How COVID-19 change your perception on Tech Giants
Long before COVID-19 break out, the reputation of big tech faltered as scancals emerged. Financial Times even called 2018 a year in a word Techlash. In March 2018, the news broke that Cambridge Analytics had attempted to influence the political process in the U.S. and the U.L. using data from 50 million Facebook accounts; In the same month, a pedestrain in Tempe, Arizona, was struck and killed by a driverless car owned by Uber; Within Google, 2 memo went viral which inadvertently revealed a toxic anti-diversity culture within the company.
Now, less than 2 years later, shortly after COVID-19 crisis break out, these Tech Giants began to get kudos from public from its responses to the pandemic. In the first week of the White House Coronavirus Task Force Briefing, Trump mentioned Google multiple times, highlighting that Google has 1,700 engineers working on the new website to register people with Coronavirus symptoms and direct them to testing sites. Obviously, Google is not the only Tech Giants that see this crisis as an rare opporunity to alter the public negative perception against them. Donnation is a predictable response, but no the only one; Tech firms are also exploring innovative ways to help the government combat COVID-19: Facebook is sharing aggregated and anonymized smartphone data with academic institutions including Harvard T.H.Chan school of Public Health and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan to study scoial movement and patterns; Apple released COVID-19 websites & Apps in partnership with CDC, WH Coronavirus task force, asking questions to screen for COVID-19 symptoms and point the public resources; Microsoft provide customized health care chatbot to CDC to deal with preliminary enquiries and information dissemination; TikTok has been in partnership with WHO to posting educational videos, live information sessions and a #SafeHands challenge that encourages people to wash hands. Tiktok is not the sole partner of WHO; Twitter, Linkedin, and WhatsApp held question-and-answer sessions so users can voice out their concerns to experts. Since March 1, WHO has gained nearly 1 million additionaal followers on Twitter, 1.5 million on Instagram and 2 million on Facebook. There is clearly a race among Tech firms to build COVID-19 tools, and these platforms have all become de facto emergency reponse networks in the face of this crisis.
Will this crisis put Techlash, which has defined coverage of the tech firms for the past two or three years, to an end or just on pause? Steven Levy wrote in Wired recently: “While Big Tech’s misdeeds are still apparent, their actual deeds now matter more to us.” Indeed, having been quarantined at home for 4 weeks now, I have mostly live on these platforms: I logged in Facebook & Instagram to check and connect with my friends and families; WhatsApp & WeChat, what used to kept us apart, now closely connects me with my parents who are in another country; Google has been the plact for me check news and do self-check; Amazon delivery date is marked on my refrigerator (It’s literally the only way for me to get food and vital supplies as I stop going to groceries weeks ago). I’m not sure about everyone else but at least for me, I found these tech companies entwine themselves ever more deeply into my life.
Still, it’s possible that even a perfect response to the Coronavirus crisis could plant the seeds for a future backlash. The surge in usage of the tech platforms brought massive data to them at the same time. People are more generous in sharing their privacy durin the pandemic. How will these data be used in post-pandemic era? Will they gain unchecked power (even more than they already have) in the coorporation with the government and public organizations?
Stay vigilant.
