Åsa Wikforss: "We are in an experimental workshop"

Technological developments are progressing rapidly and several computer engineers in the Silicon valley south of San Francisco have begun to question what they themselves have created and created. The question of the advancement of technology has almost always interested philosophers - and now tech experts have also begun to take an interest in ethics and philosophy.

- We are in an experimental workshop right now. We wake up and see that our way of communicating has fundamentally changed. What should we do? says Åsa Wikforss, professor of theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University.

As a philosopher, Åsa Wikforss is interested in what is truth and knowledge, and since 2016 she has also opened her eyes to social media. It was with the US election and the Brexit vote in the UK, when it became clear that the democratic processes were the subject of social media influence and disinformation campaigns, which she realized the platforms are both powerful and potentially dangerous. In 2017, she came out with the book Alternative Facts: Knowledge and Its Enemies.

- Social media illustrates how dependent we are on others as we shape our worldview. We get a part of our worldview from what we ourselves experience, but quite a bit. Most of it comes from other sources, such as books, magazines, television and radio, for example, and continues:

- As the technology around those sources changes, our worldview will also change in a rather radical way. And it will be exploited in this way now.

Unlike in the research world and traditional media, where responsibility for proper content and personal integrity rests with publishers and is subject to internal review, platforms such as Facebook and Google work with ex-post review. This means that inappropriate content is removed only when it is discovered or reported.

The reason that is usually stated is that the companies deal with such a large amount of information that a preliminary examination of all content would be impossible.

- The problem has been that these tech giants have said that they are not publicists but a "platform" where people can write what they want. Therefore, they did not want to go in and take that responsibility over the content. But now you realize that that line doesn't really hold.

In addition, social media does not choose the content we should look at based on, for example, the principle of traditional news media that the most important and biggest news is first seen. It is the information that companies such as Facebook and Google collect about us when we use social media that largely controls what information we receive from our feeds.

- There is a contradiction here. For me, it is a difficult equation to get together if you want to build the content on users' engagement, so that companies can collect information about us in order to make money on targeted ads, while also having a flow of accurate and credible information, says Åsa Wikforss .