Marie Santini discusses tech platforms' lack of transparency 28 July 2023
Rose Marie Santini, Professor of Social Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro offered two core takeaways during the Profiteering panel at from the Cambridge Disinformation Summit meetings:
1) Tech platforms offer anonymity and scale and fight transparency, and
2) Regulatory fines seem to be internalized as normal business expenses by the larger tech platforms.
“For all the actors, including the big techs, …we can monitor and identify a lot of ads…completely designed with disinformation narratives, but we cannot identify clearly who is paying for that, because these platforms guarantee anonymity at the same time as scale. …They do not give us transparency.
So, we don’t have transparency about their recommendation systems,…about who paid for the ads,…about the users behind fake accounts and things like that.
And when the Justice [Department] asks for data in Brazil, they refuse to give. …[Enforcement agencies] impose them a fine and they prefer to pay the fine than to send the data about these users, because their business model depends on that.”
[recorded 28 July 2023 at King's College, Cambridge]