The business model of Google, Facebook, and Twitter went from technical service providers to GULAG or concentration camp:
- They treat the users not as customers, but as inmates. They have almost no customer service. Instead, they have content moderators—the equivalent of prison guards. A moderator / prison guard is the most numerous job in these companies.
- Respectively, instead of providing services they attempt to prevent us from saying or doing forbidden things.
- They also try to prevent the inmates from escaping. GFT don’t need walls and guard towers – their products are addictive enough to keep many inmates close. But they also take hostages – a man cannot leave Facebook if his friends are held by it.
- This said, the walls have been erected. Apple & Google banned Gab from their online stores and keep blocking other escape routes. They went as far as to collectively attack Mastodon – an open source software that allows creating decentralized communities competing with Twitter.
- Facebook and Twitter make money from content created by their inmates without any compensation, literally slave labor.
- They don’t talk to us, but research us and experiment on us.
Tech against Terrorism and Global Network Initiative justify treating internet users this way by calling some speech “violent extremism” and equating it with terrorism.
Examples of experimentation: Google’s Rapid UX Research; Google’s User Researcher – Trust & Safety (job), Facebook experiments with users’ emotions; If You’re a Facebook User, You’re Also a Research Subject; or Twitter 1 and 2.