Facebook, YouTube and Brazil

A rather depressing article in the latest NYRB (reference 1) about government in Brazil and the influence of the likes of Facebook and YouTube on same. Reference 2, by a reporter from the New York Times, is offered by way of a fuller story, now en-route from Amazon.

One half of the story seems to be that Brazil is a conservative society. We are told, for example, that maybe 60% of Brazilians oppose the legalisation of abortion. On which subject, reference 3 makes for grim reading. They are very prone to get angry about gays, druggies and commies. Keen on guns. A country with a penchant for government by generals or their proxies.

The other half seems to be that the country is awash with awful content hosted by Facebook, YouTube and others of that ilk. Content which includes what most of us here in the UK would regard as ridiculous conspiracy theories about COVID vaccines. In which connection, Bolsonaro is said to have presided over a catastrophically irresponsible response to the pandemic. Except that checking with Wikipedia, the headline story seems to be that Brazil with 210m people had around 0.7m deaths, while the much richer US with 330m had 1.1, so in both cases around 0.3%  of the population. And the UK was much the same. But I dare say I am missing something.

While Fisher's book argues that what interests Facebook and YouTube is profit - they might even get sanctimonious about their bounden duty to do their best by their shareholders. But their profits are mainly payments by advertisers, payments which are tightly coupled to the number of clicks. And tripe & worse seem to do much better in that department than the truth. With the result that all this tripe is amplified by algorithm and goes on to seed all kinds of confusion, nonsense and lies in the minds of citizens across the world. Particularly, I imagine not very well educated citizens in poorer parts of the world. Not least, it seems, in Brazil, where there is a horrendous amount of tripe swirling, not to say swilling, about. With the generation of all this tripe being a substantial industry in its own right. With the result that the forces of decency there are hard put to it to hold back the Bolsonaros. Fisher argues that Facebook could easily shut their share of this stuff down, but chooses not to, preferring the revenue stream. Hopefully I will get around to reading this part of his argument.

Maybe it is just as well that not many Anglophones speak Portuguese.

PS 1: one does not feel great buying stuff from Amazon, given the monstrous wealth of the founder and the way that he treats his workforce. But who together do provide a good service, despite the irritation generated by all the invitations to join Amazon Prime.

PS 2: the next day: I came across an organisation called NetBlocks this morning, an organisation which, inter alia, monitors censorship of the Internet by governments, often by instructing Internet service providers to throttle back or block access to nominated websites. Which is sometimes a good thing, but is all too often authoritarians trying to block access by their fellow citizens to alternative views of the world. Not the same thing at all as trying to weed out the tripe above. See references 4 and 5.

References

Reference 1: Brazil at the Crossroads: Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures - Vanessa Barbara, New York Review of Books - 2023.

Reference 2: The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World - Max Fisher - 2022.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Brazil.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBlocks.

Reference 5: https://netblocks.org/.