Opinion | The first regulation for big tech should be to guard mental health
4 min read . Updated: 24 Jun 2019, 03:50 PM ISTThose who monitor content endure audio-visual content that graphically depicts man’s inhumanity to man
The media has been all agog over the last few weeks with news that Facebook Inc. is launching a crypto-currency of its own called “Libra" backed by blockchain technology. Unlike the blockchain-based Bitcoin, which is a roller-coaster, Libra will be backed by a basket of fiat currencies. It is to be supported by a consortium of large-scale corporate houses, e-commerce players, financial services firms and venture capitalists. Companies such as Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., Uber Technologies Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc. have all signed up.
Facebook has over 2 billion users worldwide, and it is clear that it can influence the system. Yet, it appears as if Facebook will attempt to distance itself somewhat from the crypto-coin by not controlling it directly. Members of its consortium, called the “Libra Association", will also not control the currency directly either.
The secretive project is actually based on two old methods, one organizational and the other technical. The first is the use of a consortium to back a clearing-house. Each member of the consortium provides a ‘node’ for its systems to interact with a common messaging technology platform across the consortium. This is not very different than the earlier methods that bank consortia have used while building settlement systems such as the Global Straight Through Processing Association or GSTPA. GSTPA was set up in the late 1990s and 2000s to allow financial-services firms a technology platform for the faster settlement of cash and securities transactions. It is now a relic; just one of the many incremental technological attempts to a create financial payments and settlement systems that were close to real-time. The second old method is the use of blockchain, a technology method that has been in place for a dozen years.
Governments worry about their fiat currencies and would like to manage exchange rates and liquidity and to restrict money laundering and terrorist financing. But UN reports on migrant workers suggest that they lose over $25 billion a year in exorbitant fees when they try to send money home using traditional methods available today. Young adults the world over have little to no patience with onerous banking systems of the past. Neither do hundreds of millions of Indians who have come online recently. All of these classes of people would benefit from an easy way to make both national and international money transfers. Facebook and its collaborators are on to something big.
As I have written before, control over user data will be the new trade barrier that is set up across the world. Last week, President Donald Trump went so far as to say that countries that mandate that their citizens’ user data remains resident in their own countries will face a backlash in the processing of H1-B work visas for the United States. This was a pointed reference to India, which fills up 70% or more of the H1-B slots that come up every year. This is in addition to minimum wage floors already assigned to these visas.
The Chinese won’t find this particularly bothersome. They built a “Great Wall" around their homegrown internet companies many years ago. The wall largely kept Western firms like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Uber out through draconian laws and other market moves. Facebook is banned outright in China. Crypto-currencies are banned in India. Other countries have been very wary of allowing a free-for-all for cypto-currency. It is understandable that Facebook is trying to distance itself from the management of the Libra Association consortium. There will be plenty of jockeying in this space before nation-states come to a common ground, and it is wise to wait it out. The company has already waited for almost five years; its first moves came in June 2014 when it hired PayPal’s President David Marcus.
While countries will be quick to regulate the movement of money, they are not so quick to regulate mental health. And this is where the true travesty of Big Tech’s omnipotence lies. A disturbing report in theverge.com was mentioned in Mint last week and pointed to the underbelly of the social networking world. Facebook, Google and other social networking firms allegedly do not pay much attention to their workers (or, in reality, workers from firms who contract to them) who monitor their giant sites for objectionable content. Some observers feel that this is because these firms believe that Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to take over the jobs of the hundreds of humans who check objectionable content on their platforms.
The article in theverge.com presented a chilling and disturbing view into the operations of an IT service provider retained by Facebook to monitor content on its platform. The article started off with the story of an employee who died of a heart attack while he was at work, and the aftermath of his passing. It also went on to describe working conditions for these workers and the sheer horror of what they have to see online day after day. These guardians of our mental health are poorly paid and have to endure audio-visual content that graphically depicts man’s inhumanity to man, and to other sentient beings. These are the manual scavengers of Big Tech, who clean up the filth that twisted human beings put up online.
Maybe the US government can start by mandating that these local workers are paid large sums of money for their heroic service rather than mandating pay floors for skilled H1B workers. Or put its police force in charge.
Siddharth Pai is founder of Siana Capital, a venture fund management company focused on deep science and tech in India
