Elon Musk, the tech mogul and Twitter CEO, and Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, released a trove of internal emails from Twitter. The documents revealed the company's efforts to suppress news on their platform and spurred a fierce polemic about the effects of big tech and social media on American society.
Frank McCourt, the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has recently been tackling these challenges. He founded Project Liberty last year, a company that promotes ethics and individual rights in technology. He is also the CEO of McCourt Global, a private family company that works in several industries, including real estate, sports, and tech. He claimed technology has been used for bad despite its potential for good during an interview with Yahoo Finance before the Twitter emails were released.
We've let technology be used in unhealthy ways, and we've let it be used as a tool. You know, I think of technology as a way to think of a hammer, right? McCourt told Yahoo Finance that it's a tool. And you can build a house with that hammer. It's just a tool, how we use it makes all the difference in the world. In recent years, social media has been criticised for its negative health effects on users. Facebook has come under fire for concealing its harmful impact on adolescent women. According to the Wall Street Journal, 13% of British users and 6% of American users have experienced suicidal thoughts linked to the desire to kill themselves back to Instagram. Other studies have linked social media use with mental illness. A recent paper from the National Library of Medicine found that excessive social media use was associated with depression.
In addition to its potentially unhealthy effects, McCourt argued that social media is eroding American democracy.
McCourt told Yahoo Finance that the damage it's doing is undermining our democracy.
He pointed out the ways in which foreign powers have used platforms like Facebook and Twitter to spread misinformation and manipulate elections.
Political candidates and their supporters have recently used social media to promote the Big Lie, a false belief that Democrats conspired to steal the 2020 election from President Donald Trump. The Russian state media is using TikTok to spread divisive videos about American politicians and issues like gun control, women's reproductive rights, and racism, according to Forbes.
We have alternative facts. McCourt said that we have misrepresented and disinformation to the nth degree. It's even to the point where foreign governments are right are interfering and disrupting our elections and even internal forces that would like to disrupt things using this and misinformation that the social media current platforms allow for this chaos to exist. According to a 2021 NBC poll, 64 percent of Americans believe that social media has created internal conflict in the U.S. This idea of trust, if we can't trust one another, and to be able to converse and actually disagree, but we know where we're trying to get to, you know, a healthy America, McCourt said. If that trust is destroyed, that means we have some confidence in our government, some confidence in each other, and I don't think democracy has a prayer.