Jamie Bartlett

The Facebook scandal exposes our politicians’ technical illiteracy

Imagine a world in which all politicians were computer scientists. What a dreary dystopia that would be. It’s hard to think of anything worse than a nation ruled by people with PhDs in machine learning.  

That said, politicians do need to know something about the digital world. It’s no longer good enough for our elected representatives to feign technical illiteracy, throw up their arms in defeat, and ask the office twenty-something to fix it. Every professional thinks politicians are clueless about their particular area of expertise – doctors complain that MPs are medically illiterate, teachers moan that they don’t get pedagogy and so on. But a special case can be made for upping the digital literacy of our elected, because unlike the many, many subjects about which our politicians know little, digital technology increasingly concerns foundational questions of accountability, fairness, and abuse of power. And to answer these questions today increasingly requires some degree of technological know-how.

Later today, the DCMS committee, led by the increasingly impressive Damian Collins, will be grilling Facebook’s Chief Technical Office over the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. Collins is a notable exception, a politician who’s clearly decided to learn about all this. Too many haven’t bothered. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimony to the US Senate reminded me of Roger Federer neatly dispatching some first round semi-competent opposition at Wimbledon. At times it was embarrassing. Senator Orrin Hatch (Utah) asked Zuckerberg whether Facebook would always be free. ‘If so’ he wondered, ‘how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your services’? Zuckerberg replied: ‘Senator, we run ads’. I don’t expect Senator Hatch to grill Zuck on the technicalities of the newsfeed algorithm, but this sort of inquisition is wasting everyone’s time. I’ve lost count of how many politicians simply demand – as Jeremy Hunt did earlier this week – that some techy dude builds some techy algorithm to fix some massive social problem.

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