Mission Report 4

Can the internet ever be truly neutral?

As the political situation of our country becomes more polarized, so does the internet. As we have discussed in Week 1, memes can be used to incite racism and violence. It seems that algorithms also contribute to this, as shown in the example above, wherein Twitter cropping feature chose to display Mitch McConnell's face over Obama's. It was only when the colors of each photo were inverted that Obama's photo showed up in the display alongside McConnell's.

I think that the Internet could never be neutral again; it would be great if it could revert back to a more innocuous state, a place where people could share their thoughts and opinions without dealing with hindrances like targeted advertisments and algorithms that filter content.

As I believe the Internet is becoming a polarized tool, I think the only way to really neutralize the internet is to be cognizant of the content that you interact with. Of course, this is very hard to do, given our conversations about survelliance capitalism as well as these algorithms that most of us can't recognize. There will inevitably be people on the internet with ill intentions, and algorithms that will leave out information that you may need to see, so all you can do is try your best to determine if neutral information has been skewed. In the case of the twitter cropping algorithm (which was allegedly never created to choose white faces over those of people of color), people would need to open the full image to see what other information it contains.