 2016. The case meant that Mark Zuckerberg was forced, as a North American citizen, to go through a hearing of more than 600 questions in around ten hours of testimony in Washington, to which he responded in the most evasive way possible. was able.

Regarding the three subpoenas to testify that he received from the British parliament, the owner of Facebook, in metaphorical terms, only showed the finger to the English – and it was not the thumb of the blue network’s famous “thumbs up”. Zuckerberg’s insolence in ignoring the subpoenas led the British parliament, in the report on disinformation and fake news that it published in 2019, to state that “companies like Facebook should not behave like “digital gangsters” in the online world, considering they are ahead of and beyond the law.” The same should be true for Elon Musk’s Twitter, Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Google, and for any CEO or company that considers itself the Alpha and Omega of the digital universe.

* Text originally published on the website A Terra é Redonda on May 4, 2023.