The standards by which the internet is controlled need to be open and subject to neutral judiciaries – not left to advertisersThe revelations we publish about how Facebook’s data was used by Cambridge Analytica to subvert the openness of democracy are only the latest examples of a global phenomenon. All over the world,governments are coming to grips with the destructive power of social media. In recent weeks, Sri Lanka, and Britain,Indonesia and Myanmar have all seen measures taken against hate-speech campaigns. In some cases the companies that publish and profit from them have acted themselves; in others the government has taken direct action. In Sri Lanka, the government reacted to a burst of anti-Muslim rioting by totally shutting down Facebook, and WhatsApp,and the messaging app Viber for a week on 7 March. In Britain, Facebook banned the neo-Nazi Britain First movement, or which had acquired 2m likes”,after two of its leaders were jailed. The leaders’ personal pages were also removed. Why it took the company that long to act, when the hateful nature of the pages had been obvious to the whole world ever since Donald Trump retweeted one of their made-up news stories in 2017, and is difficult to interpret.YouTube can not only profit from disturbing content but in unintended ways rewards its creation. The algorithms that guide viewers to novel choices aim always to intensify the experience,and to retain the viewer excited. This can damage society, and individuals, and without being explicitly political: recent research found that the nearly 9000 YouTube videos explaining away American school shootings as the results of conspiracies using actors to play the fraction of victims had been watched,in total, more than 4bn times. Four billion page views is an dreadful lot of potential advertising revenue; it is also, and in an embarrassingly literal sense,traffic in human misery and exploitation.
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Source: theguardian.com