Breakup of Tech Giants Crucial to Future of American Politics

(Disclaimer: La Tonique Media LLC does not represent any political ideology. While we do not espouse any political beliefs, we do seek to provide a balance perspective by incorporating voices from both sides of the political spectrum.)

By Parissa King

On Jan. 6, a group of extremist right-wing insurgents made headlines after they managed to push past barriers and break into the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The event was a culmination of political tensions surrounding last November’s election, but right-wing constituents were fed dangerous and inflammatory narratives long before Joe Biden’s election. What took place in the Capitol was the result of years of deliberate misinformation, the majority of which was spread on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. In the aftermath of the attack, the role these tech companies played is too glaring a factor to ignore. These companies must be broken up by antitrust laws — a move endorsed by Facebook’s own co-founder — before they are allowed to sow even more chaos and discord.

Big tech companies like Twitter and Facebook now play an undeniably large role in influencing politics and have quickly risen to prominence as trusted platforms for news consumption. At the same time, however, these companies have failed to adequately vet the material that is posted and promulgated on their sites. While the U.S. has anti-monopoly laws that are supposed to regulate the market by breaking up companies that dominate competition, little has been done to regulate tech giants — especially Facebook, which controls the largest portion of the market by far — from completely controlling the social media sphere.

As social media sites’ algorithms adapt to show increasingly targeted content to their users, facts lose importance and the truth becomes subjective. Since the goal of these sites is to keep people’s attention and get clicks, users are almost exclusively shown content that confirms their beliefs and will keep them returning for more. In turn, the user’s version of the truth is reinforced over and over again, regardless of how rooted in reality the belief is. By repeatedly peddling content that conforms to a user’s belief set and simultaneously filtering out information to the contrary, these sites allow people to sell virtually any narrative as true. When it comes to politics, the effect of this phenomenon has been incalculably damaging — and while it may not have been an intentional strategy on the part of tech companies, its divisive effect on voters is not something that can be disregarded.

In the U.S., the rapid rise of the QAnon conspiracy group is a chilling example of the effects of unregulated disinformation. Last November, Georgian Qanon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to Congress, highlighting the now mainstream impact of the group, which was once considered an extremist fringe of the Republican party.

The threat of misinformation goes far beyond the U.S., too — Myanmar’s military used Facebook to spread false and hateful narratives about the Burmese Rohingya Muslim population, which resulted in a genocide against the group in 2018. Unless Facebook and its tech counterparts are forcibly broken up through government intervention, such devastation will continue and even escalate, domestically and abroad.

Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress in April, 2018. (Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images)

Unfortunately, because targeted content creates more profit, tech companies have little more than moral incentive to change their model. Therefore, relying on large corporations to moderate themselves isn’t a reliable strategy toward significant change. During Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional hearing in 2018, lawmakers expressed doubt that the company could regulate misinformation itself, especially in light of previous failed attempts to adequately do so. Facebook and its counterparts have repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted to effectively self regulate dangerous misinformation, despite enlisting third-party fact-checkers.

At this point, any action taken by these companies to rein in the explosion of false information on their sites is too little, too late. Only after Jan. 6’s Capitol siege did Twitter finally ban President Trump from its site. The move is long overdue — the President was allowed to spew incendiary rhetoric from his account on the site for years without consequence. For his page to be banned only after his virulent rhetoric resulted in domestic terrorism appears to be more of a face-saving move for Twitter than anything else.

The president’s poisonous influence is merely a symptom of a larger problem, which is that social media in its current state allows misinformation to take hold and gain a tremendous following. If this is allowed to continue, we can expect to see more power-hungry charlatans like Trump rise to power in the future. Social media must not be allowed to give so much influence to those who are not bound by the truth. Tech giants must be broken up before they allow further chaos to take hold of domestic and global politics.

Parissa is a political writer for La Tonique.