Mark's Monopolies: Are we doomed?

Last week the three social media giants: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp crashed simultaneously. This wasn’t a coincidence, it was a result of monopolisation. CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, 5 years before WhatsApp and 6 years before Instagram entered the realm of social connectivity. With this increase overtime of competitors and simultaneous growth of FaceBook (around 1 million users by the end of 2004, with exponential growth to 1 billion monthly users by the summer of 2012) symptoms of monopolisation began to appear when Zuckerberg purchased Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 for $1B and $19B. This does call into question as to whether this is ethical, whether this is a side effect of capitalism and is there anything we can do as consumers of these apps?

In terms of ethics and whether this is a by-product of capitalism, we should turn to the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ scandal, whereby Aleksandr Kogan and his company ‘Global Science Research’ created an app called ‘thisisyourdigitallife.’ Users took a psychological test, producing useful data from around 50 million Facebook profiles, which was then sold to Cambridge Analytica, allowing them to establish a software to influence political outcomes such as the 2016 US election (with Trump employing Cambridge Analytica as part of his campaign), Brexit etc. It’s well documented that Kogan is well-known to FaceBook, as he collaborated with their data scientists in 2013. Here, he paid around 270,000 people to take a personality quiz; however, unknown to them, this enabled him to access their profiles, and on average around 160 of the participants’ friends. There is a clear willingness on Zuckerberg’s part, to allow this to happen, as well as a clear display of social capital in that these corporate connections allow for data to be exchanged for political gain, at the complete evasion of privacy of millions of users.

With this monopolisation, it can only get worse as data can be obtained from all three of these platforms, and it really does call into question this notion of ‘democracy’ and how legitimate it is. Given these tech and corporate giants are able to exchange data to drive political adds tailored for specific users to influence voting outcomes. As Democrat Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez tweeted it has “incredibly destructive effects on free society and democracy.” I totally agree with her, it’s ethically erroneous and would agree, from a Leninist perspective, that this is a product of capitalism, as wealth inequality grows, resources open up - which makes monopolisation pretty much inevitable.

So what can we do? Firstly, look into your privacy settings (particularly your ‘Off-FaceBook activity’ setting), Secondly, stop signing into new websites with a pre-existing platform (e.g using your FaceBook login for a Google account) as this allows for cross-platform data exchange. Finally, disable cookies while browsing as this prevents data from being accumulated and used for advertisement.

It’s not an impossible fight, but entire submission to this monopolisation and its increasing data accumulation would undermine democracy as we know it, and would pave way for an ever increasingly mass controlled, dystopian, and ubiquitous tech future, controlled by one man.