Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, reportedly has a dossier of anticompetitive behavior Facebook carried out over the years, dubbed Project Voldemort.
According to the WSJ, Snap’s legal team recorded instances where Facebook discouraged prominent social media influencers with a presence on multiple platforms from mentioning Snap on their Instagram accounts. Snap executives also suspected Facebook was suppressing content that originated on Snap from trending on Instagram, when such content was shared there.
Check It Out: Facebook Abuses Collected in Snap’s ‘Project Voldemort’
Andrew:
Stories about FB’s malfeasance have become as common as traffic monitors reporting fender benders during rush hour. Now, one could look at the sheer volume of FB’s offences and conclude, ‘Bad’; however there is an alternative view, which is to look at the range of FB’s offences. When one looks at that sheer range, we find that they harm and offend users, users’ non-FB using contacts, the contacts of those contacts, startups in areas where FB has a presence, startups in areas where FB has no presence, tech minnows, tech giants, legislatures, governments foreign and domestic…basically the whole planet. The good news? FB is anti-discriminatory; they piss everybody off. Well done!
Now, before FB moves off-world, gets some extraterrestrials’ knickers in a twist, and sparks a trans-galactic lawsuit (or war), there is something that we can do to clip FB’s wings with greater speed and efficacy than we’re doing at present, and no, I’m not even suggesting a boycott, although that remains an appealing option, but an unlikely event.
Rather, here yet again, is another task that can be assigned to AI; specifically letting AI use predictive algorithms to anticipate new and emerging trends in tech whose outcomes are not yet covered by law, and where lack of regulation could adversely affect competition, user privacy or data security, and to highlight and prioritise skip areas, that is gaps, in current legislation that require urgent attention if those vulnerabilities are to be appropriately patched in timely fashion.
Whereas FB and other tech giants involved is so-called surveillance capitalism as their core business model have shown no shortage of creative genius in evading any responsibility, let alone penalty, for egregious anti-competitive and anti-privacy behaviour, often at great socio-political cost (eg Cambridge Analytica), legislators are too uninformed of these trends in tech to anticipate emerging threats and challenges. AI can. Perhaps now is the time that AI should.
Not only could AI anticipate current gaps, and even highlight which holes need to be plugged, AI could run simulations with multiple alternative scenarios out for decades, anticipating and attenuating the weight of those alternative threats as actual human decisions cut off some of those alternative scenarios by taking a committed paths. AI could run rings around the Zuck, the Goog, and Bezos with time to spare on names and concerns most of us have not yet heard of.
To be clear, the objective would not be to thwart competition, innovation and growth; but rather democratise it by closing off opportunity to stifle competition and malpractice with user data by exploiting holes in our current legislation by plugging those holes before anyone even gets there.
Philip Dick anticipated this phenomenon of anticipating crime before it happened and called his agent ‘pre-cogs’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(film). Today, we call it AI. Whatever we choose to call, perhaps now is the time to call it into play.