At no other point in history has such a small group of companies been so present in people’s interactions across most societies on the planet. The so-called Big Techs have become active mediators of social relationships shaped by digital technologies. It’s important to remember that mediators are not neutral: Big Tech interferes in managing the flow of opinions, modulating attention and generating reactions among millions of users.
On social networks and their variants, their controllers operate by capturing data from every move, every click—in short, from actions that allow their algorithmic systems to extract behavioral patterns, which are fundamental for feeding the artificial neural networks that deliver content designed to anticipate our desires and needs, in order to predict our actions. This can be summed up in the expression “total monetization of social life.”
Operating invisibly to their users, these platforms have absorbed the advertising budgets of almost every society, based on algorithmic management of glances and attention. In doing so, they perpetuate the logic of turning everything into spectacle.
For these platforms, “good information” is that which generates engagement, that which is sensational and allows interactions to be monetized. The supposed commitment of Big Tech to information quality has, in practice, been purely rhetorical. Clicks, retweets, mutual attacks, exaggerations, lies, and the spread of non-existent facts are all welcome in their operational logic.
Asymmetric Freedom
Recently, with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Elon Musk has taken the lead in the offensive against platform regulation. To that end, he promotes the idea that regulation is equivalent to censorship. His notion of freedom is based on power.
While democratic freedom is grounded in symmetry—that is, in the equal right of all individuals to be free—the version of freedom promoted by the far right translates into asymmetry. The powerful only consider themselves free if they can exercise their full power; the billionaire, only if he can use everything his wealth allows without restrictions. This view resembles violence more than it aligns with the principle of equality in expression.
On digital platforms, it is not freedom of expression that prevails. It is the power of money that reigns. The monetization of absolutely all relationships is imposed within a vertical, limited, and highly surveilled informational architecture controlled by the platform owners. The entirely opaque management of online social networks is run by algorithmic systems that execute the rules and laws set by their owners. This implementation is wholly arbitrary, decided unilaterally by company leadership, altered without notice, without debate, without regard for their users, following only two logics: profitability and the expansion of their worldview’s power.
Who can believe that the algorithmic systems on Elon Musk’s platform will be neutral in contexts where the far right and democratic forces clash? Who believes that Meta’s platforms won’t favor narratives aligned with Trump-like ideas? Who can claim these structures are not plutocratic—that is, ruled by money?
The Elites Are Breaking with Democracy
One of the main figures of the technological far right, Peter Thiel, declared in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
In the face of a profound crisis regarding capitalism’s future outlook, a significant segment of the elites that once supported neoliberal solutions have broken with democracy and embraced reactionary ideologies—in other words, the solutions promoted by the far right. If we don’t understand this rupture, we won’t be able to effectively defend democracy. Michel Foucault reminded us that power is also a strategy. In this context, the destruction of rational debate based on facts has become one of the far right’s main tactics. The war on reality, on verified information, and on science itself consolidates a strategy of confusion, a cultural battle where “freedom” becomes synonymous with violence.
In light of this scenario, it is worth recalling sociologist Georg Simmel, who held that conflict is an inherent and necessary element of social life. Conflict and cooperation are complementary in social life. However, Simmel warned that situations where social regulatory forms are absent—where there is a total denial of the other and fragmentation of society without mediation channels—are destructive and extremely dangerous.
Simmel did not know today’s hyperconnected world, where people are constantly impacted by waves of disinformation and hate speech, shaped by algorithmic systems to intensify profit extraction and the erosion of rights. Yet, based on his analyses, we can see that regulating these mega-oligopolies and building solutions to ensure the quality and integrity of information has become fundamental and indispensable.
This article was written in collaboration with Brazil’s National Network to Combat Disinformation (RNCD), Ibict and ICIE, LatinAmerica21, The Conversation Brasil, Brasil de Fato, and other allied platforms. We promote the dissemination of content that fosters a more informed and critical citizenry to confront disinformation—a growing threat to democracy, science, and human rights.
*Machine translation proofread by Janaína da Silva.
Autor
PhD in Political Science from the University of São Paulo (2005). He is an associate professor at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC). He is a member of the Scientific Deliberative Committee of the Brazilian Association of Cyberculture Researchers (ABCiber). He was a member of the Internet Steering Committee in Brazil (2003-2005 and 2017-2020). He coordinated the Electronic Government of the City of São Paulo and created the Telecentros-SP project (2001-2002). He presided over the National Institute of Information Technology (2003-2005).
