US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account briefly went offline when a Twitter customer support employee pulled the plug on the account on his last day at work. On the face of it, this might seem a harmless enough 11-minute interlude in which the much derided “tweeter-in-chief” disappeared from the public platform from which he constantly addresses the US audience and even world leaders as he did during the North Korea nuclear crisis. The employee of the tech titan may have had innocent fun or he may even have been an activist who felt he must strike in an act of defiance on Mr Trump’s Twitter tirades against various personalities, including American football players. Beyond the sarcasm Mr Trump’s brief absence triggered, the incident carries serious implications. If this can happen to the social media platform handle of one of the world’s most powerful men, imagine the power that the technology titans wield.
There are huge issues concerning tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter in today’s world dominated by public interaction on their platforms. Three US congressional committees grilled the three firms last week about their enabling Russian propaganda to spread during the 2016 elections. Such is their sweep and hold on people that the tech titans may have played a big role in Mr Trump becoming the President of US. The power to influence public opinion may have passed on to the cloud as it were as the Internet rules the world. Little can be done to prevent politicians from profiting from such trends. What is more fearsome is how explosive the situation can be if a leader’s social media platform account is controlled by someone within the technology organisations who can create mischief, even sow discord between nations by tampering with tweets and posts.
As the world’s leaders like Mr Trump and Narendra Modi use these platforms to not only communicate with the people but also sometimes make policy pronouncements through them, it becomes important to know who controls the tech platforms. Are checks tight enough within the tech titans to ensure the damage that a single employee could wreak won’t be repeated? While human oversight is needed to check the occasional aberrations of algorithms, it’s unthinkable what might happen if artificial intelligence in the form of bots simply takes over everything and human supervision is entirely removed because of the possibility of adverse action as in the case of Mr Trump’s Twitter handle. At a time when everything that can be hacked is probably hacked, this matter of controls over technology becomes vital. The power to influence elections is a frightening thought. Renegade tech commerce like the Russian kind is available for a price and might be induced to take an interest in the Indian general elections of 2019 too.
