'Tech money in civil society: whose interests do digital rights organisations represent?' by Jake Goldenfein and Monique Mann in (2022) Cultural Studies
explores philanthropic interactions between ‘Big Tech’ and digital rights civil society organizations (DRCSOs) to enhance understanding of the alignment and misalignment of interests between these groups. ‘Big Tech’ wields political influence by distributing cash to research and policy organizations. Academic research supporting ‘Big Tech’ business practices is marshalled to support their political lobbying efforts, while civil society policy work shapes the narrative what dimensions of these businesses should be regulated (or not). While academic work is typically presented as a cool analysis of the relevant issues, DRCSOs purport to represent the interests of individuals and groups negatively affected by those business practices. Through empirical tracking of direct financial flows, as well as an analysis of cash distributions via class action litigation settlements, we show that certain DRCSOs have long-term financial relationships with ‘Big Tech’ that trouble our understanding of the alignments or misalignments of their interests. Through that analysis, we question where and how civil society fits into automated and algorithmic cultural production and perpetuation, and the way that Big Tech uses and guards the economic capital generated through its dominance over ‘automated culture’.
The authors state
There is a long history of ethically questionable philanthropic practices in socially harmful industries. ‘Big Tobacco’, gambling, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and mining have all been supported by philanthropically backed research and policy work. Industry is able to influence scientific findings and policy agendas in various ways, for instance through research funding and directing research programmes (Yach and Bialous 2001, Adams 2007, Capps and van der Eijk 2014), creating of conflicts of interests (e.g. between academics and industry, in favour of industry agendas) (Brandt 2012, Hendlin et al. 2019), undermining policy-relevant research (Landman and Glantz 2009), or interfering with researcher independence (Van der Eijk et al. 2019). Philanthropic interventions have the potential to deflect research and policy towards corporate objectives, launder corporate and executive reputations, and satisfy perceptions of corporate social responsibility (on corporate reputation and philanthropy, see Brammer and Millington 2005).
As relationships between industry and academia intensify (Crespo and Dridi 2007), related concerns associated with industry funding of academic research continue to emerge in the field of technology policy (Phan et al. 2021). Moves towards university commercialization come with complex ethical challenges (Mintz et al. 2010), especially at times where research budgets are under threat, and promoting industry collaboration is seen as a solution to fiscal crises. These issues, by no means new, are however, taking on new inflections in the context of research and policy work being funded by ‘Big Tech’ firms.
The firms that constitute ‘Big Tech' have become so profitable, in part, through business models that automate cultural production by ‘enfolding human thought, conduct, organisation and expression into the logic of big data and large-scale computation’ (Striphas 2015). We focus our analysis of the relationship between technology firms and policy work in the context of this dimension of Big Tech platforms’ participation in automated culture – the use of automated and opaque systems that manage and monetize the concurrent flows of personal data, cultural output, and human attention. Through entirely opaque curatorial, ranking, and gatekeeping systems, dominant platforms are able to manage the flow of cultural content according to incentives and optimizations that target the maximization of advertising revenue (Viljoen et al. 2021). Maintaining the opacity and profitability of these complex systems of automated cultural distribution and monetization requires ongoing control – control over cultural production, control over markets, control over consumer behaviour, and control over regulatory outcomes. This represents an epic and expensive political exercise. In the context of ongoing regulatory efforts to address the privacy impacts of this business model, as well as tackle the obscene market power that platforms have aggregated in the digital economy, dominant platforms appear especially resolute in preventing exposure of the relationships between cultural content, data flow, and economic value that their automated systems control.
In this article, we trace the movement of money between Big Tech firms and DRSCOs in order to highlight one way that the distributional and political status quo of automated culture reproduces itself. Although it is not possible to directly demonstrate the link between financial support from Big Tech to DRSCOs and the political objectives they pursue, we suggest that these financial relationships likely influence certain civil liberties narratives common to DRSCO outputs – ideas like greater individual control over data – which we argue operate to smooth over the often contradictory interests of platform providers and their ‘users’.
Our argument proceeds as follows: automation at scale (i.e. via forms of intermediation, advertising and attention economies, and the domination of multi-sided markets) enables Big Tech to accumulate vast economic capital. Big Tech faces threats in relation to these (frequently unethical, at times legally questionable) automated practices, including regulation challenging those business models, as well as competition law and antitrust enforcement that challenges their domination of those profitable markets. Following Maclean et al. (2021) we contend that the strategic distribution of economic capital through philanthropy enables the transference of economic capital into social, cultural and political capital that serves to inoculate platforms from regulatory intervention. This in turn allows Big Tech to continue to accumulate through their automated management and monetization of cultural content. Our examination of automated culture thus takes a wide focus that encompasses the social and political structures that facilitate, sustain and enable it. In doing so, we make original contributions to the field of cultural studies in questioning where and how civil society fits into algorithmic cultural production and perpetuation, and the way that Big Tech uses and guards the economic capital produced through automated culture. We begin with an overview of the money and influence that ‘Big Tech’ wields in various spheres, across political, academic, and civil society work.
