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Big Tech

a compilation of important notes

Definitions

  • Big Tech / FAGMA: Word/Acronym used to describe the five largest tech companies in the world, namely Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple
  • Sometimes includes Tesla and Nvidia (FAANG)
  • Apple was the first of these to achieve a two trillion dollar valuation in August 2020
  • The combined net worth of these five, in addition to five other top tech companies, rounds up to a whopping nine trillion dollars.
  • BATX: Acronym used to describe China's four largest tech companies, that being Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi.
  • ByteDance is often counted into this list, despite it's name being missing from the actual acronym
  • Beijing has, over the past two years, started to crack down on these companies, especially Alibaba.

Scandals and Problems

  • The NSA Scandal: It was revealed in 2013 that America's NSA and their British counterpart had been stealing information secretively from users of Google, Yahoo and many other tech products, with the creators of the products being completely oblivious to this happening. This led to widespread fear regarding government surveillance and stigmated views against Big Tech.
  • Classified as "surveillance", since the data was used as a form of targeted monitoring to triangulate individuals based on the others' relative positions in order to identify potential threats.
  • The Cambridge Analytica Scandal: In 2016, after Trump's victory at the Election, it was revealed that the company it was working with, Cambridge Analytica, had been surreptitiously stealing data from Facebook users and in an effort to manipulate and brainwash them, by showing people against Trump's campaign more positive articles about his work to influence their decision to work. This massive scandal led to widespread stigma against Big Tech and especially Facebook, which had yet to come into the line of fire. However, Facebook was the most severely hit, with the years that followed being some of its worst.
  • The Rohingya Genocide and Facebook's Involvement: The Rohingya Genocide happened as a result of the overly stigmatized views of people against the Rohingya Muslims, a set of muslims often considered some of the, if not the most discriminated people in the world. During the genocide, many of the military officers went on Facebook posing as popular individuals and purposely incited hate speech, which was one of the main catalysts for the truly inhumane acts that followed.
  • The Christchurch Shootings: In March 2019, a man openly streamed his video on Facebook Live as he went and shot nearly 51 people in 2 mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in an effort to spread hate speech towards the Muslim population in New Zealand. The videos surfaced on Facebook, with many audience members surprisingly cheering on for the act to continue, leaving a bleak shot of the white nationalism ever present in Oceania today. While this may not be fully attributed to Facebook, it was nonetheless a display of one of Facebook's weakest moments.
  • The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haughen: An ex-employee of Facebook, Frances Haughen had been secretly copying and storing hundreds of internal files in Facebook with regards to research it had done on the impacts of its algorithms to better serve their purpose as a tech company, and shared it with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), leading to the creation of the "Facebook Files" series at the WSJ. Research done by Facebook itself found that
  • angrier posts often got higher engagements, hence in 2018, Facebook's algorithms were reconfigured to give priority to these posts in user feeds. An implication of this would entail that more individuals would be angrier while reading the post and it is definitely possible that it may have led to incitement of more hate speech. This is incredibly problematic, but Facebook's insistence to focus on the profit made by more user retention due to this algorithm led to this being left to the wayside by the developers.
  • During the sudden appearance of the pandemic, a large number of posts with contradictory information was shared on these social media platforms that left many users excessively confused. In fact, a study by the National Centre of Infectious Diseases (NCID) revealed that 6 in 10 Singaporeans received fake information regarding the pandemic. This information overload, or "infodemic", as termed by the World Health Organisation (WHO), has led to the spread of excessive amounts of misinformation.
  • During events like the excessive aftermath of George Floyd's death and the Taliban's take-over of Afghanistan, an incredible number of posts led to these events being blown out of proportion.

  • The Capitol Riots and Trump's Ban: After the absolutely horrific events of January 6th 2021, where a mob of individuals barreled their way into the US Capitol Building in support of Trump after his recent loss in the presidential elections, Trump was permanently banned from multiple social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. YouTube also banned him, and Apple and Google both refused to offer the Parler, which was commonly associated with Trump and his followers, on their respective mobile app stores. This was followed officially with the impeachment of Trump just a few short days of his term, but it also painted a picture of just how powerful Big Tech Countries, with their act of censorship making them act more like a government than a group of businesses.

  • WhatsApp's Privacy Settings: In the beginning of 2021, millions of people around the globe received a message on their phones that WhatsApp was updating their privacy settings such that certain data would be stored by WhatsApp. Being an application recently acquired by Facebook, this message led to immediate terror and uproar amongst the general populace, with many worldwide immediately deleting the app and switching to Telegram and Signal, the latter of which was instigated by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. While these concerns ended up being overexaggerated, it was still notable that the general populace has become more receptive to privacy concerns and the impacts that these settings could have.