It’s now four years since venture capitalist Hemant Taneja took to the pages of the Harvard Business Review to declare an end to the “move fast and break things” era. The phrase had been Facebook’s mantra during its startup years, but the company abandoned it in 2014, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying a shift to a “move fast with stable infrastructure” attitude had become more appropriate.
Zuckerberg’s words were somewhat belied by the subsequent Cambridge Analytica scandal, but in the wake of that omnishambles—and the 2017 downfall of aggressive Uber CEO Travis Kalanick—it did seem like tech’s high-fliers had reached cruising altitude and it was safe for everyone to unfasten their seat belts. “Investing in responsible innovation not only benefits society, it protects the viability of technological progress in a democratic system,” wrote Taneja.
Well, buckle up again, because we’re entering a new era of Big Tech recklessness.
Elon Musk isn’t entirely to blame, but—chronologically at least—he started it with his wild steering of Twitter after buying it late last year. His abrupt mass layoffs at the company may not yet have resulted in Twitter’s structural integrity crumbling, which some had predicted, but they quickly compromised user safety by allowing an explosion of hate speech on the platform. Meanwhile, Musk’s new paid user verification scheme for Twitter was a gift to merchants of disinformation. He’s also making it harder for users to maintain their security unless they subscribe to Twitter Blue, which is only available in 15 countries.
This was chaos born of desperation, which in turn stemmed from the fact that Musk’s massive overpayment for Twitter left the company saddled with $13 billion of debt.
Meta also finds itself needing to “move fast”—Zuckerberg reintroduced that half of the motto a year back—for financial reasons. The unit responsible for the company’s metaverse project, on which Zuckerberg has bet the farm, lost more than $13 billion last year. Meta’s advertising cash cow has also been massively diminished by Apple and the EU giving users the power to easily reject the lucrative tracking of their online behavior. (There’s a non-negligible chance that Meta will be forced to yank Facebook and Instagram from the EU entirely in the near future.)
And so, this past weekend, we saw Zuckerberg follow in Musk’s footsteps by introducing paid user verification to Facebook and Instagram. This appears to be a slightly more sensible version of the idea, in which a government-issued ID is required to verify a user’s identity, but it still means less-well-off users will become second-class citizens on the platforms.
Then we have the burgeoning A.I. arms race, in which Microsoft has stirred memories of its infamous Tay debacle by unleashing a ChatGPT-equipped version of Bing that compares users to Hitler and tells them to leave their wives. Google scrambled so hard to see off the ChatGPT threat that it made a public demonstration of its Bard alternative in which the chatbot made factual errors, whacking Alphabet’s stock in the process. (It later turned out that Microsoft’s chatty Bing demo also spewed out inaccurate information.)
These particular breakages can be undone, and—while they come with severe reputational risk—they were perhaps to be expected. To evolve, these A.I.s will need to engage with real people, and that will be messy and at times dangerous. Time will tell whether the benefits outweigh the risks. But either way, Big Tech has left an era of relative tranquility that could prove to have been an anomaly.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
