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Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

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Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#121

Post by lovelearning »

treebeard901 wrote: post #46

The claim that big tech itself is a threat to democracy needs to be debated. While they do manipulate their customers and sell their personal information for profit, the companies themselves have also been manipulated by the various groups in the world that are the actual threat to democracy. The political polarization might not be caused by technology but instead only amplifies it. One example where the tech compani…

> the companies themselves have also been manipulated ...The political polarization might not be caused by technology but instead only amplifies it.

There are claims that Facebook staffers directly help political campaigns micro-target specific audiences using "dark posts" [1].

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n...

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#122

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

archie2 wrote: post #113

Make no mistake, this is just MS calling for regulatory capture so they have few people to compete with their products. They are in it for their profits, not the good of mankind.

Any time I see a statement put out by any of the tech incumbents, I ask myself, "How does this statement benefit the company?" And usually, there is a clear path to an answer. It's for profits, it's never for the public good. These are companies after all. If they're asking to regulated, it means buying a seat at the table, creating the illusion of regulation, with none of the downsides imposed by actual regulation.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#124

Post by mlb_hn »

treebeard901 wrote: post #46

The claim that big tech itself is a threat to democracy needs to be debated. While they do manipulate their customers and sell their personal information for profit, the companies themselves have also been manipulated by the various groups in the world that are the actual threat to democracy. The political polarization might not be caused by technology but instead only amplifies it. One example where the tech compani…

Abramowitz and Sanders (2008)[1] is a good article showing the debate going on 10 years ago over whether or not we were even seeing polarization, which supports the possibility that tech is a spurious factor.

A really cool causal factor (e.g. Green, Palmquist, and Schicker, 2002, [2]) is the effect of civil rights and voting rights acts in the 60s. Essentially, young conservatives subsequently started primarily joining the Republican party and it took 30 years for the effects to really be visible (kind of like messing with pH levels where the color eventually just changes).

[1] http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jcampbel/documents/AbramowitzJO...

[2] http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/articles/green.pdf

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#125

Post by navigatesol »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #117
skrebbel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop pushing the blame upstairs. If you knowingly build software that hurts people, you share the blame. The job market for programmers has never been better. "My boss told me to do it" is not an excuse. I, for one, hope more engineers involved in fraud (eg VW), privacy breaches (eg Facebook) etc get tried and punished. It might help make programmers realize that yes, your work actually affects real humans and yes, y…

>>> Stop pushing the blame upstairs. If you knowingly build software that hurts people, you share the blame. The job market for programmers has never been better. "My boss told me to do it" is not an excuse. It is an excuse. If my livelihood depends on it, my children's health insurance depends on it (especially if you have kids that need continuous care), my kids university tuition depends on it, etc, etc... So, per…

>I know I wouldn't care unless someone really made it worth my while to do so.

This mentality is appalling.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#126

Post by tfehring »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #117
skrebbel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop pushing the blame upstairs. If you knowingly build software that hurts people, you share the blame. The job market for programmers has never been better. "My boss told me to do it" is not an excuse. I, for one, hope more engineers involved in fraud (eg VW), privacy breaches (eg Facebook) etc get tried and punished. It might help make programmers realize that yes, your work actually affects real humans and yes, y…

>>> Stop pushing the blame upstairs. If you knowingly build software that hurts people, you share the blame. The job market for programmers has never been better. "My boss told me to do it" is not an excuse. It is an excuse. If my livelihood depends on it, my children's health insurance depends on it (especially if you have kids that need continuous care), my kids university tuition depends on it, etc, etc... So, per…

Your and your children’s well being depend on your having a job. They don’t depend strictly on your current job. Approximately all engineers at big tech companies could put in their 2 week’s notice on Monday and find another job above the 95th salary percentile during that 2 week period.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#127

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

Barrin92 wrote: post #24
aj7 wrote: post #14

Warning. Regulation almost always favors incumbents.

This argument is always repeated within the first ten minutes of these discussions, but I don't really understand why anyone assumes that competition is somehow the panacea to every problem on the planet. I don't want ten unregulated facebooks who all leak my data, I want one facebook that plays by reasonable rules. The dynamics of social networks which don't deliver value if they're fragmented has made the competiti…

> The world isn't better off if half of the information is on bing and half of the information is on google

The premise here is incorrect. The idea is all information would be available on both Google and Bing, and searchers are free to query their engine of choice.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#128

Post by traderjane »

skrebbel wrote: post #70
GreaterFool wrote: post #52

> that governments need to put some "guardrails" around engineers and the tech titans they serve The evil engineers! Not the managers, CEOs and so on, but engineers. The true root of evil. Finally someone recognizes who's really at fault

Stop pushing the blame upstairs. If you knowingly build software that hurts people, you share the blame. The job market for programmers has never been better. "My boss told me to do it" is not an excuse. I, for one, hope more engineers involved in fraud (eg VW), privacy breaches (eg Facebook) etc get tried and punished. It might help make programmers realize that yes, your work actually affects real humans and yes, y…

Is the fast food worker responsible for thinking about American dietary health? Is the logger responsible for thinking about ecological health? Is the coal miner responsible for thinking about clean air?

In some ways the fast food worker is even more directly responsible for the end-product. Burgers require regional labor; software can be made by somebody in Australia or China.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#129

Post by goofaced »

There is actually a pure free market solution to this problem.

Microsoft should sell their stake in Facebook and publicly announce they are distancing themselves from FB. The dominos will just start falling automatically, one by one. For sure, it will start some serious soul searching among the companies whose primary business is data exploitation.

But of course, this will not happen, because Microsoft desperately needs Facebook to be strong so that its AI team can actually challenge Google's dominance in AI (Tensorflow).

https://internetofbusiness.com/microsoft-and-facebook-team-u...

So we keep hearing these weird platitudes by folks who probably are never going to be affected in any big way by this so called "cannibalization of the fabric of this country".

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#130

Post by pgcj_poster »

mattmcknight wrote: post #44

The threats to democracy arguments are so overblown. We're about to have a huge election. There is no literal threat to democracy. Hmmm...it must be some kind of metaphor. So what do people mean when they say this? The NPR piece says Smith suggests "the Internet giants will cannibalize the very fabric of this country". This metaphor seems hyperbolic as well. To use "cannibalize" means that something will eat itself.…

Elections are only a small part of democracy. Things like free speech and privacy are also very important components of a functioning democracy.
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