The ‘Good Censors’
The main problem with social media isn’t political bias or market share, it’s that Big Tech is still coddled by legal protections from the dawn of the internet era.
Waiting for the day.
Photographer: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
When talking among themselves, Silicon Valley big shots sometimes say weird things. In an internal presentation in March 2018, Google executives were asked to imagine their company acting as a “Good Censor,” in order to limit the impact of users “behaving badly.”
In a 2016 internal video, Nick Foster, Google’s head of design, envisioned a “goal-driven ledger” of all users’ data, endowed with its own “volition or purpose,” which would nudge us to take decisions (say, about shopping or travel) that would “reflect Google’s values as an organization.”