Big Tech, Russia and Democracy
As Western companies from every walk of life exit Russia as part of the sanctions against the country for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the biggest tech companies in the US are grappling with whether to do the same.
So far, Apple is the only major tech company to significantly exit its Russia operations, halting all sales in the region and removing Russian media outlets from its app store. On the other hand, Meta said that it intends to keep Instagram and WhatsApp active, as “people in Russia are using FB and IG to protest and organize against the war.” Amazon said that it would donate $5 million to organizations but announced no plan to shift operations. Google announced a bar of Russian news apps from its app store but is not modifying access to YouTube, which is used by 80 – 85% of Russians.
What would be the impact of big tech pulling out of Russia? Not that long ago, there was a widespread sense of optimism that social media was going to be a force for increased adoption of democratic institutions. The idea was free expression on social media and authoritarian governments would be incompatible.
Of course, we have seen that’s not the case. In the wake of the Arab Spring of 2010, any optimism was quashed as outcomes included both the continuation of repressive regimes and even societal disarray in countries like Syria and Libya. And authoritarian countries like China have implemented their own carefully monitored tech platforms while enjoying commerce with most of the world.
Here in the US, social media is contributing to the polarization we are seeing as well as widespread misinformation. You could make the case that the advent of social media has been disastrous for our own democracy here at home.
This week on the podcast I interviewed one of the foremost experts on technology’s impact on both society and democracy, Professor Ramesh Srinivasan of UCLA. Said Ramesh on the Arab Spring: “I called bullshit on that from the start. . .. There was a narrative that our tools liberate you. . . . we knew at the time that various types of personalization algorithms [were] sending us into echo chambers.”
Ramesh argues that the mining of our data and interactions is splintering people into different versions of reality and rewarding inflammatory content. “When they started doing this personalization, we became Googled, not based on some neutral notion of relevance but based on what would grab our attention. It’s all based on correlation . . . we have all this data on your engagement with these pages, .. . .it doesn’t really know what content is inflammatory or sensational because we haven’t done good AI work on this just yet . . . but it can figure out what will maximize [your] engagement and attention, what maximizes that dopamine release is outrageous content.” This is true both here in the US and everywhere.
Instead of imagining that big tech is a force for democracy, it’s more appropriate to regard them as having their own distinct interests. The tech journalist Farhad Manjoo observed that the biggest tech companies are themselves more powerful than many or most governments. Facebook’s user base is now 2.91 billion, over a third of the world’s population and about 9 times the population of the US.
Watching these tech companies wrestle with their response to Russia’s aggression highlights just how independent they are as well as their vast reach. If Meta/Facebook were an American company committed to the preservation of democracy, then it seems like an exit from Russia would be a natural step. But if Meta is more a quasi-state with its own set of interests, it simply wants to be in front of as many people as possible. Just as we’re seeing the truth of Putin and Ukraine, we’re also seeing the truth of our tech companies that have become more global and dominant than any other firms in human history.
