Meta or setting democracy on fire
Pierre Michaud ·
We regulate advertising, radio, television, dangerous products... one day we will have to require the Facebooks of this world to manage their algorithms in a responsible and transparent manner.
For the past few hours, my feed has been flooded with posts about wildfire smoke and the Canada-U.S. dispute surrounding it. On one side, supporters of the Trumpist right accusing Canada of every ill imaginable: our forests are poorly managed, they claim. Pure nonsense.
On the other, Canadians firing back, often with equal anger. And in the middle, an algorithm rubbing its hands together. Because it's well known: if this kind of content dominates our feeds, it's no accident.
It's a business decision, made without a shred of scruples. Anger drives clicks, and every minute we spend fuming is money in Meta's pocket. Fanning the flames in people's minds while the forests burn... that's the model.
The problem isn't sharply held opinions. It's that a machine designed to keep us hooked systematically amplifies what divides us and buries what might help us understand one another. We are dismantling, one feed at a time, public debate. The very foundation of our democracies.
Our political leaders need to grasp this, and the urgency is growing by the day. We cannot allow private companies to single-handedly decide what shapes public conversation.
We regulate advertising, radio, television, dangerous products... sooner or later we will have to demand that the Facebooks of this world manage their algorithms responsibly and transparently. Not to censor ideas. But to stop financially rewarding discord.
We talk a great deal about climate change and countless other issues, and rightly so. But these algorithms that are eroding our democracies may well be just as significant a challenge. Perhaps even more so.
And it seems to me we are not talking about it nearly enough.
Could it be because it's just as profitable for certain politicians as it is for certain media outlets?