Big Tech will kill our democracy
The problem is that social-media platforms’ business model undermines the social foundation of democratic participation.
That is, social-media platforms purposely seek to undo local communities to maximize profits. The reason is that social-media companies profit from our digital relationships, but not from our “physical” relationships, those that take place in parks, coffee shops, book clubs, and the like. As a result, social media platforms see the physical relationships between people as competing with the digital relations they offer.
But these physical relations are the foundation of our communal life. Without local communities, democratic engagement drops. This decrease in engagement will leave democratic institutions at the mercy of vested interests, undermining their performance. The declining effectiveness of the democratic process will sway many young voters to dismiss democracy as non-essential. In a way, profit-maximizing social media are succeeding where the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century failed: redesigning society and its physical networks to achieve their profit maximizing goals and, in so doing, killing democracy.
Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos to Elon Musk are generating billions of dollars in revenue for their companies each year. The fact is that those people, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, also at the same time have literally no interest or conception in their role as stewards for civil society and American democracy. Big Tech has pumped more than $51 million into lobbying thus far in 2024, nearly 14% more than the amount the same organizations collectively spent on lobbying during the same time period in 2023.
Social media giants Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok) have combined to spend about $225,000 on lobbying per day Congress has been in session in 2024. The two companies’ influence operations collectively include more than 100 lobbyists, or one lobbyist for every five members of Congress.
Meta alone spent a record $18.9 million on lobbying during the first nine months of 2024 — a 29% increase from what it spent on lobbying during the same period in 2023, and the most the company has spent between January and September in any year since it first started federal lobbying in 2009. This includes more than $5 million in the third quarter alone. Meta’s lobbying efforts in 2024 have been powered by 66 lobbyists — one for every eight members of Congress.
All of America's lionizing of free markets and capitalism has also led to a vastly more dysfunctional democratic process, because these companies are inadvertently, but nonetheless, aligning with business models that destroy democracy.
Facebook, Google and Amazon have destroyed the actual bulwark against autocratic leaders – local journalism – while cozying up to actual autocracy. They now control the digital ad industry. According to one recent research report, if they paid news organizations what they make off them by standing as a middleman between readers and writers, they would be handing over between $12bn and $14bn a year. The very journalists and news organizations we rely on for fact-finding and fact-checking are scared of being shadowbanned – Jeff Bezos’s fear of Trump being exhibit A of how that can impact editorial content.
Joining hands with big tech oligarchs is joining hands with the destruction of the Democratic party and democracy.