The Guardian view on taming technology: it’s out of control

Can even a man with Nick Clegg’s record of unblemished political success rescue Facebook’s reputation? There is an awful symmetry in Sir Nick’s move from British politics to Facebook. In his earlier career, he stood for a posture of responsibility without power, of careless promises to which he was later held by an unforgiving electorate. In his new one there will be more of the same. Facebook too has a long record of cheap rhetoric about democracy and bringing people together – alongside a record of acting as a tool for destabilising democracies and in some cases for the encouragement of genocide in Myanmar or the organisation of mob violence through its WhatsApp subsidiary in Sri Lanka.

Facebook, just like the Liberal Democrats, is now trying to restore its tattered image with the general public. Its recent announcement that it will bring as much transparency as it can to the business of political advertising in the UK is welcome, but does not address the question of who recently spent £250,000 on a targeted campaign against Theresa May’s Chequers deal.

Perhaps, though, it is more fair to see Sir Nick as a singularly unlucky politician rather than a singularly unprincipled one. It is certainly unfair to regard Facebook as a uniquely unprincipled and dangerous advertising company. They are all at it. Google, eight years after it pulled out from China after being asked to censor the results of its search engine there, has now admitted it is working on a pre-censored search engine, codenamed “Project Dragonfly” for that market. This will not only blacklist such search terms as “human rights”, according to one scientist who resigned rather than work on it; it will also tie user’s queries to their phone numbers. Yet earlier this autumn Google withdrew from a possible $10bn contract with the Pentagon, in case this should conflict with the ethics of its AI program.

Any ethical discussion of the uses of artificial intelligence needs to take account of the degree to which it already pervades our everyday lives. The cameras in today’s smartphones are distinguished far more by their software, which use AI techniques to enhance photographs, than by the hardware behind them. The same kinds of technological tricks are needed to make surveillance cameras more efficient. Nor is it only governments who can misuse these powers. Ordinary teenagers can use photographs for bullying and harassment and some do.

All of these practically magical technologies have been developed in the service of the mass manipulation of our emotions and indeed our intellect which the advertising industry requires. They are deeply embedded in the corruption of politics by untraceable advertising. YouTube, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is now the primary source of news for young people in the US and possibly here as well. This has been exploited by far-right groups as well as jihadis.

The problem here is not only that the company’s recommendation algorithms lead inexorably towards edgier and sometimes extremist material. There are also networks of entirely conscious and purposeful rightwing commenters, ranging from “scientific racists” to those animated by a hatred of Muslims or of feminists, who add lustre and legitimacy to one another.

It’s easy to laugh at Sir Nick. But in his new job, as in his old, he has identified some real problems. We must hope that someone comes up with better solutions than he and his party managed.