Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

The trilemma of Big Tech

Karin Pettersson 7th May 2019

Karin Pettersson says we can have Big Tech’s market domination, business models and democracy—just not all at the same time.

Big Tech

Karin Pettersson

Last week Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage in San Jose, California, and presented his vision for the future at the company’s yearly developers’ conference.

The attention given to the conference by the world’s media was testimony to the fact that Facebook is now more powerful than most nation states. Its products provide the infrastructure for core democratic functions such as free speech, distribution of news and access to information. Our societies, to a larger and larger degree, are shaped by how Zuckerberg and a small elite of Silicon Valley business leaders choose to do business. And the results, frankly speaking, are catastrophic.

New normal

Since the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum and the election of Donald Trump as US president, the following year, discussion about the negative impact of social networks on democracy has intensified. ‘Fake news’, disinformation, Russian interference and propaganda have become the new normal. In a recent TED-talk, the Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr described how Facebook became a platform for lies and illegal behaviour in the Brexit campaign.

‘Have social media made the world a better place?’ Poppy Harlow of CNN asked the influential tech writer Kara Swisher ‘No, not now’ was the dry answer. The founder of the modern web, Tim Berners-Lee, has called for regulation of the internet as the only way to save it, and the virtual-reality pioneer and internet philosopher Jaron Lanier has written a book about why people should get off ‘social media’ as soon as possible.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

The current situation is clearly unsustainable and the measures taken so far to address it insufficient. But before discussing solutions we need to define what the problem is. And here it is easy to get lost in details and anecdotes. Not all of the problems of social networks are fatal to democracy.

The economist Dani Rodrik has framed the discussion around the state of the world economy as a trilemma, where hyperglobalisation, democratic policies and national sovereignty are mutually incompatible. We can, he argues, combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.

It might be conceptually useful to structure the discussion of the global information space in an analogous manner. One can have democracy, market dominance and business models that optimise for anger and junk—but only two at a time.

trilemma

The trilemma of Big Tech

Democracy

For democracies to work, access to information and pluralism of news and information are essential. Why? As Reporters without Borders put it in its Declaration on Information and Democracy last autumn, ‘Knowledge is necessary for human beings to develop their biological, psychological, social, political and economic capacities.’

Today, the information infrastructure achieves the opposite of informing us and providing knowledge. In today’s world, lies travel faster and reach further than the truth. Yes, disinformation and propaganda have always been around but not to this degree and not in this way—not in functioning democracies, anyway.

The danger to democracy comes as a consequence of two different but overlapping logics. One is the business model of social networks. The other is the dominant position they occupy in our information space. One isn’t enough to harm democracy but, in combination, the mechanisms become lethal.

Business models

In a classic essay, Ethan Zuckerman of MIT called the tech giants’ choice of advertising as their business model ‘the internet’s original sin’. When Facebook and Google made that choice, the foundation was laid for a lot of the problems we see today.

Advertising feeds on data. To sell more targeted ads back to customers means keeping them engaged and harvesting the maximum amount of data from them. This incentivises the companies to pursue more and more detailed surveillance and more and more granular personalisation of their products. And the consequence? Zuckerman pointed to a study by Gilad Lotan in which he described the view participants from Israel and Palestine had of the war in Gaza as ‘personalized propaganda’.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

Zuckerman’s essay was written five years ago. Since then, things have escalated, not only in Gaza, but all over the world. Hatred, lies and propaganda are spreading like wildfire, after being tailored to individuals’ online profiles. This has huge, real-world effects on politics and people’s lives.

Lisa-Maria Neudert, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, has summarised the problems of the digital-attention economy thus: ‘The content that is the most misleading or conspiratorial, that’s what’s generating the most discussion and the most engagement, and that’s what the algorithm is designed to respond to.’

We live in a public sphere which optimises for rage. And it’s not a flaw or something that is easy to fix. The problem is embedded in the core of the business models generating record profits for the companies’ owners.

Market domination

The ad-based business model wouldn’t be so dangerous if we lived in a world with a plurality of products competing in the information space. But today we see a two-fold movement in the opposite direction.

The first is the that Facebook and Google—which owns YouTube—are becoming a duopoly in the data and advertising market. They are buying up competition and using anti-competitive measures to strengthen and expand their position. The other movement is the weakening of journalism, as a consequence of the same development. Where social networks are succeeding, ‘news deserts’—big geographic areas which simply have no local news coverage—are expanding rapidly.

Facebook today has over 2.3 billion monthly users and YouTube last year had 1.8 billion logged on. The majority of Americans get their news from social media and the same is true of most European countries.

Never in the history of humankind have companies existed with such reach and impact on information and human communication. The size of the audience amplifies the problems of the business models to a level where it becomes dangerous. If only smaller actors in the communication space optimised for engagement, it would not be a problem for democracy. But when the dominating platforms do, knowledge and truth are crowded out.

The trilemma, then, is that one can have democracy and ad-based business models, but not combined with market domination. And one could, in theory, have democracy and dominating platforms, if they functioned in a way that did not optimise for rage and guaranteed pluralism. And of course, one can have duopoly and destructive business models. But then, as we are starting to realize, democracy won’t work.

Solving the trilemma

In the end, just as with Rodrik’s model, we are stuck with a choice. If we want to keep democracy, we need to guarantee pluralism in the information space, by creating competition in the market through breaking up the duopoly or establishing safeguards against a business model incompatible with democracy.

How do we do that? I’m not sure but I firmly disagree with the notion that it would be ‘too complicated’. The Reporters without Borders declaration suggests that platforms ‘shall promote diversity of ideas and information, media pluralism and favour serendipity’. And it goes on: ‘Tools used for curating and indexing information—meaning aggregating, sorting and prioritising information—must provide alternative solutions, allowing for a pluralism of indexation, and allowing for freedom of choice for users.’

If implemented, such principles might fundamentally alter the business models of the social-network giants and help solve the trilemma. The other road is, of course, that which the Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has suggested in the US—break the companies up.

The important realisation at this juncture is that the three points in the triangle just can’t be reached at the same time. Bearing in mind the warning from the philosopher Hannah Arendt: ‘What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?’

This article is a joint publication by Social Europe and IPS-Journal

Karin Pettersson

Karin Pettersson is culture editor at Aftonbladet, Scandinavia’s biggest daily newspaper. She founded Fokus, Sweden's leading news magazine, and worked for the Swedish Social Democratic Party. She is a 2017 Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow at Harvard.

You are here: Home / Politics / The trilemma of Big Tech

Most Popular Posts

Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic

Most Recent Posts

transition,deindustrialisation,degradation,environment Europe’s industry and the ecological transitionCharlotte Bez and Lorenzo Feltrin
central and eastern Europe,unions,recognition Social dialogue in central and eastern EuropeMartin Myant
women soldiers,Ukraine Ukraine war: attitudes changing to women soldiersJennifer Mathers and Anna Kvit
military secrets,World Trade Organization,WTO,NATO,intellectual-property rights Military secrets and the World Trade OrganizationUgo Pagano
energy transition,Europe,wind and solar Europe’s energy transition starts to speed upDave Jones

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2022

Since 2000, the annual Bilan social volume has been analysing the state of play of social policy in the European Union during the preceding year, the better to forecast developments in the new one. Co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the new edition is no exception. In the context of multiple crises, the authors find that social policies gained in ambition in 2022. At the same time, the new EU economic framework, expected for 2023, should be made compatible with achieving the EU’s social and ‘green’ objectives. Finally, they raise the question whether the EU Social Imbalances Procedure and Open Strategic Autonomy paradigm could provide windows of opportunity to sustain the EU’s social ambition in the long run.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Discover the new FEPS Progressive Yearbook and what 2023 has in store for us!

The Progressive Yearbook focuses on transversal European issues that have left a mark on 2022, delivering insightful future-oriented analysis for the new year. It counts on renowned authors' contributions, including academics, politicians and analysts. This fourth edition is published in a time of war and, therefore, it mostly looks at the conflict itself, the actors involved and the implications for Europe.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube