11 ms·

Majority of US teens have lost trust in Big Tech

207 points by Tomte 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
It’s an interesting survey but I wonder if more nuanced questions would reveal more. Perhaps those who distrust big tech in the survey still have some platform they use and think is fine. Maybe all the people answering believe they’re the enlightened ones using the one correct platform while distrusting the rest, but they each have different ideas on which one is trustworthy.
robertlagrant 2y ago
> companies like Google, Apple, Meta, TikTok, and Microsoft cared about their well-being and safety I wonder if this is the right question. No company I know cares about my well-being and safety, except for my employer.
- akkad33 2y ago
  Why do you think your employer cares about your well-being and safety?
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    You get the point I'm making, right?
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    Can't work when you're dead or insane?
    - chrsw 2y ago
      Just hire someone else.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      Some fairly bad faith people like to say "Slaves couldn't have been poorly treated, they were an expensive investment, like a grain harvester, and no rational person would damage their own property like that". Except, we have ample evidence that people would beat, rape, murder, fuck around with, starve, and otherwise destroy their "investment" regularly, sometimes because "it will keep the others in line", but plenty often just fucking because. Because humans are not rational. Farmers just doing what they believed would be the most rational to make money was one of the main causes of the Dust Bowl. Your boss is human, and plenty able to do things that make you a LESS effective worker while adamantly believing you are just lazy.
  - kadushka 2y ago
    Cost of replacement
  - otikik 2y ago
    Small Bus Factor
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  Companies are incapable of caring about anything because they're not sentient beings — one of the biggest tricks they've played on us is referring to them as if they are. Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Shou Chew, Satya Nadella... if you were laying in a ditch on the side of the road they wouldn't even give you the time of day.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    Do you agree that it's a silly question to base things on?
    - micromacrofoot 2y ago
      Oh certainly, I'm just elaborating that "companies don't X" is part of the scam. Companies don't do anything, the people running them do.
roenxi 2y ago
Between this for new media channels and the breakdown of trust in old media channels there is a lot of reason to be hopeful about the future of the US. One of the big problems of the past was the insane level of trust in institutions that were at best credulous and more realistically just lying continuously and brazenly. It is a big win for the public discourse if people start applying cynicism where warranted. In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited. Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them.
- tomohelix 2y ago
  A society where people can trust each other and each individual has enough integrity to not violate that trust is, in my opinion, the closest we can get to a thriving utopia. The US was close to that back in the days. Maybe it was just nostalgia speaking but I felt a few decades ago, people were so much more "refined" and had respect for each others and themselves. Then some people took advantage of that. And it devolved. Now we have a country where the presidential candidates insult each other live on TV with straight up lies and deception. And the people cheer on. So yes, indeed we are having a breakdown of trust and a new paradigm is shifting in. Just that I don't think it is a good one.
  - codr7 2y ago
    I see what you see. But I'm not convinced the result is a disaster. Evolution moves in a spiral, every round brings new insights.
  - Hizonner 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Have you watched US presidential debates across the decades? (1992) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWo88Lr0rzw&t=102s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWo88Lr0rzw&t=102s They've objectively gotten meaner and dumber with each cycle.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
We really gotta start doing a better job of differentiating between tech companies and ad companies.
- zombot 2y ago
  Do you seriously hallucinate a difference there? I'd like to have what you're smoking.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    What percentage of Meta or Google do you suppose is actually working on technology? Yeah sure they have little moonshot side projects involving quantum computing or whatever, but data centers and surveillance and browser malware has all been around for decades. They've been moving the needle hardly any all. These are ad companies, or propaganda companies, or attention companies. They have malicious intent, and calling them technology companies confuses people into thinking that technology itself has malicious intent.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - zombot 2y ago
      This explains much better what you mean than your first comment. While I somewhat agree, I think that ship of using the wrong label has sailed long since. Which sells better: calling yourself a tech company, or a mercenary manipulator?
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        I think the comment you were replying to basically agrees with you, they are imputing that Facebook and Google are the ad companies. AMD, Intel, even NVIDIA (although they are feeding on a bubble that might eventually roundabout end in ads), those are tech companies.
feverzsj 2y ago
But they still use them daily. It's like put a commie sticker on your macbook.
- hagbarth 2y ago
  You can be critical of a system and still need to participate in it.
  - akimbostrawman 2y ago
    A Macbook (or any Apple product) isn't a essential item without alternatives. If you actually care there is almost always a way without it.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      The Apple brand has an alternative, but for most people the alternative is "Google" (for phones) or "Microsoft" (for 'proper computing'). I think I've got a Blackberry around somewhere, but the OS is so old it doesn't work with current-spec HTTPS. I've got some Pi's with Linux (and even RISC OS) on them, but I'm also a software developer, alternative OSes aren't what normal people want to spend their free time learning how to use just to get by in society. If you want to work with others in an office environment, you're using either Microsoft Office or Google Docs for your spreadsheets, word processing, and presentations, because even the really good document compatibility of Open Office isn't quite good enough. If you want to communicate with others at all, there is at least still email and webpages — those have not yet been totally subsumed by Gmail, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, DMing on X, etc. — but even then, not being available on major platforms is considered weird and eccentric and many potential contacts will drop you for that. (Anecdote about how little effort normal people are willing to put into tech: When I first moved to Germany, I tried to set up a local SIM card. You need to register your identity when setting up the card around here. There is (or was) an app/website for that. On my first attempt, the website customer support people thought that I couldn't use a Mac to talk to them even though I was at that moment using a Mac to talk to them and they knew it. Also they thought that their SIM cards only worked with Android.)
    - 2y ago
tayo42 2y ago
> 35% of teens think GenAI will make it harder to trust online information Your already supposed to not believe everything on the internet! Especially any one that makes short form videos, or asks you to comment to get a PDF.
- pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
  Doesn't mean generative models won't make it worse. Sure, maybe the advice given to you by an influencer in a short video was bunk, but at least you could be sure that they actually said it. Soon you won't be certain even of that.
elevatedastalt 2y ago
It's the nature of teenagers to be cynical and dislike anything people older than them do. There's nothing noteworthy about it.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  Shallow trope. PAst computer revolutions have involved teenagers enthusiastically greeting videogames, personal computers and so on and admiring the people who designed and built them.
  - Vampiero 2y ago
    john carmack is my spirit animal
  - elevatedastalt 2y ago
    I never said that teens are idiots. I said they are rebels. 20 years ago being a rebel meant having a GMail account instead of a hotmail or aol account. Today it means not having a GMail account.
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      I didn't say you did. Teens are natural rebels, but they don't reflexively rebel against anything, they have preferences and will enthusiastically get behind things they like. People are not one dimensional, they can seek novelty for orthogonal reasons to any rebellion they might have going on.
granzymes 2y ago
This report was published by Common Sense Media, an advocacy organization with a clear interest in pushing this message as part of their lobbying efforts. Maybe their intentions are good (they seem to back some good bills!), but it’s not a neutral source of information. If you look at polling data published as part of generic political surveys, you find that companies like Amazon and Meta are among the most trusted of U.S. institutions[0] (Amazon loses out only to the military). [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OgPzcB75uxXiFmTjUUb-ITIr7BFdFFhw/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OgPzcB75uxXiFmTjUUb-ITIr7BF...
- distortionfield 2y ago
  Trust is multi-faceted and although I trust Amazon to deliver me a toaster, i don’t for a second trust them to handle my audio or video in a manner I’m comfortable. This survey is talking about the latter kind of trust, not the former.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    Ye. The surveyees (is that a word?) probably interpret the question very differently. I mean up until 5 years ago I trusted Microsoft and Google to handle my mail, since I though I was too unimportant and it would to much of an effort to read my mails for them. But I in no way trusted them. Concerning Amazon I guess most trust they will have their toaster. Like the same question about Walmart would be about food safety and quality. Not corporate culture or long term political influence.
    - permo-w 2y ago
      Is there a private company whose corporate culture or long term political influence could be trusted? I feel like this has not been possible in the West at least since Friedman
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    I trust them to deliver “a toaster” but, like, not necessarily the exact one I ordered, right? Either the one I ordered or a knock-off copycat that made it into the bin.
colechristensen 2y ago
Ok. Fine, that’s how teens answered your survey (and it sounds like the surveyor had a bit of an agenda) But did you ask them if they cared or if their mistrust would guide their actions? Spoiler alert: not at all.
txdv 2y ago
I always thought the tech guys would be the good guys. That's probably because I'm also in tech. Good old knight fighting dragon and becoming a dragon after all :(
- DinoDad13 2y ago
  This is normal in business. Now that tech dominates they use that market position to setup monopolies. If we had functional anti-trust laws then it wouldn't feel so dire. Allowing monopolies in a capitalist system is the worst economic policy since socialism.
- stepanhruda 2y ago
  You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain
- 52-6F-62 2y ago
  This is why tech bros should read well beyond tech and don’t stop at Machiavelli like most do. The first dragon wasn’t the bad guy, but natural order. The new dragon now intends to usurp natural order. Technology can still help us, but it cannot save us. And it cannot be everything. It is one tool of many more intelligent tools besides.
hedayet 2y ago
From what I’ve observed, Google was an anomaly that helped build trust in Big Tech (and lured me into it). AFAIK, developers had strong reservations against Microsoft before the Google era, and it was only after Google’s rise that Silicon Valley became attractive to top talent, leading to a shift in the tech landscape. Now, with the decline of Google’s culture, that trust seems to be fading as well. Unlike traditional corporations, Google used to be trusted by investors, employees, users, and the general public — I can’t think of any other company that checked all these boxes.
- badlibrarian 2y ago
  General Electric had a good run and ticked those boxes, as did many corporations until the 1980s. Then incentives changed.
  - null_shift 2y ago
    Asking in good faith, what incentives changed exactly?
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#1970%E2%80%932000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#1970%E2%80%932000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#Reagan_administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#Reagan_administra...
- 42772827 2y ago
  Trust in “Big tech” reaches back into the early 20th century with Bell Labs. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend “The Master Switch” by Tim Wu: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/176/ https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/176/
  - scoofy 2y ago
    CTRL+F: "Tim Wu" I'm shocked and dismayed that this book is not more prominent. The book opened my eyes not only to the fact that these companies would become enshitty, but why they weren't in the first place.
godelski 2y ago
Teens? Trust has been broken for a much wider demographic. This problem has been foreseeable and people have been sounding the alarm for over a decade. Companies have centralized AND abused that centralization. We have products that fail at basic tasks while we're trying to push machine learning on people. I say this as a machine learning researcher, who fully believes that it's a powerful and useful technology. But there's so much that could be solved with a regex... we've focused so much on getting to the next target that we lost track of the destination. Much of coding has become glueing, copy paste from stack overflow, and results in not only the deletion of stupid dependencies that shouldn't exist, like leftpad, but we've gotten to a point where we say "don't over optimize" when someone suggests using best practices. You're not optimizing until you're running the profiler and you're not "over optimizing" until you're writing asm... We've just piled on decades of tech debt and forgot that the interest compounds. We moved fast and break things, which is great for learning or getting moving, but no one goes around fixing all the broken things. We have triple A games with hundreds of millions in budgets that can't run 4k@60fps on the best hardware. Half because there isn't enough VRAM and half because the code is so low quality and tries to eat as much VRAM as possible. We've been over promising and under-delivering. We aren't calling out blatant fraud and scams (e.g. Rabbit), but instead endorsing them and hyping them up. We forgot where we were going. We forgot all the implicit agreements. We make it difficult for young hackers to find that spark and joy of hacking computers for the sake of learning computers. We've become money focused. We've become prestige focused. We forgot that these things were just proxies. It used to be that the public would idolize Jobs and the technical people would idolize Woz. But now we all look to Jobs and forget Woz. You need both and we are cultivating one and not the other. We forgot that you can make the world better AND make hand over fist fulls of money at the same time. But it became where we started getting so much money that it no longer became about the money, but the high score. What happened to Google? Who led the way saying "devs make so much we can't entice them with more money, we will entice them with free lunch instead". Because the best programmers were in it for the love of the job, not for the money. We did this to ourselves. Slowly and little by little. But all those things compound. So now we're only left with one question: do we turn back, reinstitute the framework that has a proven track record of success, or do we see where this wild ride goes? Every single dev has a role in making that. Little things compound in both directions.
rcarmo 2y ago
Not just US teens. Mine use DuckDuckGo and avoid any kind of social media except WhatsApp (solely because it is so insidiously everywhere that teachers use it to communicate about class assignments, which I find atrocious).
- Havoc 2y ago
  The WhatsApp thing is very country specific. Some have super high penetration some not so much
ribadeo 2y ago
Seeing the obvious blatant grift spanning the crypto-currency and now LLM booms pales beside the general low hanging fruit noneffort that both the Slacks and Social Medias represent. These ain't no moonshots and the kids can smell it. The lack of moral fiber and general depth of character is plain for all to see. Meta is a joke for old people (facebook) and or your older sister/brother(instaglam). Xitter seems to have obviated the market for Truth or Parlez or The Daily Stormer or something, thereby only being relevant for overtly far right youth. This leaves us TikTok which them causes them to question the motives of political efforts to ban it. What are the kids supposed to take away from this contemporary debacle?
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > What are the kids supposed to take away from this contemporary debacle? That's a good question. As other comments have noted, "trust" is too complex a word for a clear discussion. With teens there's a different quality of affect. It's a time of life for seeking role models. Looking for adults and ideas you would like to be. It is more aspirational, morally and socially sensitive than mere transactional trust. In liberal democratic countries like USA or Britain young people grow up with the expectation of making choices and having a voice, so these affiliations really matter. We're seeing younger people realise, and clearly express their disgust at "tech leaders" and their companies. The kids are okay. The new generations of geeky kids realise that these people are not one of us [0] [0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/notoneofus/ https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/notoneofus/
ripped_britches 2y ago
Loved the part about whether companies would protect users if it hurt profits. This is kind of the ultimate question.
- krapp 2y ago
  I mean, the answer is obviously "no."
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Believe it or not, there was a time in the not-too-distant past where Big Tech meant Microsoft selling boxed copies of MS Office at retailers, in exchange for money. And if the KKK happened to buy Microsoft Office to do their word processing - well, it's no different to them buying a typewriter. If the KKK wanted to put their stuff online, it certainly wouldn't be hosted on Microsoft's website, surrounded by Microsoft branding and ads that pay Microsoft - there were no "platforms", they'd have to make their own HTML and upload it to their own hosting provider. And the nearest thing to "Social Media" was hundreds of tiny phpBB forums, IRC channels and suchlike, administered by genuine human beings, and for minimal reward. Censorship meant blocking mentions of viagra and cialis, which everyone knew were obvious spam. You can't put profits before users when there aren't any profits. And of course the guy with ops in the #north-west-london-anime IRC channel is going to look out for the users, they're his buddies. Algorithmic news feeds hadn't been invented; the front page of Slashdot was whatever CmdrTaco and Hemos decided to post. Clickbait? Ragebait? Parody story mistaken for real? Dupe of a story from yesterday? They just wouldn't post it, simple. Into this unbelievable environment came a tech company whose goal was to "organise the world's information" with the guiding principle "don't be evil" and such was the hope and optimism at the time, people treated such claims as literally true.
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      Hairyfeet, is that you?
    - emchammer 2y ago
      The technology is not really very interesting any longer, it's just a channel between behaviors. It is not as difficult to discern between wearing-a-chicken-suit-carrying-a-bazooka crazy, and underhanded scheming, and people having a hard time. I saw pictures of young people dressing up and posing to re-create Soviet-era propaganda posters literally on a Chinese app called Little Red Book.
OutOfHere 2y ago
If you want an example of a scalable trustless system that works, look no further than Bitcoin Lightning. In general, with cryptocurrencies, if you don't follow the established communication protocol, you not only get ignored, but also penalized, reliably so. It's a system that works. We need more protocols of engagement, with automatic escalating consequences for misbehavior, and also a good faith means to improve or fork the protocol.
scarface_74 2y ago
In economics, there is a concept of “revealed preference”. 80%+ of teens own iPhones https://www.pymnts.com/consumer-insights/2023/apple-iphone-remains-teens-preferred-mobile-device/ https://www.pymnts.com/consumer-insights/2023/apple-iphone-r... And this is the percent of teens on various social media platforms https://www.sentiment.io/how-many-teens-use-social-media/#t-1705002742694 https://www.sentiment.io/how-many-teens-use-social-media/#t-...
- bee_rider 2y ago
  The alternative to an iPhone is an Android phone. They are both big tech, but one is built by a fairly invasive anti-competitive villain, while the other is build by the flagship company of surveillance capitalism. No good option, but one is clearly worse, right?
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    There are always open source alternatives that are perfectly acceptable according to HN…
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Well I don’t know this HN guy but I think he’s wrong, haha. (I mean it is a giant website full of tech people so of course we’re going to over-estimate the practicality of some extremely niche techie solution).
  - lukeschlather 2y ago
    I don't know. Apple does place significant barriers to open source software. And this isn't just an innocuous thing, it means you're likely to have more trouble locating a free and safe application to do some simple task and likely to be steered toward adware. And Apple keeps their hands clean on paper but they make a lot of money off of adware on iOS.
- trescenzi 2y ago
  There are two real options, both big tech, and then layer peer pressure on top of that. People pick between options they don’t like all the time.
Hizonner 2y ago
"Lost trust"? Who the fuck ever trusted any of those companies?
- hn_go_brrrrr 2y ago
  If you think that you either weren't around or have just forgotten. Google was "do no evil" and seemed to actually mean it. They had a ton of goodwill.
  - micromacrofoot 2y ago
    at the time they were the underdogs, even after they reached massive success... they were making data widely available and free and easy to find! this upset so many traditional industries now that they're at the top — they vacuum all the data up, give you shit results, and sell more data than you probably even know about yourself to advertisers
  - chrsw 2y ago
    I didn't forget. That was just PR.
- dr-detroit 2y ago
  [dead]
nextworddev 2y ago
The irony is that they like Tiktok
eeasss 2y ago
Let me tell you something - it is not just US teens. It is all around Europe as well.
Andrex 2y ago
Just teens? There's much work yet to be done...
boringg 2y ago
Out of all the large tech providers the two that have public personas that I might trust more are Tim Cook and Elon. Apple's margins are high enough and their public persona is trust. And Elons tech products is the wild west - anything goes except censorship on X. Doesn't mean I trust them.
- pjc50 2y ago
  X is extremely censored for things that Elon doesn't like.
  - boringg 2y ago
    Is that actually true or speculative? Seriously asking.
    - spacechild1 2y ago
      https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-elon-musk-b2545355.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-elon...
- ajoseps 2y ago
  X still censors certain keywords
jazz9k 2y ago
I'm wondering. Was it when we found out that pre-elon, that Twitter was working with governments worldwide to censor citizens? Or when Mark Zuckerberg admit that the previous administration pushed to censor anything that went against the current narrative?
- DanielHB 2y ago
  It was definitely the Cambridge Analytica scandal and then subsequent media-rampage any time any social-media company touched politics (directly through censorship or indirectly through algorithms). That was when it became a mainstream problem.
  - jazz9k 2y ago
    Cambridge Analytica wasn't censorship. It basically involved simple form questions to gauge political affiliation and was brilliant. Ad companies do this every day with no issues. It only became an issue because it helped Trump win. Obama spammed Facebook years earlier, which I think is much worse and people in the tech community called it 'genius'. This sort of double standards is why nobody trusts big tech.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      You're misconstruing it, and there's no double standard.
    - DanielHB 2y ago
      Who said anything about that being censorship? I am saying that scandal brought it up to public attention, the Cambridge Analytica scandal was just the triggering point because: 1) It allegedly had russian influence 2) It involved Trump and he was much more controversial at the time 3) By my definition it counts as an "indirect interference from a social media company into politics through the use of algorithms", not censorship
  - pjc50 2y ago
    I've been thinking about this lately and I think the last point at which Internet driven mass politics was a progressive force was the early 2010s. Tahrir Square (2011), Euromaidan (2014), Scottish Indyref (2014). (now, how organic was that? Probably impossible to tell at this distance in time) The Facebook driven Rohingya genocide was starting up in the same time frame (adoption in 2011, military forces deployed in 2017). But following the effectiveness of social media as a revolution-triggering force, governments and political parties had to catch up and control it for their own purposes. Now we have what's effectively been a rightwing revolutionary force derived from the Tea Party take over the Republican party and replace it with strongman populism. HK protests (2019): https://news.sky.com/story/hong-kong-protests-facebook-and-twitter-move-to-block-chinese-campaign-11789617 https://news.sky.com/story/hong-kong-protests-facebook-and-t... ; Chinese government taking action against the last of the 2010s protest wave.
giorgioz 2y ago
Frankly the quality of the reporting is a bit low. It's Techcrunch, mentioning a report from CommonSense here: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/research-brief-teens-trust-and-technology-in-the-age-of-ai https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/research-brief-tee... which then you need to download as a PDF. Which then you need to scroll to page 5 of 6 where there is a bar chart this way posed: "Overall, how much of the time do you think you can trust major technology companies (i.e., Google, Apple, Meta, TikTok, Microsoft, etc.) to ________?" Not sure why then they gave ONLY TWO COLLAPSED OPTIONS: Trust hardly ever/some of the time Trust most of the time/always While in the other questions there were 4 answering options here they collapsed the answering to extremes. Yeah in general you should not trust anybody ALWAYS. So it's good to be skeptic and double check and don't take things for granted. Teenagers should rebel against incumbents anyway, it's the way we move forward. For teenagers, FAANGS are like what IBM was to Steve Jobs and Apple. I only hope that while they will destroy the old they will find a way to make a new one which is overall better. Finally, the results might be true and accurate but the quality of the reporting from CommonSense and TechCrunch makes me feel as usual they are looking for drama and conflict.
netcan 2y ago
The "enlightened capitalism" meme has fallen hard. HN is itself as good an example as any. Compare early HN to now... People have the same view of media, tech companies and political parties as they do of cigarette companies or casinos.
- cies 2y ago
  They also betrayed us. One claimed "do no evil", when we still wondered "what evil can one do in search results". Now we know.
  - bookaway 2y ago
    The double whammy may come when people realize, if they haven't already, that the "do no evil" guy (Paul Buchheit) and--at the individual level--many of the "enlightened" angel investor old guard have one by one decided that the current admin and broligarch movement is actually the lesser of two evils. PG being one of the few remaining holdouts, at least for now.
    - micromacrofoot 2y ago
      PG is out there ranting about "wokeism" like a lot of them now, he's losing the plot.
      - cies 2y ago
        I thought his "rant" was refreshing. I know the "woke" term from the last 5 years, but it apparently has a much longer history. Both PG and myself dont like the fact that it's so badly defined (while being heavily discussed). In my view the woke crowd did a lot of performative gestures w/o event attempting to really solve the underlying problems. PG also believes that way. The woke crowd does not actually discuss things: you are labelled a fascist, racist, transfobe, anti-semite or biggot before you can even make your point. So I've stopped discussing with them and stopped caring for being called these names.
        2y ago
black_13 2y ago
[dead]
FugeDaws 2y ago
They can lose trust no one really had any to begin with but everyone will use their stuff regardless and they know that. So why should they bother?
annoyingnoob 2y ago
Big Tech is trying to surveil everyone in order to manipulate everyone. Why would anyone trust Big Tech?
agentultra 2y ago
Add the majority of people I know to the pile. As a programmer, I don't think we're in control anymore, and haven't been for quite some time. Money and economics dominates almost every conversation when it comes to tech.
- fullshark 2y ago
  Need a paradigm shifting technology and be one of the few technologists that understand it in order to be in control as a programmer. Hence crypto/AI hype gets pumped by engineers with zero interest in genuine self-reflection.
- waltercool 2y ago
  [dead]
- Valord 2y ago
  Programmers don't fully control what they work on when employed by an entity seeking profits. Programmers _do_ have control in the world of open source. Unfortunately efforts are spread out thinly[0] enough to prevent many ideas from reaching the tipping point to being better than a profit driven entity's solution. Imagine what would be possible in OSS if all work in a similar domain was concentrated. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42821332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42821332
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    > Programmers don't fully control what they work on when employed by an entity seeking profits. But they do tend to control what entity they are employed by, and sometimes what team within that entity they work for. Let's not defend programmers as helpless cogs who are forced by their evil managers to program bad things. We all have agency, even during bad hiring times and bear markets. If my boss asked me to build the Torment Nexus, I'd resist up to and including quitting. A disappointingly high number of us wouldn't even put up a fight.
    - tivert 2y ago
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
I remember graduating in 2004 and ingesting the message from the [current] BigTech companies that, "this time it'll be different!" and "we aren't like those other companies!" I ate it up, of course. I didn't have the experience to see that the promises were hollow by the nature of the arrangement. Fully expect a new crop of companies to make the same pitch, and people to fall for it again.
- indoordin0saur 2y ago
  To be fair, it was different for a while. Those companies started out with visionary product designers and engineers who cared about creating a great product that genuinely helps the customers. But once the product is out in the market the culture inevitably changes over to one of patent trolling lawyers, stock buyback schemes, layoffs, outsourcing, dishonest marketing, squeezing the customers with difficult-to-cancel subscription models, etc.
  - mostlysimilar 2y ago
    It is incumbent upon those of us who want better to build companies that do not do this. You don't need to be a unicorn startup, you can be a small company that employs a small handful of like-minded individuals who want to build good products for people, who reject the ravenous growth machine that plagues tech today.
    - kraussvonespy 2y ago
      Yes but only if you stay a private company. Once you issue stock, those like-minded individuals are going to be pressured to enshitify to maximize shareholder value. Or pressure the like minded to get acquired by a big pile of enshitification like Broadcom.
      - boppo1 2y ago
        What actually legally establishes shareholder primacy? Ford vs Dodge?
egberts1 2y ago
It is time to roll out the full liability to the protected paid class such as HiTech, pharmaceutical, and NGOs.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
smt88 2y ago
It's insane to me that anyone would "trust" an enormous for-profit company in the first place. It requires a deep ignorance of history.
waltercool 2y ago
[dead]
FinnKuhn 2y ago
"Lost trust" implies that they ever trusted big tech in the first place. I doubt that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ImJamal 2y ago
Then why do all the teens use WhatsApp?
asdasdsddd 2y ago
All of these surveys are pointless, all that matters is do they use it or not when they have a choice, and the answer seems like a resounding no.
tmikaeld 2y ago
Honestly? I find that teens have lost trust in basically everything in modern society, not just tech.
rkagerer 2y ago
Good, I knew at some point some next generation of humanity would smarten up.
tim333 2y ago
>...teens have lost trust in Big Tech I don't see any evidence in the article or real life that they used to trust big tech or big corporations in general. I think the truth is US teens and non US teens and all other people don't trust big companies and never have.
nikurasu-tan 2y ago
Honestly, I have more trust in some Fedi Server in an enby catgirls basement than Meta or X. And it seems like I'm not alone, lol

207 points by Tomte 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

It’s an interesting survey but I wonder if more nuanced questions would reveal more. Perhaps those who distrust big tech in the survey still have some platform they use and think is fine. Maybe all the people answering believe they’re the enlightened ones using the one correct platform while distrusting the rest, but they each have different ideas on which one is trustworthy.

robertlagrant 2y ago

> companies like Google, Apple, Meta, TikTok, and Microsoft cared about their well-being and safety I wonder if this is the right question. No company I know cares about my well-being and safety, except for my employer.

akkad33 2y ago
Why do you think your employer cares about your well-being and safety?
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  You get the point I'm making, right?
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  Can't work when you're dead or insane?
  - chrsw 2y ago
    Just hire someone else.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Some fairly bad faith people like to say "Slaves couldn't have been poorly treated, they were an expensive investment, like a grain harvester, and no rational person would damage their own property like that". Except, we have ample evidence that people would beat, rape, murder, fuck around with, starve, and otherwise destroy their "investment" regularly, sometimes because "it will keep the others in line", but plenty often just fucking because. Because humans are not rational. Farmers just doing what they believed would be the most rational to make money was one of the main causes of the Dust Bowl. Your boss is human, and plenty able to do things that make you a LESS effective worker while adamantly believing you are just lazy.
- kadushka 2y ago
  Cost of replacement
- otikik 2y ago
  Small Bus Factor
micromacrofoot 2y ago
Companies are incapable of caring about anything because they're not sentient beings — one of the biggest tricks they've played on us is referring to them as if they are. Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Shou Chew, Satya Nadella... if you were laying in a ditch on the side of the road they wouldn't even give you the time of day.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Do you agree that it's a silly question to base things on?
  - micromacrofoot 2y ago
    Oh certainly, I'm just elaborating that "companies don't X" is part of the scam. Companies don't do anything, the people running them do.

roenxi 2y ago

Between this for new media channels and the breakdown of trust in old media channels there is a lot of reason to be hopeful about the future of the US. One of the big problems of the past was the insane level of trust in institutions that were at best credulous and more realistically just lying continuously and brazenly. It is a big win for the public discourse if people start applying cynicism where warranted. In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited. Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them.

tomohelix 2y ago
A society where people can trust each other and each individual has enough integrity to not violate that trust is, in my opinion, the closest we can get to a thriving utopia. The US was close to that back in the days. Maybe it was just nostalgia speaking but I felt a few decades ago, people were so much more "refined" and had respect for each others and themselves. Then some people took advantage of that. And it devolved. Now we have a country where the presidential candidates insult each other live on TV with straight up lies and deception. And the people cheer on. So yes, indeed we are having a breakdown of trust and a new paradigm is shifting in. Just that I don't think it is a good one.
- codr7 2y ago
  I see what you see. But I'm not convinced the result is a disaster. Evolution moves in a spiral, every round brings new insights.
- Hizonner 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Have you watched US presidential debates across the decades? (1992) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWo88Lr0rzw&t=102s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWo88Lr0rzw&t=102s They've objectively gotten meaner and dumber with each cycle.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

We really gotta start doing a better job of differentiating between tech companies and ad companies.

zombot 2y ago
Do you seriously hallucinate a difference there? I'd like to have what you're smoking.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  What percentage of Meta or Google do you suppose is actually working on technology? Yeah sure they have little moonshot side projects involving quantum computing or whatever, but data centers and surveillance and browser malware has all been around for decades. They've been moving the needle hardly any all. These are ad companies, or propaganda companies, or attention companies. They have malicious intent, and calling them technology companies confuses people into thinking that technology itself has malicious intent.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - zombot 2y ago
    This explains much better what you mean than your first comment. While I somewhat agree, I think that ship of using the wrong label has sailed long since. Which sells better: calling yourself a tech company, or a mercenary manipulator?
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      I think the comment you were replying to basically agrees with you, they are imputing that Facebook and Google are the ad companies. AMD, Intel, even NVIDIA (although they are feeding on a bubble that might eventually roundabout end in ads), those are tech companies.

feverzsj 2y ago

But they still use them daily. It's like put a commie sticker on your macbook.

hagbarth 2y ago
You can be critical of a system and still need to participate in it.
- akimbostrawman 2y ago
  A Macbook (or any Apple product) isn't a essential item without alternatives. If you actually care there is almost always a way without it.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    The Apple brand has an alternative, but for most people the alternative is "Google" (for phones) or "Microsoft" (for 'proper computing'). I think I've got a Blackberry around somewhere, but the OS is so old it doesn't work with current-spec HTTPS. I've got some Pi's with Linux (and even RISC OS) on them, but I'm also a software developer, alternative OSes aren't what normal people want to spend their free time learning how to use just to get by in society. If you want to work with others in an office environment, you're using either Microsoft Office or Google Docs for your spreadsheets, word processing, and presentations, because even the really good document compatibility of Open Office isn't quite good enough. If you want to communicate with others at all, there is at least still email and webpages — those have not yet been totally subsumed by Gmail, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, DMing on X, etc. — but even then, not being available on major platforms is considered weird and eccentric and many potential contacts will drop you for that. (Anecdote about how little effort normal people are willing to put into tech: When I first moved to Germany, I tried to set up a local SIM card. You need to register your identity when setting up the card around here. There is (or was) an app/website for that. On my first attempt, the website customer support people thought that I couldn't use a Mac to talk to them even though I was at that moment using a Mac to talk to them and they knew it. Also they thought that their SIM cards only worked with Android.)
  - 2y ago

tayo42 2y ago

> 35% of teens think GenAI will make it harder to trust online information Your already supposed to not believe everything on the internet! Especially any one that makes short form videos, or asks you to comment to get a PDF.

pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
Doesn't mean generative models won't make it worse. Sure, maybe the advice given to you by an influencer in a short video was bunk, but at least you could be sure that they actually said it. Soon you won't be certain even of that.

elevatedastalt 2y ago

It's the nature of teenagers to be cynical and dislike anything people older than them do. There's nothing noteworthy about it.

anigbrowl 2y ago
Shallow trope. PAst computer revolutions have involved teenagers enthusiastically greeting videogames, personal computers and so on and admiring the people who designed and built them.
- Vampiero 2y ago
  john carmack is my spirit animal
- elevatedastalt 2y ago
  I never said that teens are idiots. I said they are rebels. 20 years ago being a rebel meant having a GMail account instead of a hotmail or aol account. Today it means not having a GMail account.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    I didn't say you did. Teens are natural rebels, but they don't reflexively rebel against anything, they have preferences and will enthusiastically get behind things they like. People are not one dimensional, they can seek novelty for orthogonal reasons to any rebellion they might have going on.

granzymes 2y ago

This report was published by Common Sense Media, an advocacy organization with a clear interest in pushing this message as part of their lobbying efforts. Maybe their intentions are good (they seem to back some good bills!), but it’s not a neutral source of information. If you look at polling data published as part of generic political surveys, you find that companies like Amazon and Meta are among the most trusted of U.S. institutions[0] (Amazon loses out only to the military). [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OgPzcB75uxXiFmTjUUb-ITIr7BFdFFhw/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OgPzcB75uxXiFmTjUUb-ITIr7BF...

distortionfield 2y ago
Trust is multi-faceted and although I trust Amazon to deliver me a toaster, i don’t for a second trust them to handle my audio or video in a manner I’m comfortable. This survey is talking about the latter kind of trust, not the former.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Ye. The surveyees (is that a word?) probably interpret the question very differently. I mean up until 5 years ago I trusted Microsoft and Google to handle my mail, since I though I was too unimportant and it would to much of an effort to read my mails for them. But I in no way trusted them. Concerning Amazon I guess most trust they will have their toaster. Like the same question about Walmart would be about food safety and quality. Not corporate culture or long term political influence.
  - permo-w 2y ago
    Is there a private company whose corporate culture or long term political influence could be trusted? I feel like this has not been possible in the West at least since Friedman
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I trust them to deliver “a toaster” but, like, not necessarily the exact one I ordered, right? Either the one I ordered or a knock-off copycat that made it into the bin.

colechristensen 2y ago

Ok. Fine, that’s how teens answered your survey (and it sounds like the surveyor had a bit of an agenda) But did you ask them if they cared or if their mistrust would guide their actions? Spoiler alert: not at all.

txdv 2y ago

I always thought the tech guys would be the good guys. That's probably because I'm also in tech. Good old knight fighting dragon and becoming a dragon after all :(

DinoDad13 2y ago
This is normal in business. Now that tech dominates they use that market position to setup monopolies. If we had functional anti-trust laws then it wouldn't feel so dire. Allowing monopolies in a capitalist system is the worst economic policy since socialism.
stepanhruda 2y ago
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain
52-6F-62 2y ago
This is why tech bros should read well beyond tech and don’t stop at Machiavelli like most do. The first dragon wasn’t the bad guy, but natural order. The new dragon now intends to usurp natural order. Technology can still help us, but it cannot save us. And it cannot be everything. It is one tool of many more intelligent tools besides.

hedayet 2y ago

From what I’ve observed, Google was an anomaly that helped build trust in Big Tech (and lured me into it). AFAIK, developers had strong reservations against Microsoft before the Google era, and it was only after Google’s rise that Silicon Valley became attractive to top talent, leading to a shift in the tech landscape. Now, with the decline of Google’s culture, that trust seems to be fading as well. Unlike traditional corporations, Google used to be trusted by investors, employees, users, and the general public — I can’t think of any other company that checked all these boxes.

badlibrarian 2y ago
General Electric had a good run and ticked those boxes, as did many corporations until the 1980s. Then incentives changed.
- null_shift 2y ago
  Asking in good faith, what incentives changed exactly?
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#1970%E2%80%932000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#1970%E2%80%932000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#Reagan_administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#Reagan_administra...
42772827 2y ago
Trust in “Big tech” reaches back into the early 20th century with Bell Labs. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend “The Master Switch” by Tim Wu: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/176/ https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/176/
- scoofy 2y ago
  CTRL+F: "Tim Wu" I'm shocked and dismayed that this book is not more prominent. The book opened my eyes not only to the fact that these companies would become enshitty, but why they weren't in the first place.

godelski 2y ago

Teens? Trust has been broken for a much wider demographic. This problem has been foreseeable and people have been sounding the alarm for over a decade. Companies have centralized AND abused that centralization. We have products that fail at basic tasks while we're trying to push machine learning on people. I say this as a machine learning researcher, who fully believes that it's a powerful and useful technology. But there's so much that could be solved with a regex... we've focused so much on getting to the next target that we lost track of the destination. Much of coding has become glueing, copy paste from stack overflow, and results in not only the deletion of stupid dependencies that shouldn't exist, like leftpad, but we've gotten to a point where we say "don't over optimize" when someone suggests using best practices. You're not optimizing until you're running the profiler and you're not "over optimizing" until you're writing asm... We've just piled on decades of tech debt and forgot that the interest compounds. We moved fast and break things, which is great for learning or getting moving, but no one goes around fixing all the broken things. We have triple A games with hundreds of millions in budgets that can't run 4k@60fps on the best hardware. Half because there isn't enough VRAM and half because the code is so low quality and tries to eat as much VRAM as possible. We've been over promising and under-delivering. We aren't calling out blatant fraud and scams (e.g. Rabbit), but instead endorsing them and hyping them up. We forgot where we were going. We forgot all the implicit agreements. We make it difficult for young hackers to find that spark and joy of hacking computers for the sake of learning computers. We've become money focused. We've become prestige focused. We forgot that these things were just proxies. It used to be that the public would idolize Jobs and the technical people would idolize Woz. But now we all look to Jobs and forget Woz. You need both and we are cultivating one and not the other. We forgot that you can make the world better AND make hand over fist fulls of money at the same time. But it became where we started getting so much money that it no longer became about the money, but the high score. What happened to Google? Who led the way saying "devs make so much we can't entice them with more money, we will entice them with free lunch instead". Because the best programmers were in it for the love of the job, not for the money. We did this to ourselves. Slowly and little by little. But all those things compound. So now we're only left with one question: do we turn back, reinstitute the framework that has a proven track record of success, or do we see where this wild ride goes? Every single dev has a role in making that. Little things compound in both directions.

rcarmo 2y ago

Not just US teens. Mine use DuckDuckGo and avoid any kind of social media except WhatsApp (solely because it is so insidiously everywhere that teachers use it to communicate about class assignments, which I find atrocious).

Havoc 2y ago
The WhatsApp thing is very country specific. Some have super high penetration some not so much

ribadeo 2y ago

Seeing the obvious blatant grift spanning the crypto-currency and now LLM booms pales beside the general low hanging fruit noneffort that both the Slacks and Social Medias represent. These ain't no moonshots and the kids can smell it. The lack of moral fiber and general depth of character is plain for all to see. Meta is a joke for old people (facebook) and or your older sister/brother(instaglam). Xitter seems to have obviated the market for Truth or Parlez or The Daily Stormer or something, thereby only being relevant for overtly far right youth. This leaves us TikTok which them causes them to question the motives of political efforts to ban it. What are the kids supposed to take away from this contemporary debacle?

nonrandomstring 2y ago
> What are the kids supposed to take away from this contemporary debacle? That's a good question. As other comments have noted, "trust" is too complex a word for a clear discussion. With teens there's a different quality of affect. It's a time of life for seeking role models. Looking for adults and ideas you would like to be. It is more aspirational, morally and socially sensitive than mere transactional trust. In liberal democratic countries like USA or Britain young people grow up with the expectation of making choices and having a voice, so these affiliations really matter. We're seeing younger people realise, and clearly express their disgust at "tech leaders" and their companies. The kids are okay. The new generations of geeky kids realise that these people are not one of us [0] [0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/notoneofus/ https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/notoneofus/

ripped_britches 2y ago

Loved the part about whether companies would protect users if it hurt profits. This is kind of the ultimate question.

krapp 2y ago
I mean, the answer is obviously "no."
- michaelt 2y ago
  Believe it or not, there was a time in the not-too-distant past where Big Tech meant Microsoft selling boxed copies of MS Office at retailers, in exchange for money. And if the KKK happened to buy Microsoft Office to do their word processing - well, it's no different to them buying a typewriter. If the KKK wanted to put their stuff online, it certainly wouldn't be hosted on Microsoft's website, surrounded by Microsoft branding and ads that pay Microsoft - there were no "platforms", they'd have to make their own HTML and upload it to their own hosting provider. And the nearest thing to "Social Media" was hundreds of tiny phpBB forums, IRC channels and suchlike, administered by genuine human beings, and for minimal reward. Censorship meant blocking mentions of viagra and cialis, which everyone knew were obvious spam. You can't put profits before users when there aren't any profits. And of course the guy with ops in the #north-west-london-anime IRC channel is going to look out for the users, they're his buddies. Algorithmic news feeds hadn't been invented; the front page of Slashdot was whatever CmdrTaco and Hemos decided to post. Clickbait? Ragebait? Parody story mistaken for real? Dupe of a story from yesterday? They just wouldn't post it, simple. Into this unbelievable environment came a tech company whose goal was to "organise the world's information" with the guiding principle "don't be evil" and such was the hope and optimism at the time, people treated such claims as literally true.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    Hairyfeet, is that you?
  - emchammer 2y ago
    The technology is not really very interesting any longer, it's just a channel between behaviors. It is not as difficult to discern between wearing-a-chicken-suit-carrying-a-bazooka crazy, and underhanded scheming, and people having a hard time. I saw pictures of young people dressing up and posing to re-create Soviet-era propaganda posters literally on a Chinese app called Little Red Book.

OutOfHere 2y ago

If you want an example of a scalable trustless system that works, look no further than Bitcoin Lightning. In general, with cryptocurrencies, if you don't follow the established communication protocol, you not only get ignored, but also penalized, reliably so. It's a system that works. We need more protocols of engagement, with automatic escalating consequences for misbehavior, and also a good faith means to improve or fork the protocol.

scarface_74 2y ago

In economics, there is a concept of “revealed preference”. 80%+ of teens own iPhones https://www.pymnts.com/consumer-insights/2023/apple-iphone-remains-teens-preferred-mobile-device/ https://www.pymnts.com/consumer-insights/2023/apple-iphone-r... And this is the percent of teens on various social media platforms https://www.sentiment.io/how-many-teens-use-social-media/#t-1705002742694 https://www.sentiment.io/how-many-teens-use-social-media/#t-...

bee_rider 2y ago
The alternative to an iPhone is an Android phone. They are both big tech, but one is built by a fairly invasive anti-competitive villain, while the other is build by the flagship company of surveillance capitalism. No good option, but one is clearly worse, right?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  There are always open source alternatives that are perfectly acceptable according to HN…
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Well I don’t know this HN guy but I think he’s wrong, haha. (I mean it is a giant website full of tech people so of course we’re going to over-estimate the practicality of some extremely niche techie solution).
- lukeschlather 2y ago
  I don't know. Apple does place significant barriers to open source software. And this isn't just an innocuous thing, it means you're likely to have more trouble locating a free and safe application to do some simple task and likely to be steered toward adware. And Apple keeps their hands clean on paper but they make a lot of money off of adware on iOS.
trescenzi 2y ago
There are two real options, both big tech, and then layer peer pressure on top of that. People pick between options they don’t like all the time.

Hizonner 2y ago

"Lost trust"? Who the fuck ever trusted any of those companies?

hn_go_brrrrr 2y ago
If you think that you either weren't around or have just forgotten. Google was "do no evil" and seemed to actually mean it. They had a ton of goodwill.
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  at the time they were the underdogs, even after they reached massive success... they were making data widely available and free and easy to find! this upset so many traditional industries now that they're at the top — they vacuum all the data up, give you shit results, and sell more data than you probably even know about yourself to advertisers
- chrsw 2y ago
  I didn't forget. That was just PR.
dr-detroit 2y ago
[dead]

nextworddev 2y ago

The irony is that they like Tiktok

eeasss 2y ago

Let me tell you something - it is not just US teens. It is all around Europe as well.

Andrex 2y ago

Just teens? There's much work yet to be done...

boringg 2y ago

Out of all the large tech providers the two that have public personas that I might trust more are Tim Cook and Elon. Apple's margins are high enough and their public persona is trust. And Elons tech products is the wild west - anything goes except censorship on X. Doesn't mean I trust them.

pjc50 2y ago
X is extremely censored for things that Elon doesn't like.
- boringg 2y ago
  Is that actually true or speculative? Seriously asking.
  - spacechild1 2y ago
    https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-elon-musk-b2545355.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-elon...
ajoseps 2y ago
X still censors certain keywords

jazz9k 2y ago

I'm wondering. Was it when we found out that pre-elon, that Twitter was working with governments worldwide to censor citizens? Or when Mark Zuckerberg admit that the previous administration pushed to censor anything that went against the current narrative?

DanielHB 2y ago
It was definitely the Cambridge Analytica scandal and then subsequent media-rampage any time any social-media company touched politics (directly through censorship or indirectly through algorithms). That was when it became a mainstream problem.
- jazz9k 2y ago
  Cambridge Analytica wasn't censorship. It basically involved simple form questions to gauge political affiliation and was brilliant. Ad companies do this every day with no issues. It only became an issue because it helped Trump win. Obama spammed Facebook years earlier, which I think is much worse and people in the tech community called it 'genius'. This sort of double standards is why nobody trusts big tech.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    You're misconstruing it, and there's no double standard.
  - DanielHB 2y ago
    Who said anything about that being censorship? I am saying that scandal brought it up to public attention, the Cambridge Analytica scandal was just the triggering point because: 1) It allegedly had russian influence 2) It involved Trump and he was much more controversial at the time 3) By my definition it counts as an "indirect interference from a social media company into politics through the use of algorithms", not censorship
- pjc50 2y ago
  I've been thinking about this lately and I think the last point at which Internet driven mass politics was a progressive force was the early 2010s. Tahrir Square (2011), Euromaidan (2014), Scottish Indyref (2014). (now, how organic was that? Probably impossible to tell at this distance in time) The Facebook driven Rohingya genocide was starting up in the same time frame (adoption in 2011, military forces deployed in 2017). But following the effectiveness of social media as a revolution-triggering force, governments and political parties had to catch up and control it for their own purposes. Now we have what's effectively been a rightwing revolutionary force derived from the Tea Party take over the Republican party and replace it with strongman populism. HK protests (2019): https://news.sky.com/story/hong-kong-protests-facebook-and-twitter-move-to-block-chinese-campaign-11789617 https://news.sky.com/story/hong-kong-protests-facebook-and-t... ; Chinese government taking action against the last of the 2010s protest wave.

giorgioz 2y ago

Frankly the quality of the reporting is a bit low. It's Techcrunch, mentioning a report from CommonSense here: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/research-brief-teens-trust-and-technology-in-the-age-of-ai https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/research-brief-tee... which then you need to download as a PDF. Which then you need to scroll to page 5 of 6 where there is a bar chart this way posed: "Overall, how much of the time do you think you can trust major technology companies (i.e., Google, Apple, Meta, TikTok, Microsoft, etc.) to ________?" Not sure why then they gave ONLY TWO COLLAPSED OPTIONS: Trust hardly ever/some of the time Trust most of the time/always While in the other questions there were 4 answering options here they collapsed the answering to extremes. Yeah in general you should not trust anybody ALWAYS. So it's good to be skeptic and double check and don't take things for granted. Teenagers should rebel against incumbents anyway, it's the way we move forward. For teenagers, FAANGS are like what IBM was to Steve Jobs and Apple. I only hope that while they will destroy the old they will find a way to make a new one which is overall better. Finally, the results might be true and accurate but the quality of the reporting from CommonSense and TechCrunch makes me feel as usual they are looking for drama and conflict.

netcan 2y ago

The "enlightened capitalism" meme has fallen hard. HN is itself as good an example as any. Compare early HN to now... People have the same view of media, tech companies and political parties as they do of cigarette companies or casinos.

cies 2y ago
They also betrayed us. One claimed "do no evil", when we still wondered "what evil can one do in search results". Now we know.
- bookaway 2y ago
  The double whammy may come when people realize, if they haven't already, that the "do no evil" guy (Paul Buchheit) and--at the individual level--many of the "enlightened" angel investor old guard have one by one decided that the current admin and broligarch movement is actually the lesser of two evils. PG being one of the few remaining holdouts, at least for now.
  - micromacrofoot 2y ago
    PG is out there ranting about "wokeism" like a lot of them now, he's losing the plot.
    - cies 2y ago
      I thought his "rant" was refreshing. I know the "woke" term from the last 5 years, but it apparently has a much longer history. Both PG and myself dont like the fact that it's so badly defined (while being heavily discussed). In my view the woke crowd did a lot of performative gestures w/o event attempting to really solve the underlying problems. PG also believes that way. The woke crowd does not actually discuss things: you are labelled a fascist, racist, transfobe, anti-semite or biggot before you can even make your point. So I've stopped discussing with them and stopped caring for being called these names.
      - 2y ago

black_13 2y ago

[dead]

FugeDaws 2y ago

They can lose trust no one really had any to begin with but everyone will use their stuff regardless and they know that. So why should they bother?

annoyingnoob 2y ago

Big Tech is trying to surveil everyone in order to manipulate everyone. Why would anyone trust Big Tech?

agentultra 2y ago

Add the majority of people I know to the pile. As a programmer, I don't think we're in control anymore, and haven't been for quite some time. Money and economics dominates almost every conversation when it comes to tech.

fullshark 2y ago
Need a paradigm shifting technology and be one of the few technologists that understand it in order to be in control as a programmer. Hence crypto/AI hype gets pumped by engineers with zero interest in genuine self-reflection.
waltercool 2y ago
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Valord 2y ago
Programmers don't fully control what they work on when employed by an entity seeking profits. Programmers _do_ have control in the world of open source. Unfortunately efforts are spread out thinly[0] enough to prevent many ideas from reaching the tipping point to being better than a profit driven entity's solution. Imagine what would be possible in OSS if all work in a similar domain was concentrated. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42821332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42821332
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > Programmers don't fully control what they work on when employed by an entity seeking profits. But they do tend to control what entity they are employed by, and sometimes what team within that entity they work for. Let's not defend programmers as helpless cogs who are forced by their evil managers to program bad things. We all have agency, even during bad hiring times and bear markets. If my boss asked me to build the Torment Nexus, I'd resist up to and including quitting. A disappointingly high number of us wouldn't even put up a fight.
  - tivert 2y ago

mattgreenrocks 2y ago

I remember graduating in 2004 and ingesting the message from the [current] BigTech companies that, "this time it'll be different!" and "we aren't like those other companies!" I ate it up, of course. I didn't have the experience to see that the promises were hollow by the nature of the arrangement. Fully expect a new crop of companies to make the same pitch, and people to fall for it again.

indoordin0saur 2y ago
To be fair, it was different for a while. Those companies started out with visionary product designers and engineers who cared about creating a great product that genuinely helps the customers. But once the product is out in the market the culture inevitably changes over to one of patent trolling lawyers, stock buyback schemes, layoffs, outsourcing, dishonest marketing, squeezing the customers with difficult-to-cancel subscription models, etc.
- mostlysimilar 2y ago
  It is incumbent upon those of us who want better to build companies that do not do this. You don't need to be a unicorn startup, you can be a small company that employs a small handful of like-minded individuals who want to build good products for people, who reject the ravenous growth machine that plagues tech today.
  - kraussvonespy 2y ago
    Yes but only if you stay a private company. Once you issue stock, those like-minded individuals are going to be pressured to enshitify to maximize shareholder value. Or pressure the like minded to get acquired by a big pile of enshitification like Broadcom.
    - boppo1 2y ago
      What actually legally establishes shareholder primacy? Ford vs Dodge?

egberts1 2y ago

It is time to roll out the full liability to the protected paid class such as HiTech, pharmaceutical, and NGOs.

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smt88 2y ago

It's insane to me that anyone would "trust" an enormous for-profit company in the first place. It requires a deep ignorance of history.

waltercool 2y ago

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FinnKuhn 2y ago

"Lost trust" implies that they ever trusted big tech in the first place. I doubt that.

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ImJamal 2y ago

Then why do all the teens use WhatsApp?

asdasdsddd 2y ago

All of these surveys are pointless, all that matters is do they use it or not when they have a choice, and the answer seems like a resounding no.

tmikaeld 2y ago

Honestly? I find that teens have lost trust in basically everything in modern society, not just tech.

rkagerer 2y ago

Good, I knew at some point some next generation of humanity would smarten up.

tim333 2y ago

>...teens have lost trust in Big Tech I don't see any evidence in the article or real life that they used to trust big tech or big corporations in general. I think the truth is US teens and non US teens and all other people don't trust big companies and never have.

nikurasu-tan 2y ago

Honestly, I have more trust in some Fedi Server in an enby catgirls basement than Meta or X. And it seems like I'm not alone, lol