Imagine you are the chairman of Phillip Morris in 1995. You control one of the biggest companies in the world, absolutely full of cash. You also know that your product is just bad all around for everybody whether they use it or not. One of your corporate lawyers tells you that you need to immediately break yourself up, sell off all the components to foreign buyers, cease all operations in the United States, and cash out the company to the shareholders. You pass; this will be no big deal. The next three years are living hell, morning to night sitting in a courthouse listening to your customers detail how you destroyed their lives. At the end you get a $200B settlement against you, your company is dead, everybody hates you, and you are no longer welcome in any of your social circles. Was it worth it? If a company is required to do the best thing for the shareholders, then shouldn’t it require them to cash out at the zenith of their value? Otherwise if they are going to ride all the way down, how is the stock ever worth anything?
Phillip Morris didn't operate a sophisticated propaganda machine capable of steering national opinion in its own favor and indeed directing the course of democracy (if we are to believe that foreign actors can side-channel attack Twitter's algos to influence elections, then it naturally follows that Twitter can influence elections with direct control over its algorithms). I don't mean this in a contrarian sense (I agree with you), moreso just venting my pessimism that things will change.
I wasn't using "machine" in the figurative sense of an advertising department, I meant "a literal machine", like Twitter's algorithms. I can't imagine Phillip Morris in its heyday having 1% of the influence that Twitter enjoys today.
I'm not sure why we have gone down this rabbit hole, but you're just mistaken.
Phillip Morris used its propaganda to lie to people about health risks and "benefits" of smoking, sold an addictive product to addicts, and used its resulting people power to subvert democratic decisions.
It didn't do this with transistor technology, sure. But cigarettes have hugely more Daily Active Users than Twitter, still today.
You're insisting on fighting that straw man. Yes, Phillip Morris used propaganda and influenced a politician here or there. That's fundamentally different than Twitter, whose very essence is a machine for influencing people at scale, including who they vote for. At a certain point, a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind.
You could argue that "airplanes are no different than hot-air balloons" on the basis that they're both aerial modes of transportation, and you'd be right in the strict sense that you've framed the debate, but you'd be ignoring the original point and steering the debate away from anything that might be considered insightful. Frankly, I don't have any interest in engaging in that kind of discourse (and also it's generally against the spirit of this forum).
