One of the ongoing issues that people maybe haven’t paid as much attention to is related to the United States Supreme Court and social networks.
That this has a larger impact than just within the United States takes a little bit of understanding. Still, we’ll start in the United States and what started the ball rolling.
“A majority of the Supreme Court seemed wary on Monday of a bid by two Republican-led states to limit the Biden administration’s interactions with social media companies, with several justices questioning the states’ legal theories and factual assertions.
Most of the justices appeared convinced that government officials should be able to try to persuade private companies, whether news organizations or tech platforms, not to publish information so long as the requests are not backed by coercive threats….”
“Supreme Court Wary of States’ Bid to Limit Federal Contact With Social Media Companies“, Adam Liptak, New York Times, March 18, 2024
This deals with the last United States Presidential Election, and we’re in an election year. It also had a lot to do with the response to Covid-19 and a lot of false information that was spread, and even there we see arguments about about whether the government should be the only one spreading false information.
Now I’ll connect this to the rest of the planet. Social networks, aside from the 800lb Chinese Gorilla (TikTok) are mainly in the United States. Facebook. The Social Network formerly known as Twitter. So the servers all fall under US jurisdiction.
Let’s pull that 800 lb Chinese Gorilla back in the ring too, where that political issue of TikTok is at odds with who is collecting data from who, since the Great Firewall of China keeps China in China but lets the data from the world go to their government.
Why is that data important? Because it’s being used to train Artificial Intelligences. It’s about who trains their artificial intelligence’s faster, really.
The Supreme Court is supposed to have the last say on all matter of things, and because of that there’s a level of ethics assumed of the members – which John Oliver dragged under a spotlight. Let’s just say: there are questions.
It’s also worth noting that in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that money was free speech. This means, since technology companies lobby and support politicians, the social networks you use have more free speech than the users combined based on their income alone – not to mention their ability to choose what you see, what you can say, and who you can say it to by algorithms that they can’t seem to master themselves. In a way that’s heartening, in a way it’s sickening.
So, the Supreme Court ruling on issues of whether the United States government’s interference in social networks is also about who collects the data, and what sort of information will be used to train artificial intelligences of the present and future.
The dots are all there, but it seems like people don’t really understand that this isn’t as much a fight for individual freedom of speech as it is about deciding what future generations will be told.
Even more disturbing now is just how much content is AI generated on the Internet, which has already been noted to be a significant amount, and is estimated to be 90% by some experts by 2026.
So who should control what you can post? Should governments decide? Should technology companies?
These days, few trust either. It seems like we need oversight on both, which will never happen on a planet where everybody wants to rule the world. Please fasten your seat-belts.
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