Position statement: References, and approach, to actual tech companies

[ghost]

Proposed position statement on references and approach to tech companies

Introduction/background

In the course of producing campaigns and deliverables, our team may from time to time need to refer to actual (i.e. not fictitious) tech companies, i.e. the like of Google, Apple, Facebook, etc by name.

One of the key objectives of the whole awareness initiative and our work here is to alert people to the present, potential or future harms or risks posed to humanity by technology and, per association, technology firms.

While it should be obvious to all that our deliverables should be grounded on facts, it is much less obvious what tone/message is acceptable when we highlight the above issues by referring to actual technology firms.

Proposed position

When publicly referring to any actual technology firm by name or implicitly, we should generally refrain from directly implying that such technology firm engages in unethical, immoral, or even criminal practices

Rationale

• The purpose of this initiative is to promote awareness of the negative impacts of technology on society and our daily lives, not to charge any particular tech company with any alleged wrongdoing.

• I believe most tech companies are on the whole innocent until proven guilty, in which case such scandal would already be abundantly covered in the media (think Snowden and the Prism program). But we are not in charge of prosecuting tech companies.

• Our strategy is to cooly present the facts, let our audiences think for themselves, reach their own conclusions, ultimately changing their behaviors and considering becoming part of a forming grassroots movement.

• Publicly attacking a specific tech company would invite a backlash against our community from a large part of the audience whom we seek to inspire, not to mention a potential response PR campaign from said tech company with the risk to entirely discredit our movement.

• We are not Luddites and thus not against technology and specific technology firms in general.

Important caveats and examples

The above does not mean we are neutral or excessively lenient towards tech companies. The nuance is about the format of our allegations/doubts (see the word directly in the proposed position statement). We may have a certain position towards a specific tech company on a particular issue, and are free to present a fact that supports our position, leaving it to the audience to put the pieces together as they choose.

Example

• Acceptable: At the end of the proposed video ("Caffeine injection"), we could show some text, such as "As of October 2018, Facebook had over 2 billion active users.", followed by "Based on its latest market capitalization, each active user is worth USD200 to the company". That is it.

• Not acceptable: At the end of the same video, we show the text "Since its inception, Facebook has made billions of dollars selling access to their users to advertisers by using their private information", followed by the line "Despite repeated requests, Facebook declined to answer our enquiries".

We may also adopt a more critical opinion when referring to groups of actual tech companies, rather than singling out one in particular.

Example

-Acceptable: Social media companies are increasingly adopting AI to find new ways to get their users spend more time on their networks.

-Not acceptable: Facebook has been heavily investing in AI to increase the average time users spent on their app.

[aschrijver]

Very well described! Fully agree 👍

There may be cases where we'll have to reference to a real big tech brands, e.g. in response to some scandal that is trending in the news globally. There are ways we can do this without infringing brand names, but still let it ben known exactly who is this all about.

The image below, created by Steve Cuts, provides an example of this (though some names have negative connotation, which we can avoid). Note also that:

• We can be more critical when targeting a group of corporations, to show a common problem, and not target just one company directly (as in the picture, which symbolizes a societal problem)
• We can be more critical when we attribute the imagery to a single member or sub-group of the community, rather than the community as a whole (but we should be careful in how that's packaged)

[ghost]

We can be more critical when targeting a group of corporations, to show a common problem, and not target just one company directly 

Agreed. I added this as another caveat.