Social media execs did themselves no favors by becoming so closely identified with the Democratic Party and, more broadly, the elite progressive left. Now the industry’s politically charmed existence, in which it enjoyed deregulatory Republicans as allies, has come to an abrupt end.
This politicization is a recent phenomenon. When tech companies were manufacturing hardware—transistors, integrated circuits, PCs—or selling shrink-wrapped software, their executives’ political preferences didn’t matter. A static RAM chip can’t deplatform dissenters, and neither can Microsoft Word. But on the post-1990s internet, fortunes are made by creating public platforms. The news articles, search results, and even posts from friends that you see are selected for you by algorithms using inscrutable machine learning techniques. This process, which involves judging whether sources are legitimate, deciding what groups will be muzzled, and wrestling with epistemological questions about truth in headlines, is necessarily politically charged, writes Declan McCullagh.
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