The Social Media Threat to Society and Security

By George Soros, Project Syndicate

14 February 18

It takes significant effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called the freedom of mind. And there is a real chance that, once lost, those who grow up in the digital age – in which the power to command and shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies – will have difficulty regaining it.

he current moment in world history is a painful one. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of dictatorships and mafia states, exemplified by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, are on the rise. In the United States, President Donald Trump would like to establish his own mafia-style state but cannot, because the Constitution, other institutions, and a vibrant civil society won’t allow it.

Not only is the survival of open society in question; the survival of our entire civilization is at stake. The rise of leaders such as Kim Jong-un in North Korea and Trump in the US have much to do with this. Both seem willing to risk a nuclear war in order to keep themselves in power. But the root cause goes even deeper. Mankind’s ability to harness the forces of nature, both for constructive and destructive purposes, continues to grow, while our ability to govern ourselves properly fluctuates, and is now at a low ebb.

The rise and monopolistic behavior of the giant American Internet platform companies is contributing mightily to the US government’s impotence. These companies have often played an innovative and liberating role. But as Facebook and Google have grown ever more powerful, they have become obstacles to innovation, and have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware.

Companies earn their profits by exploiting their environment. Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment. This is particularly nefarious, because these companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This interferes with the functioning of democracy and the integrity of elections.

Because Internet platform companies are networks, they enjoy rising marginal returns, which accounts for their phenomenal growth. The network effect is truly unprecedented and transformative, but it is also unsustainable. It took Facebook eight and a half years to reach a billion users, and half that time to reach the second billion. At this rate, Facebook will run out of people to convert in less than three years.

Facebook and Google effectively control over half of all digital advertising revenue. To maintain their dominance, they need to expand their networks and increase their share of users’ attention. Currently they do this by providing users with a convenient platform. The more time users spend on the platform, the more valuable they become to the companies.

Moreover, because content providers cannot avoid using the platforms and must accept whatever terms they are offered, they, too, contribute to the profits of social media companies. Indeed, the exceptional profitability of these companies is largely a function of their avoiding responsibility – and payment – for the content on their platforms.

The companies claim that they are merely distributing information. But the fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulation, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and open access.

Social media companies’ true customers are their advertisers. But a new business model is gradually emerging, based not only on advertising but also on selling products and services directly to users. They exploit the data they control, bundle the services they offer, and use discriminatory pricing to keep more of the benefits that they would otherwise have to share with consumers. This enhances their profitability even further, but the bundling of services and discriminatory pricing undermine the efficiency of the market economy.

Social media companies deceive their users by manipulating their attention, directing it toward their own commercial purposes, and deliberately engineering addiction to the services they provide. This can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents.

There is a similarity between Internet platforms and gambling companies. Casinos have developed techniques to hook customers to the point that they gamble away all of their money, even money they don’t have.

Something similar – and potentially irreversible – is happening to human attention in our digital age. This is not a matter of mere distraction or addiction; social media companies are actually inducing people to surrender their autonomy. And this power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies.

It takes significant effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called the freedom of mind. Once lost, those who grow up in the digital age may have difficulty regaining it.

This would have far-reaching political consequences. People without the freedom of mind can be easily manipulated. This danger does not loom only in the future; it already played an important role in the 2016 US presidential election.

There is an even more alarming prospect on the horizon: an alliance between authoritarian states and large, data-rich IT monopolies, bringing together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with already-developed systems of state-sponsored surveillance. This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even George Orwell could have imagined.

The countries in which such unholy marriages are likely to occur first are Russia and China. Chinese IT companies in particular are fully equal to the US platforms. They also enjoy the full support and protection of President Xi Jinping’s regime. China’s government is strong enough to protect its national champions, at least within its borders.

US-based IT monopolies are already tempted to compromise themselves in order to gain entrance to these vast and fast-growing markets. These countries’ dictatorial leaders may be only too happy to collaborate with them, in the interest of improving their methods of control over their own populations and expanding their power and influence in the United States and the rest of the world.

There is also a growing recognition of a connection between the dominance of the platform monopolies and rising inequality. The concentration of share ownership in the hands of a few individuals plays some role, but the peculiar position occupied by the IT giants is even more important. They have achieved monopoly power while also competing against one another. Only they are big enough to swallow start-ups that could develop into competitors, and only they have the resources to invade one another’s territory.

The owners of the platform giants consider themselves the masters of the universe. In fact, they are slaves to preserving their dominant position. They are engaged in an existential struggle to dominate the new growth areas that artificial intelligence is opening up, like driverless cars.

The impact of such innovations on unemployment depends on government policies. The European Union, and particularly the Nordic countries, are much more farsighted than the United States in their social policies. They protect the workers, not the jobs. They are willing to pay for retraining or retiring displaced workers. This gives workers in Nordic countries a greater sense of security and makes them more supportive of technological innovations than workers in the US.

The Internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a public menace, and it is the regulatory authorities’ responsibility to protect society against them. In the US, regulators are not strong enough to stand up to the monopolies’ political influence. The EU is better positioned, because it doesn’t have any platform giants of its own.

The EU uses a different definition of monopoly power from the US. Whereas US law enforcement focuses primarily on monopolies created by acquisition, EU law prohibits the abuse of monopoly power regardless of how it is achieved. Europe has much stronger privacy and data protection laws than America.

Moreover, US law has adopted a strange doctrine that measures harm as an increase in the price paid by customers for services received. But that is almost impossible to prove, given that most giant Internet platforms provide a majority of their services for free. Moreover, the doctrine leaves out of consideration the valuable data that platform companies collect from their users.

The EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager is the champion of the European approach. It took the EU seven years to build a case against Google. But, as a result of its success, the process of instituting adequate regulation has been greatly accelerated. Moreover, thanks to Vestager’s efforts, the European approach has begun to affect attitudes in the US.

It is only a matter of time before the global dominance of the US Internet companies is broken. Regulation and taxation, spearheaded by Vestager, will be their undoing.

Why Are We Still in Afghanistan?

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

14 February 18

Forty years of US terrorism show little sign of success

t must have seemed like a safe, cheap, and easy idea back in 1979 when US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, with President Carter’s blessing, set about harassing the Russian occupation of Afghanistan by covert means. The US escalated CIA activities, working with Pakistani secret services, including arming, training, and directing Islamic militants (then called the mujahideen) to fight the Russians. The US waged a nine-year-long proxy guerrilla war in Afghanistan (where US allies included Osama bin Laden). When the Russians pulled out 1n 1989, US proxies remained. Now they were called the Taliban, and they ran the country with the festering Islamic rage that the US had nurtured and supported when it seemed to salve our post-Viet Nam, post-Iranian Revolution wounded global pride.

The monster the US had raised from a pup was out of US control and came back to hurt us. Numbed by decades of Cold War denial of American crimes, Americans acted surprised by September 11, 2001.

Remember back in October 2001 when the US government and the US population were almost unanimous in the inchoate idea that we had to rush to do something – almost anything – in response to the downing of the World Trade Center?

The Bush administration had already obstructed justice by protecting nationals from the country that provided 15 of the 19 hijackers. The FBI wanted to interview Saudis in the US to see what connections they might discover to their compatriot suicide bombers. President Bush, fresh from holding hands with Saudi princes, made sure all the Saudis managed to get out of the country without any inconvenient criminal investigation questioning. That was a clear cover-up even if there was nothing to cover up, because it covered up the possibility of finding anything at all. That was the kind of blatant flouting of the law that Nancy Pelosi Democrats refused to think of as an impeachable offense. And the 9/11 Commission’s report on the Saudis remains top secret into a third presidency. This is massive, bipartisan political breakdown and abject moral failure that could lead to nothing good. It has in fact metastasized unimpeded into the cancer of the Trump administration.

Remember what it was like in September 2001? Almost no one was sane in those days, or if they were they laid low. Susan Sontag wrote a sane reflection on the attack in The New Yorker, for which she was roundly castigated, especially by her querulous peers at The New Yorker. On September 14, 2001, Barbara Lee of Oakland was the only member of Congress to vote against giving the president an “Authorization for Use of Military Force” (AUMF) – a carte blanche to wage war almost anywhere for almost any reason, a Congressional license to kill that remains in force today and serves as the legal justification for pretty much every dead Afghan, Iraqi, Syrian, Kurd, Yemeni, and anyone else we’re killing for any reason anywhere in the world. Rep. Lee has continued to try to rectify the AUMF of 2001, but presidents and Congress en masse consistently maintain America’s right to murder in the name of whatever we happen to think is important at the moment.

On the basis of the Congressional invitation to war, the Bush administration went to war with Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, calling it “Operation Enduring Freedom.” The ostensible cause of the war was the refusal of the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden, who was in the country if not under their control. The US knew roughly where bin Laden was, but was afraid to surround him militarily for fear of provoking serious resistance. Instead, the US relied on Pakistan to seal the border. Osama bin Laden escaped. Lacking a stated reason to be in Afghanistan, the US stayed. And the US is still there. And the US is complicit in the deaths of a million or more Afghans, and complicit in the forced exodus of more than five million Afghans, and complicit in the devastation of Afghanistan culturally, politically, militarily, and economically. Only US delusions survive more or less intact. In his State of the Union address in 2006, President Bush assured us:

We remain on the offensive in Afghanistan, where a fine president and a National Assembly are fighting terror while building the institutions of a new democracy.

Actually that was not what was happening in Afghanistan, but by then Bush’s deceitful war on Iraq was getting more attention. Barack Obama, typically too clever for his own good, ran against the war in Iraq while defending the war in Afghanistan as a good war (without ever really explaining why). But the politics of perception don’t have to be rooted in reality, and by 2013, in his State of the Union address, President Obama was pitching the perception that the war in Afghanistan was pretty much over (if not necessarily won):

This spring, our forces will move into a support role, while Afghan security forces take the lead. Tonight I can announce that over the next year another 34,000 American troops will come home from Afghanistan. This drawdown will continue. And by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over.

Actually that was not what was happening in Afghanistan, either. In 1979 American pride planned for Afghanistan to become a quagmire, a Russian Viet Nam. Now the Russians are long gone and Afghanistan has become another American quagmire. The mistake is the same as in Viet Nam: fighting a native population will take forever, because they have nowhere else to go. Sooner or later, the invader usually goes home. And President Trump seems to be indicating that it will be later, telling a UN Security Council meeting:

I don’t think we’re prepared to talk right now. It’s a whole different fight over there. They’re killing people left and right. Innocent people are being killed left and right, bombing in the middle of children, in the middle of families, bombing, killing all over Afghanistan.… We don’t want to talk to the Taliban. We’re going to finish what we have to finish. What nobody else has been able to finish, we’re going to be able to do it.

Actually what was happening in Afghanistan in 2017 is that the US was bombing the country more than ever, dropping more bombs during 2017 than in the two previous years combined. The US has used the largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan. The US is using B-52s in Afghanistan, the same plane that carpet-bombed Viet Nam with ultimate futility. Now the B-52 has set a new record for dropping smart bombs on Afghanistan. These attacks were in northeastern Afghanistan, near the Tajikistan and Chinese borders, targeting the East Turkestan Islamic Movement accused of attacking China. Until recently, parts of this remote region had gone untouched by war for decades. Chinese and Afghan government officials are currently discussing the establishment of a Chinese military base in this region. China has provided Afghanistan with more than $70 million in military aid in the past three years (compared to some $10 billion from US/NATO countries).

Taliban attacks on Kabul and other cities have also escalated in recent weeks, killing more than 130 people in Kabul alone.

When the Taliban governed Afghanistan before 2001, it came close to eradicating opium growing and the heroin trade (set up by the CIA in 1979 to help finance the mujahideen). Since 2001, under US occupation, opium-growing and the heroin trade have flourished, reaching record levels. During that same period, US heroin-users have increased from about 189,000 to 3.8 million. According to a UN report on drugs and crime in 2017:

Only a small share of the revenues generated by the cultivation and trafficking of Afghan opiates reaches Afghan drug trafficking groups. Many more billions of dollars are made from trafficking opiates into major consumer markets, mainly in Europe and Asia…. [Drug trafficking constitutes] the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.

According to a 2017 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), during the period 2002-2016, the US provided Afghanistan with $6 billion in security and military aid. An Afghan official estimated that as much as half that money had been stolen through Afghan corruption. The overall cost of the Afghan War to the US is estimated at more than $841 billion to date. Another estimate expects the total cost of the Afghan War to exceed $2 trillion, not including the costs of taking care of veterans. President Trump’s escalation of the war is expected to add billions to its eventual cost, which is calculated to have passed $1 trillion by January 2018. In his State of the Union address this year, President Trump reported:

Our warriors in Afghanistan have new rules of engagement. Along with their heroic Afghan partners, our military is no longer undermined by artificial timelines, and we no longer tell our enemies our plans.

So why are we still in Afghanistan? It’s not because Afghanistan poses any threat to US national security – or ever did. It’s not because there’s any rational military or political reason to stay in Afghanistan. And it’s not because the Afghans want us there. There are former Taliban in the Afghan legislature, but the US presence (as in Korea) makes any chance of peaceful resolution that much more difficult.

So why are we still in Afghanistan? Because it seemed like a good idea at the time? Because no one at the time thought it through and decided to leave when the good part was no longer possible? Because presidents have more vanity than integrity? Because the US doesn’t admit mistakes because that shows weakness no matter the cost of being self-destructively stupid for 16 years? Because the US government is most comfortable when it’s lying to the American people? Because the military-industrial complex makes nothing but profits from remote wars? Because we need killed and wounded veterans to show how much we honor our military? Because a lot of people profit from the drug trade? Because the American people have been systematically numbed emotionally and dumbed-down intellectually and mystified for so many decades that they are more angry with each other than the people who do them real harm? Any or all of the above?

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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.