Google, X and Facebook are modern tobacco companies
Just as tobacco companies knew that people poison
From Facebook to X to Tiktok, today’s social networks giants are positioned as bastions of freedom of expression. Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, now says that the verification of facts caused “Too much censorship“, While Tiktok soft a Freedom of expression argument against its forced sale. Who, after all, could argue against freedom without obstacles to speak?
The answer, it occurs, could be anyone who pays attention. As we begin to understand the cataclysmic effect Of the viral wrong information that flood social networks, the undeniable reality is that these Half Empires Sputorer enormously of the division And fear. Throughout of politics To health, falsehoods spread In social networks cause immense damage. Of 2018 Genocide against the Rohingya of Myanmar people, incited on Facebook, X, Facebook and Telegram Publications last year they caused Violent anti -immigrants riot In the United Kingdom to people who gave 1.8 million visits to a Tiktok video that He encouraged them to take whitish enemas To cure the supposed infestation of parasites, the evidence is clear that social networks myths cause great social damage.
While Europe has moved to sustain Responsible social networks giantsUS efforts have almost completely hesitated, with YouTube, X and other platforms Reduction of erroneous information equipment and allowing Conspiracy theories to execute riots. Family attempts now from the industry to deny the responsibility for the damage of immensely lucrative products follow a family and deeply instructive play book: the tobacco industry obstruction strategy.
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Just as Four out of 10 people They were ever smokers in the United States, poisoning their lungs, a large number of people now receive their news through the Editorial Prism of Social Networkspoisoning their perceptions.
Around fifth of Americans now receive their news Of social networks influencers. A recent European survey of older teenagers and young adults He discovered that 42 percent received their news mainly from social media platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram. In the last two decades, social networks giants have Traditional means displaced like him News source For many, without the annoying problems of Journalistic integrity either Editorial Responsibility. Instead they benefit out of commitment. And this is where corporate greed and the beggar’s The tobacco industry They are especially illuminating.
Long before the overwhelming damage of smoking were widely knowntobacco companies I already knew Your product was harmful and addictive. Instead of taking corrective measures, they spent decades undercut any regulation, even while cigarettes continued kill millions. Opting not to mitigate the damage, but distract from the overwhelming evidence that their product was deadly, they aggressively pushed their product to vulnerable audiences. One now infamous not memorandum of a tobacco company in the 1960s boasted that “Doubt is our product“A means to distract from the damage of your profitable industry.
In the information age, social networks are not different. From their own internal metrics, technological giants have long known what independent research now continually validates: that the content that is most likely to become viral is what induces strong feelings as scandal and disgustregardless of its underlying truth. In addition, they also know that this content is very committed and more profitable. Far from acting against the false and harmful content, they placed profits above their amazing social and harmful impact to encourage it implicitly while minimizing mass costs.
We have known this at least from the sequels of the divisive US presidential elections of 2016, where the Guilt of social networks for His triumph of fictions was received with how it looks now Simulated contrition. Technological giants like Facebook even trumpeted his associations with fact verification organizations.
This now sounds insultically hollow, in 2021 Facebook complainant Frances Haugen He revealed that the company, soon renowned goal, had the tools to effectively stop the propagation of dangerous misinformation in everything, from politics to medicine. However, their leaders chose to limp those tools, precisely because they He earned more money outside the high commitment that brought inflammatory fictions. (Asked about this criticism, a target spokesman referred to a advertisement made by Zuckerberg in January and the company’s policies in disinformation and “non -authentic behavior. “)
Social networks titans essentially adopt the same hypocrisy The tobacco industry Encarnate when they pretended concern about reducing damage as their product is increasingly aggressively pushing. With Trump’s re -election, our technological giants are not even intended to worry. Instead, they are turning to superficial celebrations of freedom of expression. This was the justification that Zuckerberg adopted when he said that Meta would do it Cease the verification of facts in its January announcement. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been labeled as “Absolutist of freedom of expression. “But between Zuckerberg’s goal by launching a Legal arsenal to silence Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams PRIVILEGED INFORMATION ACCOUNT and Musk attempts to Critical silence In X too As the opposition protests In Türkiye, hypocrisy is inescapable.
Topics on free expression betray a deliberate ignorance of human psychology. We tend to emotion first and reason later, an observation that the psychologist Daniel Kahneman won A Nobel economy In 2002. To take only one example, the riots that convulsed the samples of Northern England and Ireland last year were fed by Social Network Accounts Claiming disgusting crimes by immigrants, amplified by right -wing accounts. That these accounts were fictitious was not an impediment to their ability to wake up Fear and anger.
We have known for more than a decade that the ability to induces anger or disgust It is a strong predictor of the virality of social networks. This has a cost of veracity, since the corrective of explosive fictions obtain only one fraction of the commitment. Even more worrying is the phenomenon of illusory truth, where exposures repeated to a falsehood prepare us, even when we know it is false at the intellectual level. In order for misinformation to harm, you don’t even have to convince, you should simply induce doubts enough to insert us so that the dream is apathy. This supports the extraordinary power of anti -vaccin propaganda, the main driver of vaccine hesitationwhere Fear and doubtInduced by propaganda, you can make worried parents delay or even reject vaccination. Resistance to allow vaccination He has killed at least a child in Texas’s measles outbreak this year.
Social Network Companies Know this. The commitment is your Business Modeland doubt about the damage they cause It is your product. Tobacco executives and their scientists bought, once proclaimed uncertainty About links between cigarettes and lung cancer. Zuckerberg also has testified To Congress, “the existing body of scientific work has not demonstrated A causal link between using social networks and youths have worse mental health ”, even while studies find Autoles, eating disorder and misogynist material Propagation on this platform without obstacles. This mistake echoes protests of tobacco companies that there was no causal evidence of damage to smoking, even as incontrovertible evidence in the opposite, quickly accumulated.
For all this, social media companies deserve opprobrium and, ultimately, regulation. Despite their protests, they do not advocate freedom of expression, only the freedom of the consequences for themselves. Until we start thinking about how to mitigate the damage they destroy and begin to place social trust on social networks, technological billionaires will continue to exploit human misery and fuele our divisions to align their portfolios.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the opinions expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
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