Taxing gatekeepers ~ I

Unlike knives and guns that cannot decide by themselves who to kill, AI is the first technology in human history that can decide for us, shape and solidify our biases, and vitiate our existence with the help of a toxic social media by spreading incendiary misinformation at the speed of light, while giving governments unprecedented power to exercise surveillance over their people

- GOVIND BHATTACHARJEE

By 2016-17, Facebook had designed a business model that aimed at maximizing the 'user engagement', that is how much time users spent on their platform, and started collecting data on what they liked and shared. The more time users spent the more data Facebook collected, so their algorithms could then monetize the information by targeting their ads to specific users. As users spent more time with Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was getting richer. Commercial success of this business model prompted Facebook to give their algorithms a single, no-holds-barred, overarching goal - to increase user engagement at all costs, to the exclusion of every other consideration.

By analyzing data on millions of users, the Artificial intelligence (AI)-based self-learning algorithms discovered quickly that outrage improves user engagement, that people get easily attracted to hate speech, extremism and news that trigger jealousy, envy, anger and indignation. Thus, to make people remain engaged for longer periods, they only need to promote emotionally charged material over neutral information. Many of our news TV networks have also learnt these tricks to increase their TRPs. Algorithms were thus designed to display and highlight such contents and place them at the top of the users' news feed, and to recommend them to users in a targeted manner.