Category Archives: Big Tech

Jack Ma, CEO of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, speaks during his visit at the Vivatech startups and innovation fair, in Paris on May 16, 2019.

Philippe Lopez | AFP | Getty Images

GUANGZHOU, China China's technology giants are firmly in the crosshairs of the country's regulators who are trying to figure out how to create a set of antitrust rules that can keep these firms in check.

Experts say Beijing will need to ensure that its drive for new regulations balances its push to become a global technological leader.

Like in the U.S., China's tech sector has expanded via a largely unencumbered path. In some areas, regulators have already stepped in and are now stepping up those efforts.

"Like Washington, Beijing has a love-hate relationship with its tech champions," Kendra Schaefer, a partner at Trivium China consultancy which has offices in Beijing and London, told CNBC.

"On the one hand, these companies represent China's successful modernization and growing global competitiveness.On the other hand, Beijing has long struggled with how to fit big tech into the socialist market economy."

Earlier this week, Chinas bureau for regulating monopolies released draft rules that define, for the first time, what constitutes anti-competitive behavior.

The draft regulation by the StateAdministration for Market Regulation covers areas including pricing, payment methods, and use of data to target shoppers. It's the most wide-sweeping attempt to regulate what Beijing sees as monopolistic behavior by the country's tech giants that have grown significantly in the last few years.

The agency is seeking public feedback on the draft rules until Nov. 30.

In China, the services offered by the top tech companies are essential for daily living.

For example, Tencent's WeChat messaging app is used by over a billion people per month. And it's not just a messaging app users can pay for items via WeChat Pay, book flights and trains and shop online, without leaving the app. Tencent is also strong in the gaming sector.

Meanwhile, Ant Group's Alipay is also used by over 700 monthly active users. A third of Ant Group is owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba. But Alibaba is also a cloud computing company as well.

On Wednesday, Chinese tech stocks plunged on news of the draft antitrust rules, given the fact that these internet giants could all fall under the regulation, depending on how it is enforced.

Beijing has looked to tackle aspects of such businesses in the past.

For example, in early 2018, regulators froze the approvals of new video games over fears they contained too much violence and could lead kids to having eye problems. Games need a green light from the regulators to be released and monetized in China. Tencent was particularly hard-hit by that move.

More recently, what would have been Ant Group's world record-setting initial public offering (IPO) in Shanghai and Hong Kong, was suspended. The Shanghai Stock Exchange said Ant had reported "significant issues such as the changes in financial technology regulatory environment." Just days before, theChinese central bank and regulators issued new draft rules for online micro-lending, which could affect Ant Group.

But the new antitrust laws, which are arguably more wide-sweeping, may not be easy to implement.

"I would point out how difficult it has been for regulators in the West, where anti-trust law has a very long history, to figure out how to create laws which will limit their monopoly power," Brian Bandsma, portfolio manager at asset management firm Vontobel Quality Growth, told CNBC.

"Chinese regulators face the same challenge. These businesses are difficult to define and control through traditional legal definitions," Bandsma said.

Yes, the perception appears to be that when Beijing decides to take regulatory action, it will come fast and companies will have to comply.

Late last month, Alibaba founderJack Ma made some comments that appeared critical of China's financial regulator. That was seen as something that stoked regulators into suspending Ant Group's IPO. And some observers say it could also be a factor behind the latest antitrust rules.

"The fact that it is coming on the heels of what Jack Ma said about the financial service regulator, I don't believe is a coincidence," Sam Radwan, CEO of management consultancy Enhance International, told CNBC.

Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, JD.com and Pinduoduo are all companies that could be affected by the new rules, according to a recent note by Morgan Stanley.

"It will depend on how these guidelines are enforced or whether there is further legislation or regulation in the pipeline," Paul Triolo, head of the geo-technology practice at Eurasia Group, told CNBC by email.

But dealing with regulation is not new for China's technology giants in a market where rules can come into effect unexpectedly and very swiftly.

For example, Tencent has dealt with various regulations on the gaming industry. Chinese fintech company Lufax, which recently listed in New York, was once a peer-to-peer lending giant in China. Buttougher Chinese regulations on the sector forced the company to scale back on that business. In 2019, Lufax exited peer-to-peer lending and has since pivoted to other businesses.

"These companies are also fairly adept at pivoting quickly to incorporate shifting regulatory demands into their business strategies," Trivium China's Schaefer said.

While the U.S. has not yet agreed on what regulation of its large technology firms will look like, the view is that China can move quickly in this area, which may explain the knee-jerk reaction in Chinese technology stocks.

"Yes, the perception appears to be that when Beijing decides to take regulatory action, it will come fast and companies will have to comply," Triolo said. "The latest moves are a kind of warning shot, and like we have seen in Silicon Valley, companies will respond to new rules, and try to preempt others by taking proactive action to address regulators concerns."

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China faces the challenge of keeping its Big Tech in check just like the U.S. does - CNBC

One of the darker outcomes of 21st-century work life has been the predatory gig economy. Divorced from healthcare benefits and regular pay, millions of workers are told they are supposed to be lucky to drive passengers around in a car for ever-diminishing returns.

Last week, there was hope that Proposition 22, a ballot measure that allows gig economy companies to continue treating drivers as independent contractors, would be defeated in California, an increasingly progressive state. But voters passed the measure overwhelmingly, thanks to obscene amounts of spending by Uber, Lyft, Seamless and DoorDash. Unleashing more than $200m 10 times the amount of the propositions opponents, like labor unions the coalition of tech giants easily drowned out those fighting for the rights of workers.

The sum is titanic. Uber and its allies left nothing to chance. Reaping billions in investment capital, the companies could easily deploy the cash to crush those advocating on behalf of their workforce.

With Proposition 22s passage, the underclass of these tech giants will remain overworked and underpaid, denied the benefits of full-time employees. They will continue to dwell in precarity, unable to access unemployment insurance, paid family leave or healthcare during a pandemic.

The vote will probably have a nationwide impact, since it rejected the principles outlined in a 2018 state supreme court ruling and enshrined in a 2019 state law that said workers who performed tasks within a companys regular business must be treated as employees. Now gig workers are exempted from these rules and can continue to work independently.

This is a pernicious new era of capitalism, in which companies can brutally exploit their workers without ever turning a profit. Old-world giants, like General Motors, at least needed to make money to survive.

The Uber business model is Trumpian. Storming into cities across the world and openly flouting local regulations, Uber burns up investor cash, winning through sheer ubiquity. Uber loses money every year but devours the market, offering artificially cheap transportation while driving rivals, like taxi drivers, to suicide. There is no way to compete with a company that is allowed to thrive while losing money. Uber can continually discount its rides, confident new capital will arrive to prop it up forever.

In fact, Ubers survival depends on not classifying its drivers as full-time employees. That would make them a conventional company, subject to certain laws of gravity. Workers can be costly; they make demands, after all.

Had Proposition 22 failed, Uber, with its multibillion-dollar valuation, would have been forced to redirect its capital into the pockets of its workers. This, in the long run, would be unacceptable, depriving its wealthy benefactors and executives of their unreality.

In a sane society, a company could not habitually lose money, punish its workers and keep functioning. Uber can.

For much of the 2010s, gig companies coasted on the goodwill of the public. Blissfully unaware of how their goods were rendered so cheaply, most consumers and politicians celebrated the rise of Uber, Lyft and their brethren.

The outcome of this measure should not be treated as a referendum on big tech not with such an absurd spending disparity. Give a labor union $200m to counter propaganda, and a vote total could be flipped. The outcome does, however, serve as a warning to the left that these rapacious companies will do anything and everything to protect their unnatural advantage in the marketplace.

Uber and its ilk treat workers as expendable assets. Having won in California, they will seek devastating victories elsewhere. It will be up to other states, even Congress, to somehow bring these companies to heel. This is the fight that must be joined.

Continued here:

Big tech threw $200m at a ballot measure to hurt gig economy workers. And they won - The Guardian

Over the last four years, some of America's most prominent technology companies have found themselves squarely in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump. Now industry bellwethers such as Amazon, Apple and Facebook are weighing what kind of reception they can expect from President-elect Joe Biden.

Soon after taking office, Mr. Biden will face a raft of major tech-related challenges, including whether to tighten regulations on social media players, beefing up consumer privacy rules, updating net neutrality policy and tackling the "digital divide" by providing high-speed internet access to people who lack it.

After determining that tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter were used to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election, Congress launched a series of investigations aimed at curtailing and transforming the tech industry. Democrats tried to uproot and slow the spread of disinformation on social networks, while Republicans alleged censorship of conservative voices and threatened to break up the largest firms.

During the transition, leaders in the tech industry have expressed both trepidation and optimism about the incoming Biden administration. Many fear Mr. Biden could expand federal oversight and use the Justice Department to pursue more antitrust litigation.

But while Mr. Biden has often criticized the industry, others take comfort in the presence of former Apple, Facebook and Google officials on his tech advisory board. A number of Amazon executives also are listed on Biden agency review teams.

Mr. Biden's political team is also advised by a cadre of tech industry types, including executives with political data company Alloy, formed by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Google chairpersonEric Schmidt's firmRebellion Defense. Liberal activists fear Mr. Biden's tight tech ties could mean his administration will take a light touch in overseeing tech.

Watch the video above to learn more about how the new presidential administration's major tech policy challenges.

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Here's how Biden will work with Big Tech - CBS News

In 2014, the leading economic mind from Barack Obamas administration left office to become president and partner of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus. The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington was a familiar problem at the time, but the details of Timothy Geithners cashout proved unusually gruesome.

Warburg Pincus owns Mariner Finance, a predatory lender devoted to in the words of a devastating Washington Post expos monetizing poor people.

And there was an unfortunate harmony between Geithners public and private careers. The banks had been in serious trouble in 2009, but as Obamas first and most powerful Treasury secretary, Geithner too often prioritized the short-term interests of the financial sector over the needs of struggling families. His most catastrophic decision was on housing, where he transformed a foreclosure relief program into a slush fund for Wall Street, effectively redistributing money from middle class families to the very rich.

Geithner was not the only policymaker to get big questions wrong, of course. The personnel choices Obama made before he even set foot in the White House did much to sabotage his presidency. Although much about the Great Recession and its lackluster recovery can be laid at the feet of Republican obstruction, it is also true that top Obama administration officials frequently pursued bad economic ideas with gusto, leading to disappointing policy outcomes and political dysfunction.

Even before Obamas historic 2008 win was sealed, a then-obscure Citi executive named Michael Froman was compiling a list of top hiring targets for the incoming administration, placing Geithers name alongside figures who included Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder and Peter Orzsag, all of whom hailed from a Wall Street-friendly milieu and would advance ideas in office that held back the recovery and damaged the administrations public credibility on economic policy.

Judged against that debacle, the news trickling in from President-elect Joe Bidens transition team is in some respects promising. The public list of policy advisers is not stacked with big bank insiders or private equity magnates. There is, in fact, an excellent panel of thinkers on financial reform featuring some of the best minds available, including Gary Gensler, Mehrsa Baradaran, Amanda Fischer, Andy Green, Simon Johnson and others.

But Biden also appears to be trading one set of villains for another. On advisory panel after advisory panel, veterans of big, bad Silicon Valley predators keep popping up Facebook, Uber, Amazon, AirBnB, Lyft and even Mark Zuckerbergs creepy philanthropy all appear. Biden even found a spot for Amazons international tax avoidance guru Tom Sullivan to advise on State Department policy.

The Big Tech crisis of the Trump era has not been as abrupt as the 2008 meltdown, but it has been going on now for years. If Biden allows Silicon Valley to shape the economy of the future, he will damage his presidency just as surely as Obama did by naming Wall Street insiders to a team trying to weather a Wall Street-generated recession.

There was no organized progressive movement pressuring Obama on personnel back in 2008, and for many Democrats it seemed natural that he would be pulling from Bill Clinton administration alumni who had spent their time striking it rich during President George W. Bushs years. Emanuel joined the administration as Obamas first chief of staff after making millions in private equity. Today he is most famous forcovering up the policemurder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald while serving as Mayor of Chicago. But in 2009, he helped overrule administration economists calling for a larger economic stimulus package, perhaps the biggest blown-call of the Obamas presidency.

Orzsag, as Office of Management and Budget director, was an even more aggressive deficit hawk, pressing the administration to create a commission to fix the unsustainable national debt burden but without ending the Bush tax cuts. He took a job at Citigroup in 2010.

Holder, when named attorney general by Obama, was making millions of dollars a year representing corporate clients including Swiss banking giant UBS and OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma. As attorney general, he refused to prosecute high-level financial fraud, which helped cement the impression that Obama was letting the rich rig his economic program.

Froman, the man with the magic list, ended up with a post as the U. S. trade representative, where he was responsible for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an 11-nation pact that liberal interest groups and labor unions almost universally derided, and which ultimately failed embarrassing Obama after dividing the Democratic Party.

There were no backroom conspiracies or bags of cash under the table among these players. But they brought a Wall Street-centric view of the world to the administration, where they relied on Wall Street thinking that just happened to be harmful public policy. They believed the deficit was a big deal when it wasnt. They didnt want to raise taxes on corporations or the rich. And they didnt mind flushing homeowners in the name of saving the banks, which, after all, needed to be saved.

The result was a rhetorically liberal presidency in which inequality escalated, the racial wealth gap expanded and American life expectancy declined for the first time since World War I.

Biden has generally avoided Wall Street whiz kids, and outside his financial reform group, there is a trade policy team stacked with capable, reform-minded experts who understand exactly what went wrong on trade under both Obama and Trump. If this list of advisers is any indication, Biden will not be running a big bank White House.

But the Silicon Valley names are frightening. Many of them are Obama White House alums or long-time Biden aides who joined Big Tech and cashed in back when these firms had reputations that were fishy, but not fully toxic. Longtime Biden confidant and turned bigwig Facebook lawyer Jessica Hertz will be running, of all things, ethics policy for the transition. Cynthia Hogan is returning to Bidens team after a stint as a lobbyist for Apple.

Like any other people, politicians trust their old friends. But when your old friends choose to go rake it in at Facebook, a company that poisons democracy all over the world, or Apple, which very publicly bet its future on a cozy relationship with the Chinese government those friends no longer belong in the White House.

Other Big Tech advisers are Obama White House people who were trusted for their expertise and who Biden no doubt continues to respect. But this is precisely the attitude that got Obama into trouble in 2009 with Clinton administration alumni.

Nor is Biden restricting his Silicon Valley search to Obama alums. According to a Financial Times report, Biden is seriously considering a position for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He found a labor policy advisory slot for Seth Harris, the intellectual architect of Californias infamous Prop. 22 which rewrites California law to allow Uber, Lyft and other gig economy firms to deny rights, pay and benefits to their workers.

It is hard to overstate just how out of touch Bidens Silicon Valley romance is with todays intellectual consensus on Big Techs role in society. Google is the subject of a landmark antitrust case from the Department of Justice. Uber is something between a laughingstock and a nightmare, so bad that journalists make lists ranking its worst scandals. There are multiple, highly respected think tanks that exist for the sole purpose of reining in Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called to break up Big Tech in their primary campaigns, and evenHillary Clinton thinksZuckerberg is an authoritarian.

Thus far, the Biden transition suggests that the Biden White House will be premised on a world a decade out of date one where Democrats knew that Wall Street was a modern Big Tobacco, but hadnt yet realized that tech companies were, too.

Its hard to fix the economy when you dont know whats wrong with it.

Zach Carter is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, named by Publishers Weekly as one of theTen Best Books of the Year. It is available from Random House wherever books are sold.

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Big Tech Is The New Big Tobacco And Joe Biden Doesn't Get It - HuffPost

Free speech and a free press have long been recognized as hallmarks of a functioning democracy; in fact, both are enshrined in the First Amendment of theU.S. Constitution. That said, its quite unlikely that James Madison and his collaborators foresaw an era in which the widespread dissemination of information factually accurate or otherwise could be achieved on a near-global scale and almost instantaneously. The challenges this reality presents are complex and formidable.

While the internet has often beenheraldedas the great democratizer, offering the potential to spread democratic ideals and expand intellectual enlightenment, more nefarious use cases have emerged. Social media platforms have beenexploitedby political operatives, who have used divisive and misleading content to sow seeds of discord and influence election outcomes. The Cambridge Analyicascandalshowed that illicit data harvesting techniques had been employed to psychologically profile and target social media users with often-incendiary political advertising. Meanwhile, some state authorities haveusedsocial media platforms to engage in mass surveillance, or drastically influence political discourse by restricting, filtering, banning or censoring online networks.

Of course, we cant lay the blame entirely at the feet of social media. Aworking paperby University of Chicago economists recently highlighted the role of traditional media in spreading potentially dangerous misinformation, too: it found that areas with greater exposure to a popular cable news show that had downplayed the threat of the novel coronavirus subsequently experienced a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Its also clear that news reporters face new challenges in the digital age: a 2018reportfrom the Data & Society Research Institute explored the conundrum that journalists face when confronted with how best to cover bigoted, dehumanizing and manipulative messages circulating online. Amplification of such ideas, even when seeking to debunk or dismiss them, can often fuel their adoption.

Lack of exposure to coherent and trustworthy information can yield chaotic results.

As weve seen in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lack of exposure to coherent and trustworthy information can yield chaotic results. Asurveyof respondents across all 50 U.S. states found that individuals obtaining news from social media are more inclined to believe inaccurate information regarding coronavirus conspiracies, risk factors, death rates, and preventative treatments. This can erode faith in global public health organizations, making it more difficult to contain the disease, and in some cases producingtragic consequences.

Meanwhile, the spread of misinformation surrounding other topics has led toviolence,unrest, and even aresurgenceof previously eradicated infectious diseases. As misinformation goes unchecked, and inflammatory postsdeliberatelypit certain groups against one another, Americans growmore dividedthan ever. Quite aside from making for less cohesive and harmonious societies, such misinformation can actually lead to material harms take, for example, theroleof hateful and misleading social media content in precipitating serious human rights abuses in Myanmar.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there has been a growing public unease in recent years regarding the spread of misinformation online and its negative effects on society. A Pew Researchsurvey, released earlier this year, revealed that most Americans think social media companies wield excessive power and influence in our political landscape, with around half believing that major technology firms should be subject to greater regulation. While content sharing and social media platforms have come under mounting pressure to tackle the spread of misinformation, and haverespondedwith a series of measures designed to flag or remove inaccurate or hateful posts, thedebatearound their culpability (Are they impartial forums for free speech or content publishers?) continues. This poses a regulatory risk for these firms that doesnt appear to be going away anytime soon.

Investors are expressing growing interest in the ethical and financial implications of harmful online content.

In the absence of an imminent regulatory solution, investors are expressing growing interest in the ethical and financial implications of harmful online content, and which companies may be complicit in its distribution. Recently, the nonprofit Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), which works with businesses to establish reporting standards around financially material sustainability issues, indicated forthcoming scrutiny of companies content moderation practices. A press releaseannouncedthat in part owing to investor concern, and indicators that content moderation practices can yield significant financial impact it will be evaluating technology companies efforts to manage pernicious user-generated content, political advertisements and other third-party content thats hosted on their platforms.

If you are keen to divert money away from companies that could be doing more to curb misinformation and preserve democracy, there are data points you can turn to. First, you might want to consider a companys known media ethics events, spanning incidents that relate to a breach in editorial or generalmedia ethics, and violations of content restrictions. These ethical breaches can present financially material risks, potentially harming a companys reputation, leading tofines, advertiser/consumer boycotts and legal trouble that canaffectcompanies balance sheets for years to come.

Investors might also evaluate the quality of a firms media ethics program, and corresponding editorial guidelines, which can shed light on a companys commitment to upholding ethical standards during the content creation and dissemination process. Robust measures should place emphasis on contents transparency, fairness, independence, plurality and inclusiveness of viewpointsand should be promoted from the top down. Organizationstendto have fewer ethical lapses when leadership actively adopts ethics programs, and ensures opportunities for education and problem-solving exercises surrounding ethical best practices.

Many companies still have a long way to go when it comes to instituting strong content governance measures, though. A 2017analysisof 74 conventional and social media firms found that just 16% had adequate or strong content governance measures in place, while 61% failed to provide satisfactory disclosures about relevant policies. With a record number of Americans nowexpressingzero confidence in traditional news media, and withdistrustof internet platforms precipitating a public techlash, content governance metrics will have greater financial importance.

By enhancing awareness of media ethics issues, and the steps that companies are taking to address them, we can collectively make more informed decisions about where to invest our time and money. With great power comes great responsibility, and media companies of all kinds have both the powerandthe responsibility to ensure that the content they disseminate or host is fair, accurate, and inclusive. Whats at stake? Potentially, democracy as we know it.

Jay Lipman is cofounder and president of Ethic, which creates personalized ESG portfolios for financial advisors and institutional investors.

More: Social medias U.S. election performance: The good, bad and (sometimes) ugly

Also read: Only a breakup of Facebook and controls on social media can reduce disinformation and lies on the internet

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Investors are losing patience with Big Tech over its lax policing of harmful internet content - MarketWatch

In mid-October, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a long-expected antitrust lawsuit against Google, one of the worlds largest and most influential companies. Claiming that Google has used deals with phone makers to keep its web search engine as the default on Android and Apple smartphones, the DOJ is being joined by various US states (all with Republican attorney generals) in the suit. Many other states are also running their own investigations of the company.

Google, along with the rest of Big Tech, has become a political target due to its rising power and wealth (the company is now worth over a trillion dollars). With House Democrats calling for action against the tech platforms and Donald Trump also angry at them, the company appears to be in hot water.

But US antitrust law is notoriously weak sauce, only able to bring suit against companies in specific situations. Having a full-on monopoly is not one of them. Previous US cases, in particular against Microsoft in the 1990s, suggest that the government may struggle to beat its well-financed opponent in court. And even if it did, the search market would only see somewhat more market share going to giant rivals like Microsofts Bing or Verizons Yahoo. Theres no path that leads to the rich, free competition that capitalisms defenders insist it creates.

The DOJs case mainly concerns the deals Google has made placing its search engine as the default in various computing environments a crucial advantage since many users dont change their factory settings. As a Google design ethicist once commented, If you control the menu, you control the choices. Since 2005, Google has paid Apple enormous sums, estimated today at $10 billion a year, to keep Google Search pre-loaded in Apples Safari web browser.

The traffic acquisition cost yields as much as half of its search volume. The stakes are big for Apple too. Googles payments make up roughly a fifth of the companys entire yearly profit. On smartphones running Googles Android mobile operating system, Googles licensing arrangements require the phone makers (like Samsung and Huawei) to set its engine as the default and to keep its apps un-deletable.

The dramatically higher search traffic not only feeds Googles online ad business its main revenue source but also provides fresh inquiries for continued training of its search algorithm. The relationship with Apple in particular has been so important to Google that they internally referred to the possibility of losing iPhone search traffic as Code Red.

The fact that Google has a near-monopoly in search, including an 80 percent market share for desktop and about 88 percent for mobile, is not in itself illegal. Googles dominant position arises from the economics of online search, which is driven by a classic network effect more users of a search engine help strengthen the algorithm, making its search results more relevant to the user.

Under the USs very limited antitrust system, gaining a monopoly through such economic forces isnt against the law only using your monopoly to take over another industry (monopolization) is illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Googles various exclusivity deals likely do constitute monopolization, separate from other power-mongering practices like search bias, where Google has used its dominance to crush competing specialized or vertical search services like Yelp, Foundem, and Tripadvisor by down-ranking them in Googles search results or by scraping their content onto Googles own result pages.

The DOJ is still fighting an uphill battle due to the farcically limited nature of US antitrust law, which in its modern interpretation tends to also require likely consumer harm, usually in the form of higher prices. Since Google offers its services mostly for free (along with other likely imminent antitrust targets like Facebook), its unclear if Justice will be able to convince a judge that consumers are harmed by Googles traffic acquisition arrangements after all, consumer goods companies like cereal makers pay retailers for special product placement all the time.

If the DOJ does succeed and forces Alphabet to end its exclusivity/default setting deals with phone markers and service providers, it would likely only mean more traffic for the one serious rival to Google Search in the market, Microsofts Bing. Started in 2009 to try to wrest some market share from Google, Bing has just 2.83 percent of the market share for mobile search and a slightly higher 13.48 percent on desktop (due to it being the default on Windows, the desktop operating system that still runs three-quarters of the worlds computers).

The third-place Yahoo search uses Bing to produce its results and place its search ads. And while Bings wimpy market share looks inconsequential, Google takes its potential threat seriously the New York Times has reported that Google unfairly hinders the ability of search competitors and Microsofts Bing is almost the only one left from examining and indexing information that Google controls, like its big video service YouTube, with Bing unable to examine and index up to half the videos on YouTube.

So even in the best-case scenario, a monopolized industry would become more of a two-company or oligopoly industry, with few likely benefits to users as both siphon up user data and use whatever exclusive carve-outs they can retain as defaults, like on the Edge and Chromebook devices the companies produce. The companies are unlikely to make serious plays against one anothers search territory: the companies are already cooperating on several fronts, including Microsoft planning to use Googles Android on its new line of smartphones. The companies settled their long-running multiple patent-infringement suits and countersuits in 2016.

But will the DOJs case succeed? We can look to previous tech monopoly investigations for clues.

Microsofts own antitrust odyssey is the most instructive. Much like Google Search, Microsofts Windows had a near-total monopoly in a crucial tech market the operating systems that run desktop computers (the entire industry until the mobile era). The company had a history of taking ruthless actions to crush or copy competitors for its related products, including its Office suite of business applications like Word and Excel.

But it was only when Microsoft elected to use its existing OS monopoly to take over the new market for web browsing software that it got into trouble. The company bundled its own lousy browser, Internet Explorer, with versions of its Windows 95 and later updates, which were installed on most computers worldwide. Large payments followed to Apple, AOL, and other computing platforms to make Explorer their default browser rather than Netscape, with a senior VP alleged to have said Microsoft had cut off Netscapes air supply.

It was an open-and-shut instance of monopolization. The Federal Trade Commission and the DOJ got involved.

The case went to trial, and the company suffered deep public embarrassment as claims by the company and by Gates during his notorious video deposition were directly contradicted by the companys internal email trail. (It was during this period that Gates discovered the reputation-laundering powers of publicly posturing as a philanthropist.) After an arbitration attempt failed, the company was, in a rare development, formally declared a monopolist under the law and ordered broken up. Luckily for Microsoft, its appeal continued through the stolen 2000 election, and the George W. Bush administrations DOJ dropped its goal of splitting up the company.

Instead, the federal government told the company to make various behavioral reforms, including allowing computer manufacturers to hide from view the Windows-bundled Explorer logo and include a ballot screen, later called a choice screen, where users could select among various commercial internet browsers.

The shortcomings of these behavioral changes were seen in 2011, when Microsoft released a Windows 7 update without the browser choice screen software. Hilariously, no one noticed for almost seventeen months, when the company was reported to the European Commission (EC). The commission would go on to fine Microsoft $733 million, about one percent of its revenue that fiscal year.

Microsofts outcome is likely a harbinger of Googles eventual settlement indeed, its reminiscent of the European Commission judgment against Alphabet in 2018. That case was based on similar charges of requiring Android operating systemusing phone makers to pre-install the companys search engine and browser as defaults, without which Google would not allow them to include the Google Play store for mobile apps, the main way Android users get applications. The EC fined Google and forced it to end the practice, and EU regulators then pressured Google to include choice screens for users in every EU country.

However, for a browser to appear alongside Google on the ballot, they must bid in an auction for a slot (reflecting the companys love of using them in its advertising technology and elsewhere). Browsers like Bing and Yahoo, which collect user information to serve ads have far greater profits and resources to bid for ballot spaces, unlike smaller, privacy-centered browsers like DuckDuckGo. But this kind of wonkish policy outcome is quite possible for the US investigation of Alphabet.

Google was also investigated in the United States by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2013. That probe focused on search bias, meaning Googles abuse of its dominant search position by down-ranking competing vertical search engines for trips and shopping. Considered a close call by FTC staff, no charges were brought, perhaps due to the companys long-standing closeness to the Democratic party in general and the Obama administration in particular.

For all the rivers of digital ink being spilled over the Trump administrations suspect Justice Department going after Googles very real power-mongering, the limited scope of the suit, the constrained nature of US antitrust law, and Alphabets ocean of lobbying cash all suggest the chances of a dramatic outcome are vanishingly small. Alphabets stockholders have laughed off the suit so far. And its not hard to see why: it will likely take years, and the result will almost certainly be modest behavioral leashes.

Googles market power over the flow of information in our society, along with that of its Big Tech rivals/partners, isnt going anywhere not unless we start to entertain bolder steps beyond the weak tea of antitrust.

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It's Going to Take More Than Antitrust Law to Rein in Big Tech - Jacobin magazine

As with many others in Britain, lockdown hit Rachel and her husband, Philip, hard. Almost overnight, the couple, both in their early 50s, found themselves cut off from friends, family and colleagues. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, they had both been working every day; now Philip found himself furloughed, while Rachel was put on rotation with other essential staff, working fewer shifts at odd hours. They were unable to meet up with their four adult sons and daughters. They had to attend a family funeral while remaining socially distanced.

Initially, Rachel coped in the way many others did. She played more video games than normal, and felt stressed at work, but as far as possible she managed. Her husband didnt. For him, it seemed there must be more to it than the authorities struggling to cope with a novel virus and evolving expert advice. The regularly changing and conflicting information that was coming from the government added to the feeling in him that they were making things up or covering something up, Rachel says now.

Initially, Philip and Rachel (their names have been changed for this article) discussed his fears, but as lockdown went on, their conversations stopped. Philip was frustrated that Rachel wasnt taking his concerns seriously: someone had to be benefiting from the situation, he insisted, and events such as Dominic Cummings Barnard Castle eye test only increased his belief that they knew the pandemic was fake, and the nation was being kept indoors for a more sinister purpose. Philip began to research what this sinister purpose might be. That, Rachel says, is what led him to QAnon.

Its hard to describe the movement that Philip fell into. QAnon has its roots in the pizzagate conspiracy, which emerged four years ago after users poring over hacked Democratic party emails on the message board 4chan said that, if you replaced the word pizza with little girl, it looked as if they were discussing eating children. That claim whether it was made in jest or sincerity is impossible to tell spiralled into allegations of a vast paedophilic conspiracy centred on Comet Pizza, a restaurant in Washington DC.

A year later, a 4chan user with the handle Q Clearance Patriot appeared, claiming to be a government insider tasked with sharing crumbs of intel about Donald Trumps planned counter-coup against the deep state forces frustrating his presidency. As Qs following grew, the movement became known as the Storm as in, the calm before and then QAnon, after its founder and prophet. At that point, QAnon was a relatively understandable conspiracy theory: it had a clear set of beliefs rooted in support for Trump and in the increasingly cryptic posts attributed to Q (by then widely believed to be a group of people posting under one name).

Now, though, its less clearcut. Theres no one set of beliefs that define a QAnon adherent. Most will claim some form of mass paedophilic conspiracy; some, particularly in the US, continue to focus on Trumps supposed fightback. But the web of beliefs has become all-encompassing. One fan-produced map of all the revelations linked to the group includes references to Julius Caesar, Atlantis and the pharaohs of Egypt in one corner, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and 5G in another, the knights of Malta in a third, and the Fukushima meltdown in a fourth all tied together with a generous helping of antisemitism, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to hatred of George Soros. QAnon isnt one conspiracy theory any more: its all of them at once.

In September, BuzzFeed News made the stylistic decision to refer to the movement as a collective delusion. Theres more to the convoluted entity than the average reader might realise, wrote BuzzFeeds Drusilla Moorhouse and Emerson Malone. But delusion does illustrate the reality better than conspiracy theory does. We are discussing a mass of people who subscribe to a shared set of values and debunked ideas, which inform their beliefs and actions.

At first, QAnon was a largely US phenomenon, with limited penetration in the UK. The pandemic, however, has changed that. According to recent polling by Hope Not Hate, one in four people in Britain now agree with some of the basic conspiracies it has promulgated: that secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites, and that elites in Hollywood, politics, the media are secretly engaging in large-scale child trafficking and abuse. Nearly a third believe there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together, and almost a fifth say that Covid-19 was intentionally released as part of a depopulation plan.

For Philip, trapped at home and searching for an explanation for a global pandemic, when all he could find was a void of information, QAnon was fertile territory. He already spent most of his time while furloughed on his phone looking for answers. What was the real reason for everyone being forced inside? How did the virus start? Who started it?

In his mind, there had to be a reason for it, Rachel says. Inevitably, his search took in Facebook, where the sites recommendation algorithms were quick to connect him to individuals on similar quests. Ultimately, it led to him becoming brainwashed, she says.

For many, the existence of Facebook and its sister products, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger has been a lifeline in this period. The social network has always prided itself on connecting people, and when the ability to socialise in person, or even leave the house, was curtailed, Facebook was there to pick up the slack.

But those same services have also enabled the creation of what one professional factchecker calls a perfect storm for misinformation. And with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the virus, its easier than ever for people to fall deep down a rabbit hole of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in vaccination rates or the election of an unpleasant president, but the end of consensus reality as we know it. What happens when your basic understanding of the world is no longer the same as your neighbours? And can Facebook stop that fate coming to us all?

Since its foundation, in Mark Zuckerbergs Harvard dorm room, Facebook has tackled its share of challenges. Some have stayed fairly constant: no social network gets many users without needing to tackle spam, for instance, though the Facebook of 2004 would struggle to remove the 3.3bn junk posts that the company took down in the first half of this year.

Others are unique to a company with 2.7 billion users that operates in almost every country in the world. Facebook has become a centre point of civil society. Its more than just a place to share photos and plan parties: its where people read news, arrange protests, engage in debate, play games and watch bands. And that means that all the problems of civil society are now problems for Facebook: bullying, sexual abuse, political polarisation and conspiracy theorists all existed before the social network, but all took on new contours as they moved online.

And this year they really moved online. As the initial lockdown was imposed across much of the world, peoples relationship to the internet, and to Facebook in particular, evolved rapidly. Stuck socially distancing, people turned to social networking to fill an emotional void.

Suddenly, the company found itself staring at unprecedented demands. Our busiest time of the year is New Years Eve, says Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebooks vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, over a Zoom call from her London home. And we were seeing the equivalent of New Years Eve every single day. It was, she says, the inevitable result of having almost the entire planet at home at the same time.

Rachel agrees. I believe the lockdown played a huge part in altering peoples perception of reality, she says. When Covid restrictions came in, the rules of social interaction were rewritten. We suddenly stopped meeting friends in pubs, at the coffee point or by the school gates, and our lives moved online. And for many of us, online meant on Facebook.

I first heard Rachels story from QAnonCasualties, a forum on the social news site Reddit where she, and thousands like her, have congregated to seek advice and support after their loved ones fell into the cult. Her first post, in July this year, was titled: Ive finally reached the end of my tether. She described a marriage of 25 years, and a family with four grownup children, being shattered by a husband who had sunk further and further into this conspiracy.

Its got the stage where I no longer understand him or even recognise him, she wrote. Others echoed her story. Posts with titles such as Grieving my dad while hes still alive and Today I filed for divorce from my QAnon-obsessed husband rub shoulders with pleas for help from those who still hope they can win loved ones back.

Beyond the heartbreak and anguish on QAnonCasualties, there is a common thread: a feeling that their friends and relatives are inhabiting a different reality. On all levels, from the old-school conspiracist who just wants to uncover corruption to the alien interdimensional vampire demon QAnon believer, they ignore reality and latch on to narratives that support their version of reality, says Robert Johnson, one of the moderators of the board, adding that most of the recent posts are from people radicalised in lockdown.

Early on in the pandemic, Facebook moved to make the most of the situation. As almost all of its 50,000 or so employees, as well as its army of contractors, were sent home, and Zuckerberg talked up the benefits of remote working, the company handed out grants to small businesses to help them switch to digital operation $100m (79m) globally, and another $100m in the US and retooled its product offerings to take advantage of the new normal. But for all the work it put into smoothing the transition to lockdown life, Facebook also knew it had a problem brewing. The companys never-ending battle with misinformation on its platforms was about to step into overdrive.

For a long time, the company had resisted acting on the problem. Moderation is hard enough already: simply finding and removing every example of unambiguously banned content on Facebook is a huge task, with comparatively easy-to-automate searches for things such as adult content still throwing up dizzying numbers of edge cases and errors. When it came to tackling misinformation, Facebook had a stated philosophical objection. As a principle, in a democracy, I believe people should decide what is credible, not tech companies, Zuckerberg told an audience at Georgetown University last year. But the company was also motivated by the fact that misinformation isnt as straightforward to identify as nudity, graphic violence or even hate speech.

For one thing, there isnt even a commonly accepted definition. It is a sibling of disinformation, which is the deliberate spreading of falsehoods. But the line between misinformation and simple inaccuracies is blurry. Generally, the focus is on the potential for harm. A rumour that, say, the Canadian emo pop star Avril Lavigne was secretly replaced by a body double in the late 2000s is probably untrue, but unlikely to qualify as misinformation. Conversely, a rumour that Trump died of Covid-19 in early October and has been secretly replaced by a body double almost certainly does.

But wherever the line is drawn, the problem is the same: to find out if something is misinformation, you need to know the truth. Were Facebook to ban it directly, the company would effectively need to run an entire journalistic enterprise within its own moderation team.

As a compromise, Facebook partnered with journalists in 2017. Around the world, independent factchecking organisations were given funding and tools to mark viral posts on Facebook as true or false (there are a number of other categories, including satirical, altered or missing context). If the posts were false, their reach the extent to which the Facebook algorithm showed them to others would be diminished, and users would have to click through a warning sign to read them.

So far, the programme has been a mixed success. Reducing the reach of false content certainly helps: just a few months after it was launched, Facebook said a factcheck would lead to 80% fewer viewers of a piece of false content. But factcheckers have complained about the limits placed on them by the social network, ranging from restrictions on their ability to factcheck political adverts to a lack of feedback from Facebook about how much, or little, their work is actually helping.

And that was before Covid hit. We went early as a company in closing down globally, says Mendelsohn. You would class us as conservative in that respect, and we will be conservative coming out as well. Now, six months on, Facebook has a skeleton team in some of its offices and datacentres, and employees coming in to work on the companys augmented and virtual reality products, such as its Oculus headsets. But the bulk of its staff are still working from home, something that Zuckerberg has said is likely to continue well past the end of the crisis.

Facebooks moderation staff have been pulled off some of the most sensitive work, owing to data security concerns and fears for the employees own mental health. The soul-grinding task of scouring the platform for livestreamed suicides and videos of graphic violence has already led to a $52m settlement paid to more than 11,000 moderators in the US, and a lawsuit in Ireland over allegations of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that was when contractors were based in offices, with the support that brings.

By early April, the company was having to bring its diminished resources to bear against some of the most viral misinformation it had ever seen. (The unfortunate double meaning of the world viral was noted by nearly everyone I interviewed for this piece, as was the cliched-yet-useful approach of modelling misinformation as something spreading like a disease.)

It became clear, very quickly, that there would be different approaches to how people would talk about, debate and discuss the issues of the virus, Mendelsohn says. And so we work through our harmful misinformation policy that weve had in place for about two and a half years now, where we have a very specific policy about taking down anything that could contribute to physical harm.

Of course, the company has a lot of leeway in how it defines physical harm. It had applied that to infectious diseases before. A measles outbreak in Samoa, for instance, saw a parallel outbreak in harmful untruths, which Facebook acted to limit. But for years, Facebook has argued that the harm caused by the broader anti-vaccination movement didnt cross that threshold, and allowed the groups to flourish on the platform. In March 2019, it relented slightly, and banned anti-vax ads that include misinformation about vaccines; in October this year, it went further, and banned all anti-vax advertising, except for that with a political message. Organic content posts and groups advocating against vaccines is still allowed.

With Covid-19, the company went even further, attempting to limit the misinformation while also filling in the information voids that led people such as Philip down their dark path. Links pinned at the top of feeds have taken more than 2 billion people, Mendelsohn says, to resources from health authorities around the world, detailing what is known about the virus.

But those efforts cant stop the tide. There was just an explosion of interest in one singular topic, for very obvious reasons, says Tom Phillips, the editor-in-chief of Full Fact, one of Facebooks two UK factchecking partners. In the UK, we generally see massive spikes of traffic around elections, and we had one at the end of 2019. The pandemic dwarfed that. And matching that explosion in interest was an explosion in the supply of misinformation, much of it delivered by questionable sources.

The industries that many celebrities work in film, music, sport were among the hardest hit by shutdowns. So even more than most of us, they suddenly found themselves with nothing to do but sit on Twitter, Phillips says. Not all of them did a Taylor Swift, spending the time recording an album. Some of them started sharing wild rumours to millions of followers instead. This, then, is how we end up with Ian Brown, the former frontman of the Stone Roses, declaring that conspiracy theorist is a term invented by the lame stream media to discredit those who can smell and see through the government/media lies and propaganda.

Browns obsession with revealing the truth about coronavirus has spread from his social-media posts to his recorded music: the anti-mask, anti-vaccine Little Seed Big Tree, with lyrics including Masonic lockdown, in your home town / Get behind your doors for the new world order joins Van Morrisons No More Lockdown (No more taking of our freedom / And our God-given rights / Pretending its for our safety) in the canon of hits championed by QAnon supporters.

Where celebrities at least have a coterie of minders, publicists and agents begging them not to follow Brown and Morrison down this route, the rest of us had to rely on our friends and family, says QAnonCasualties Johnson. And then, suddenly, we couldnt. Some of these folk probably werent too into QAnon before the lockdown, Johnson says. They would have been shot down by co-workers when bringing it up. Without that kind of reality check, they were able to fall further.

Full Facts Phillips agrees. Personal contact takes you out of the rabbit hole. You know, it can be a very direct, No, mate, thats nonsense, but it could also just be taking people away from the singular focus that conspiracy rabbit holes require. Just by introducing other topics of conversation. Lockdown removed those opportunities for intervention at a stroke.

And so, furloughed and stuck indoors, Rachels husband, Philip, sank deeper and deeper into the alternative reality that QAnon presented. Although Facebook had been the open end of the rabbit hole, it proved too restrictive for him: even the algorithmically mediated interactions with his friends and family were becoming hostile and argumentative, as they tried in vain to push back against the cult.

He started new social media accounts, dedicated only to the conspiracy. When Rachel found one of those, and saw what it was sharing, she felt physically sick; she realised her husband hadnt simply picked up a few odd beliefs, but joined a full-blown cult. How do you talk to someone who has been brainwashed but who believes that it is you that is the brainwashed one, she asked Reddit.

In August, things hit rock bottom. Philips focus had grown from coronavirus-specific conspiracies to the wider web of evil posited by QAnon. His YouTube recommendations were no longer about mobile phones and cars; they were for clips putting forward conspiracy theories and fabrications. YouTube has historically been one of the most permissive of the major social media platforms, with few policies against misinformation: instead, the site puts links to Wikipedia pages underneath contentious videos (and deletes only the most egregiously false ones). But even YouTubes filters started getting in the way, and so he switched again, to the video host BitChute, where Fall of the Cabal, a notorious QAnon video primer, shares space with content creators recounting lurid stories of having seen an infamous yet entirely fictional video of Hillary Clinton eating a young child alive, chasing a supposed high that can be gained from drinking the blood of a terrified child.

In Philips eyes, Rachel was now an idiot, who believed mainstream media. I became a normie who needed to wake up and understand what was really going on, she says. He was unable to stick to one topic. If I said something about how we were struggling with social distancing at work, he would respond with a furious diatribe about Soros, Clinton, Bill Gates, 5G and vaccines that control and kill people.

For Rachel, the final straw was when her husband claimed to have seen a video incriminating a member of the Hollywood elite: a clip, he said, of Tom Hanks with a three-year-old girl. For Rachel, who works with safeguarded children, the implication was obscene. If her husband really had seen such a clip, then no matter how it was produced Photoshopped, edited together it must have started as real child abuse imagery. That a cult ostensibly focused on saving children could somehow persuade her husband to engage in sharing such material disgusted her. She started packing her bags the next morning.

By the time QAnon adherents are that far in the rabbit hole, the consensus on the QAnonCasualties board is that its hard to rescue them. Its not easy to overturn someones sense of reality, but even harder to restore it once it has been lost. And so the focus is on preventing people from falling down the rabbit hole in the first place: tackling QAnon at the more acceptable end.

In the UK, that largely means the Save the Children movement, not to be confused with the charity of the same name. One of its largest groups, Freedom for the Children UK (FFTCUK), was created in July by Laura Ward, 36, who told the BBC she had a spiritual awakening that motivated her to organise during the lockdown. By late August, the FFTCUK Facebook page had become large enough to organise a 500-strong rally in central London, campaigning to raise the awareness of child exploitation and human trafficking. Ward denied any links to QAnon, but the London rally one of 200 nationwide that day was full of QAnon-related slogans, from warnings that pizzagate is real to the catchphrase Where we go one, we go all (shortened to WWG1WGA).

In October, Facebook announced a blanket ban on QAnon-related groups, after earlier trying to ban only those arms of the movement linked to violence. But that ban did not extend to groups such as FFTCUK, which remained on the site with more than 10,000 members. Joe Ondrak, of the factchecking site Logically, says the groups denials dont hold water. He cites the fact that members of the group openly talk about adrenochrome harvesting the supposed high from drinking childrens blood. While they dont talk about Trump saving the world, the bedrock of their particular movement is based on one of QAnons many plotlines, rather than having any basis in reality, Ondrak says.

Shortly before this piece was published, Facebook finally took action to remove FFTCUK for violating our dangerous individuals and organisations policy. A spokesperson said: In August, we expanded our dangerous individuals and organisations policy to address militarised social movements and violence-inducing conspiracy networks, such as QAnon. Since then, weve identified over 600 militarised social movements, removing about 2,400 pages, 14,200 groups and about 1,300 Instagram accounts they maintained, and in addition, weve removed about 1,700 pages, 5,600 groups and about 18,700 Instagram accounts representing QAnon.

The problem for Facebook is that the QAnon rabbit hole doesnt work like other conspiracy theories. Rather than laying out the conspiracy, with a call to arms for believers, it instead offers a far more compelling instruction: Do your research.

Adrian Hon, a game designer and founder of the developer Six to Start, describes the appeal as similar to that of an alternate reality game, or ARG. A relatively niche pursuit even in the geek circles where they flourish, ARGs can be thought of as large-scale communal puzzles, with clues and riddles often seeded across fake websites and real locations. They often involve the players working together to assemble evidence of a shadowy conspiracy, at a scale that no one person could hope to solve alone. The parallels, he feels, are obvious. QAnon makes the act of researching fun, and into a game. It is not a solitary effort where you are in your basement putting red string everywhere, and no one cares what youre doing: youre doing this in forums, on Facebook and WhatsApp. It is quite a social phenomenon.

QAnon is a group with coherent goals ending child trafficking, or opposing Covid lockdowns that prompt further questions. The adherents work together to uncover the truth beneath the surface, moving from mainstream sites to ever more esoteric communities, slowly getting sucked into the narrative they are both consuming and, ultimately, creating. I know how people feel when they get into this, Hon says. Its intoxicating and exciting to have all this information at your fingertips, and to be Googling things and checking websites.

That impulse doesnt just pull in adherents. Those on the outside can find themselves equally intrigued by the complexity of QAnon-related beliefs. Abbie Richards, a graduate student of climate studies at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, found herself the target of QAnon-related attacks after she went viral on TikTok for, of all things, a video criticising golf courses.

You see all the comments in your videos, and I had one that was like: Watch Fall of the Cabal, all 24 sections, and itll make sense, she says. I was like, You know what, I will! As she researched, what stood out was the ease with which the movement slid from things that were absolutely real to things that werent. In the eyes of the QAnon follower: If Jeffrey Epsteins death looks suspicious, then how can you deny that theres a sex trafficking ring of people who drink blood?

Richards drew up a diagram, The Conspiracy Chart, exploring that slide in detail. At the bottom are things that actually happened historical conspiracies such as the FBIs Cointelpro operation, which aimed to destroy the civil rights movement in the 1960s. At the top, past the antisemitic point of no return, is the mesh of beliefs that characterise QAnon and its adherents. Initially posted on TikTok, the framework is a remarkably useful way of distinguishing between conspiracy theories, and the alternative realities that sit on top of them. (God bless Abbie Richards, says Full Facts Phillips, unprompted, when discussing the difficulty of defining QAnon.)

But the chart also highlights, inadvertently, the difficulty of fighting the delusions head-on. As the conspiracies drift further away from the baseline of reality, the theorists are increasingly living in an altogether different world.

In the sci-fi author Neal Stephensons 2019 novel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, a tech guru launches a misinformation attack on the world, releasing a fake video showing the destruction by a nuclear weapon of the small Utah town of Moab. The attack is quickly revealed as a hoax, but it doesnt matter: 20 years later, remember Moab bumper stickers plaster cars as a cold civil war simmers. The consensus reality has broken down. Stephensons book feels prescient in an age when QAnon is mobilising marches of thousands of people against mass child abductions that aid workers say have simply not taken place. And, surprisingly, some experts, such as Ruth Ahnert, a professor at Queen Mary University of London and fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, which conducts research into artificial intelligence and data science, think we have been here before.

Ahnert acknowledges that Facebook and other social media platforms have changed the way we get information, but disputes that consensus reality is only now breaking down. I think that idea is true only if you think of the movement from the 20th century to the 21st century, from broadcast media to social media. If you look in the longer history back to the 16th century you see something that looks like now.

She says that then, as now, the elites had access to fairly accurate information about the state of the world. If you look at the really influential people, those people had huge reach. They were communicating across Europe, into north Africa, into South America, Ottoman empire, sub-Saharan Africa. Think of Samuel Pepys, as administrator of the navy, able to request and receive a report on the local conditions from almost anywhere English ships sailed. But normal people were probably not communicating much beyond their village, Ahnert points out. And, in an era when people primarily get their news from social networks as more than one in 10 British adults do, according to Ofcom then all that has happened is the village has moved online.

In that long view, the artificial world isnt the one the internet and lockdown have created, but the temporary blip in time when broadcast media was able to forge one shared reality for a nation. I wonder if its kind of come full circle in a way, Ahnert says. The more information we have access to, the less ability we have to tell what is authentic or not.

When I put Ahnerts words to Facebooks chief product officer, Chris Cox, he is, unsurprisingly, less pessimistic. I dont think were going back to the stone age here, but I do think, like with each medium, we go through a reckoning when its born; [a process] of understanding it and integrating it into our lives. Facebook was built in 2004, so I guess technically were still a teenager.

He points out that for Facebook, the work is continuing. When we study groups, for example, we are able to study which of those are harmful and take a stand on them. And which of those are creating, at least at the individual level, a sense of deep belonging, fulfilling a deep need.

We arent fully living in an online village yet. The number of people who get their news from a large, trusted provider still vastly outweighs those who focus primarily on social media; three times as many British people say BBC One is their single most important news source as those who cite Facebook. But Facebook is in third place, just behind ITV, and its share is growing.

We take our responsibility very, very seriously, says Facebooks Mendelsohn. Its interesting to think about the history of misinformation, because it has been around for ever. It is in the nature of human beings.

Rachel has a more concrete suggestion for how to reverse the tide. QAnon seems to turn people into angry, bitter, volatile people. Offering kindness, and reminding yourself of who they really are, helps. It is a mental health issue.

When she confronted her husband about the Hanks video, and started making preparations to leave, it shocked him back to reality. Philip came to her, saying he had deleted everything QAnon-related from his phone, as well as his social media accounts. I do love you, he said.

It has been a long road to recovery. Philip admitted that he hadnt seen the Hanks video, but a still image that was definitely him. Two days later, he and Rachel went shopping, and he wore a face covering for the first time, something he had previously insisted was just another example of how they were controlling the sheep. Since then, Rachel says, weve racked up more than 1,000 miles in the car, driving all over England to visit beautiful, quiet places to walk and talked like there is no tomorrow.

I reminded him of how we laughed like drains when Trump was elected in 2016 and wondered if the US had lost its collective mind. He laughed and agreed. He still believes there might be a deep state or something sinister like that, but is now thinking more about questioning the motives of the people who are doing the pointing not who they are pointing at.

I am glad I stuck my hand down the rabbit hole and hauled him out, she says. Although I suspect that I am going to be dusting the rabbit droppings off him for a long time.

This article was amended on 11 November 2020. An earlier version said that Facebook had yet to extend its ban to groups such as FFTCUK. In fact, that group was banned on 10 November 2020, shortly before the articles publication; the piece was updated to reflect this and a statement from Facebook added.

Read more:

Facebook, QAnon and the world's slackening grip on reality - The Guardian

At some of the countrys largest technology firms, technologists believe that a Biden-Harris White House will reverse Trump-era immigration policies,according to new data from Blind, which surveys anonymous technologists about a variety of current issues. That could result in some seismic change at many firms.

Overall, some 66 percent of technologists think that President-elect Bidenwill loosen restrictions on hiring skilled foreign workersonce he takes office; around 74 percent think that he will remove executive orders limiting high-skilled immigration; and 64 percent assume that future White House policies will increase the pipeline of foreign-born workers for technology firms.

With any new president, there are many unknowns, read Blinds blog posting on the data. We dont know which tech policies will be prioritizedor others that may come to the fore. However, tech professionals feel confident that this administration will make h1-b visas more accessible.

But the degree to which technologists believe these changes will take place varies from firm to firm. For example, 82 percent of technologists at Oracle believe that Biden will loosen restrictions on hiring skilled foreign-born workers, versus the 58 percent at Uber who think the same. Heres that full breakdown:

Its a similar situation when it comes to the potential for Biden to increase the pipeline of foreign-born workers: The majority of those at companies such as Bloomberg and VMware seem to believe thats going to come to pass, whereas those at Facebook, Uber, and Intel are much less convinced:

Substantial portions of technologists also believe that a Biden administration is going to end the executive orders that the Trump administration used to limit immigration via the H-1B and other means:

In the days preceding the election, Dicecompared the respective H-1B policies of Biden and Donald Trump. Although the Trump administration has spent the past four years tweaking H-1B policy, including the visas wage and skill requirements, Bidens campaign suggested it will revert to many Obama-era immigration policies.

Although Republican control of the Senate (which could very well happen, depending on Januarys run-off elections in Georgia) could prevent a President Biden from pushing through broad-based immigration reform, a Biden administration could still reverse many of Trumps executive orders. In addition, Biden could order U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to re-adjust their recent changes to visa requirements (such as a selection systembased on H-1B applicants potential salaries).

Over atForbes, theres an extensive breakdown of the other ways that Biden could adjust immigration policy, including tweaking the per-country limit for employment-based immigration. In the meantime, though, it seems that many technologists at the nations largest technology companies believe that big changes to immigration policy are coming.

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Tech Immigration, H-1B Reform on the Way, Most Big Tech Employees Think - Dice Insights

As information warfare exposes two completely different versions of reality concerning the presidential election, the Senate is slated to grill the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter about their ongoing roles in censoring and suppressing election-related content.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have both agreed to testifyin a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 17, less than three weeks after sitting in the hot seat before the Senate Commerce Committee on October 28.

While hardly anybody expects any meaningful action to ever come out of these big tech hearings in Congress, what is said under oath can later be used as fodder to feed legal actions in other jurisdictions.

For example, less than three months after Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee on July 29, the Department of Justice and 11 state attorneys generalsmacked his company with an antitrust lawsuit on October 20, and the accusations put forthmirrored those of lawmakers who made the same exact claims during Congressional hearings.

With the current US presidential election still in limbo nine days after the November 3 election day, Facebook and Twitter have been censoring and slapping disputed claims warnings on posts that allege evidence of election improprieties, including flagging nearlyhalf of all the US presidents social media posts.

Donald Trumps Twitter feed is full of censored tweets. #Election2020 #elections pic.twitter.com/wRSIpThHMM

Kamil Karamali (@KamilKaramali) November 5, 2020

Claims of irregularities in the election process are being marked as disputed on social media, but certain facts remain:

Meanwhile, both Zuckerberg and Dorsey are slated to be put under oath next Tuesday to give testimony on the decisions their companies made to censor and suppress content during the presidential election,and anything the big tech CEOs say on record can and will be used against them.

Through the questions they ask and the accusations they fling, lawmakers tip their hands to show where they will strike big tech next

As bureaucratic and slow the US Congress is, one silver lining is that the hearings can show glimpses of things to come.

Through the questions they ask and the accusations they fling, lawmakers tip their hands to show where they will strike big tech next, such as removing big tech immunity under Section 230.

For example, Senator Josh Hawley recently went on the highest-rated cable TV news show in history to say that that Congress must act now to take away the special immunity [under Section 230] that these tech companies get for this censorship.

#BigTech will keep right on censoring & spying & cheating until Congress stops it. Its that simple. Congress must quit talking and ACT pic.twitter.com/WnqMl9np01

Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) October 29, 2020

Other Senate Judiciary Committee members who will also grill Dorsey and Zuckerberg next week have publicly addressed their concerns over the selective censorship on Twitter and Facebook to which the CEOs struggled to recall a single person whom they censored on the left (when pressed during the last hearing), but could readily give examples of those instances on the right.

In the October hearing, Senator Mike Lee, who is on both the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees, told the big tech CEOs, There is a disparity between the censorship of conservative and liberal points of view, and its an enormous disparity [] But given the disparate impact of who gets censored on your platforms, it seems that youre either one: not enforcing your terms of service equally, or alternatively, two: that youre riding your standards to target conservative viewpoints.

A brave patriot. More & more people are stepping forward to expose this Rigged Election! https://t.co/DfOVDQu2Qp

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2020

Next weeks scheduled hearing on big tech censorship during the election was put into motion before November 3, but the evidence of censorship has been growing ever since, and America still doesnt know who will be president in 2021.

The media has projected victory for Joe Biden, and theres a very good chance that the claim could later be proven accurate, but as of today, the election isnt over.

Court battles are being fought, and the information warfare rages on.

Citizens of a free nation cannot make informed decisions when they are restricted from sharing and reviewing the counterarguments

Censoring the views of nearly half the country only amplifies the confusion, anger, and hostility that has already polarized the nation.

Citizens of a free nation cannot make informed decisions when they are restricted from sharing and reviewing the counterarguments.

Censorship takes away the peoples ability to objectively evaluate all of the information at hand, which is especially dangerous in a social media environment where every side has a completely different version of reality based on the information they are permitted to see or not see.

But those who seek will surely find, and their paths to discovery may trod the alternative routes less traveled than the ones paved by big tech and media companies.

Conflicts of interest with Facebook censorship, the Atlantic Council, Burisma & politics: perspective

Facebook relied heavily on FBI briefings before trying to prevent NY Post story from spreading wildly: Zuckerberg

Twitter is sabotaging public discourse regarding important national and homeland security issues: DHS acting secretary

Twitter censored the NY Post for showing direct material to back up claims, violated hacked materials policy: Dorsey

Facebooks business model is poison & its algorithms amplify misinformation: digital forensics expert testifies

Social media services that I & others have built are tearing people apart: ex-Facebook ads chief testifies

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Facebook & Twitter CEOs to testify on big tech censorship during disputed presidential election - The Sociable

TipRanks

Were a little over one week past the Presidential election, and the market reaction shows that that investors are pleased. While the election margins were razor thin, the will of the voters came through: they rejected Donald Trump, and his brash, in-your-face style, but they also rejected the Democratic Party on policy; the Dems lost seats in the House, will likely not take control of the Senate, and also lost ground at the State level. Americas voters seem to be tired of drama, whether it comes from Donald Trump or the Democrats push to the political left. They want a government that will simply plod straight along.And it looks like they will get just that. With power split in the White House and the Chambers of Congress, were about to be reminded of a feature of the checks and balance system: that gridlock is a result of a closely divided electorate. Change wont happen unless one side or the other gets a large majority, or a small majority over several terms. Neither of those is in the cards for now.The immediate result is a multi-day market rally. The implication is clear the markets sentiment has calmed since the election, and investors look forward to government settling into a more normal mode in the coming months.To this end, investors are sure to find solid options in the near term. Writing from Raymond James, analyst Ric Prentiss has recently published three reviews on mid-cap stocks, pointing out why, in his view, they offer high return potential with more settled markets in the coming year. The stocks all fit a profile: they are at the lower end of the mid-cap range, with market valuations between $2 billion and $3 billion; they inhabit the telecom ecosystem, and they all have, according to Raymond James, over 80% upside potential. We ran the the three through TipRanks database to see what other Wall Street's analysts have to say about them.Telephone & Data Systems (TDS)First on our list, Telephone & Data Systems, is a Chicago-based company providing a range of telecom services to over 6 million customers. The company offers broadband over cable and wireline, wireless products and services, and TV and voice services. TDS operates the countrys fifth-largest cellular carrier.TDS has dramatically outperformed expectations in 2020, despite the ongoing coronavirus. Revenues, at $1.32 billion, are about level with the pre-corona report ($1.34 billion in Q4 2019), while earnings jumped in 1Q20 and have remained high ever since. The Q3 earnings, at 66 cents, beat the forecast by 153%. It was an impressive performance, made more so by the 266% year-over-year growth.On another bright note for investors, TDS has maintained its dividend payment through the year. The 17-cent per common share payout annualizes to 68 cents, and offers a yield of 3.6%, nearly double the average yield found among S&P-listed companies.TDS has shown strong business through the year, but its weak point has been in the fiber and wireline niche. However, Raymond James Ric Prentiss looks at the half-full glass, noting: "WFH policies have continued to result in some slower approvals from municipalities and electrical utilities associated with building aerial fiber. And in some cases, TDS is pivoting to alternatives with better economics. Still, TDS Telecom grew fiber service addresses 5% y/y and is seeing better-than-expected take rates around 30-40%, depending on the market. Moreover, 34% of Wireline customers are now served by fiber, compared to 29% a year ago, and TDS expects acceleration throughout the rest of 2020."Prentiss rates TDS as a Strong Buy, and increased his price target by 6% to $34. At that level, he sees an 81% upside for the stock over the next months. (To watch Prentisss track record, click here)This stock also holds a Strong Buy rating from the analyst consensus, based on 3 unanimous Buy reviews set in recent weeks. Shares are priced at $18.73 and the average target of $34.83 suggests a one-year upside of 85.5%. (See TDS stock analysis on TipRanks)ViaSat, Inc. (VSAT)Next up, ViaSat, is a high-speed satellite broadband provider. The California company serves commercial and defense markets, building on the broad need, across industries, for secure communications.Social lockdown measures took a toll on the companys business, especially the shutdowns of airlines. Commercial air traffic relies heavily on satellite communications, and that slowdown is still weighing on ViaSat.The headwinds are partially offset by a backlog in services ordered. Revenues have remained stable over the past four quarters, between $530 million and $588 million, with the $554 million recorded in Q3 being solidly in the middle of that range. Earnings have bounced back into positive territory after turning negative in Q2. The third quarter EPS was only 3 cents, but that was a dramatic sequential improvement from the previous 20-cent net loss.In his look at VSAT, Prentiss notes, Government Systems and Commercial Networks remain strong, while the IFC business continues to navigate significant headwinds related to COVID-19 On the positive side, social distancing and Safer-At-Home policies are driving more residential broadband data usage and pushing ARPUs higherPrentiss rates VSAT an Outperform (i.e. Buy) while his $63 price target suggests an 87% upside potential.Overall, ViaSat gets a Moderate Buy rating from the analyst consensus, based on 3 reviews that include 2 Buys and 1 Hold. The shares have an average price target of $53.33, which implies a 12-month upside of 59% from the trading price of $33.39. (See VSAT stock analysis on TipRanks)EchoStar Corporation (SATS)Last but not least is EchoStar, another satellite operator. This company controls a constellation of communications satellites, offering satcom capabilities to the media and private enterprises, as well as both civilian and military US government agencies. In addition, EchoStar provides satellite broadband in 100 countries around the world.At the top line, EchoStar's revenues have held steady for the past three quarters, coming in at $465 million, $459 million, and $473 million. And while earnings were negative in Q1 and Q2, the Q3 results showed a net profit of 26 cents per share.The sequential Q3 improvements at the top and bottom lines come along with increases in the EchoStars subscriber base, to more than 1.54 million in total. The company also boasts a strong balance sheet, having more than $2.5 billion in cash on hand and no net debt.Covering SATS, Ric Prentiss is upbeat about near- and mid-term prospects. He writes, SATS [has] strategic optionality in a time when others, especially higher levered satellite companies, are cash starved facing significant maturities or capex programs we think a number of organic and inorganic growth options are being considered, including the future deployment of SBand spectrum after lining up anchor tenant(s). Lastly, we believe EchoStar's recently announced collaboration with Inmarsat to provide capacity for In-Flight Connectivity should provide over time high margin cash flows, and we note the deal is not exclusive.These comments back another Strong Buy rating, and Prentisss $57 target price indicates room for 123% growth in the next year. In terms of other analyst activity, it has been relatively quiet. 1 Buy and 1 Hold ratings assigned in the last three months add up to a Moderate Buy analyst consensus. In addition, the $43.50 average price target puts the upside potential at ~74%. (See SATS stock analysis on TipRanks)To find good ideas for stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks equity insights.Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.

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Stocks Rise to 10-Week High With Rally in Big Tech: Markets Wrap - Yahoo Finance