Just a few years ago, the idea of tech companies controlling anything would have seemed ridiculous…
Now, it’s almost impossible to imagine a world without them.
But how did they take so much power… and what can you do about it?
Let me tell you some facts you might already have guessed…
Almost half of all adults get at least some of their news from social media.
And over two thirds of adults now get news online.
Those numbers didn’t come out of nowhere…
And they’re not going away any time soon.
The fact is, it’s a question of convenience. Decades ago, when people started buying TVs and watching the news on them, paper sales started to drop. It’s just more convenient to watch something on TV than to go out of your way to buy and read the paper.
Now, with computers and phones being a standard fixture in just about every American household, getting news online is even simpler for the average person.
At first, this wasn’t a big problem…
But over the years, Big Tech has become more and more of a monopoly.
The rise of social media means people can get everything, from news to entertainment, in one place…
All controlled by Big Tech, and their invisible, inexplicable algorithms.
Thanks to those algorithms, they’re deciding exactly what news people see. Sure, that’s what editors do for papers, for TV news channels – but those editors are people.
Algorithms aren’t people – they’re machines…
Machines that no one can really explain. Even the bosses at Google don’t know exactly how their search system works… the algorithm is too big, too rapidly-changing, for anyone to ever be able to understand what’s going on.
It’s just like that for Facebook, Twitter, whoever else you want to name. The news you see is controlled by systems that absolutely no one understands.
In other words…
Complete anarchy.
