Media / Opinion
February 11, 2025

Let us step out of this disaster movie and decide for ourselves what is presented to us and our children

A handful of Big Tech multimillionaires are influencing our information, our politics and our future. Let's take back control of social media by educating our algorithms and not believing everything on social media, argue Moniek Buijzen and Chiara de Jong.

With a hundred-metre rocket Jeff Bezos wantsto compete with Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg fires fact-checkers from Meta's Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The richest ten per cent of people own half of all the money in the world. Meanwhile, Los Angeles burns. Outgoing President Joe Biden warns in a thin voice about the power of money with a sneer at ‘Big Tech’ and Donald Trump. It has been causing blue arms from pinching lately. Is this for real?

The world increasingly feels like one of those futuristic disaster movies. Even for fans of science fiction, reality is now getting too close to Don't Look Up, the Netflix film in which a meteorite hurtles towards Earth. In the film, a corrupt president and a megalomaniacal tech billionaire develop a nonsensical technological solution to the impending disaster, at the expense of humanity.

Recently, Zuckerberg shoved people aside for X's nonsensical fact-checking robot. Biden is right: money rules. A handful of big tech multimillionaires are influencing our information, our politics and our future. While our democratic tradition should protect against this kind of concentration of power.

Democratic cocreation

See, for example, our Kijkwijzer (“Smart watch” a Dutch rating tool that indicates whether audiovisual media content may be harmful for children), a good example of how democracy works. The law says that media content must not harm children. In a system of self-regulation, all stakeholders are involved in shaping policy. Politicians, parents, media producers, scientists... Even if the system is slow and the advice is not always what we would do with our children, it is democratic cocreation at its best. The same democratic regulation should also keep Big Tech in check.

In other words, we have to do it ourselves. With shared responsibility for all concerned. We should not drift further and further into a world where money, robots and algorithms rule instead of people and human values.

The strongest voice

Yet we now see algorithms designed to maximise profits are spreading disinformation and bias through social media. The systems that protect us are being circumvented or eroded. Fortunately, new European rules still offer some counterbalance. Despite the growing influence of Big Tech, our people's representatives still have the strongest voice - whether they are left or right, god-, people- or nature-loving.

We can still get out of this disaster film. By recognising what we care about, the deeper values that make us human. We can take back control. By thinking critically about the messages that occur on our social media and not just believing everything we see. By educating our algorithms. By choosing different social media. And by voting for the politicians who share our deeper human values.

And, thus, to decide for ourselves what we and our children will watch and read. Us together, with each other. Not a bunch of eccentric multi-millionaires with their big rockets.

Prof. Moniek Buijzen is Principle Investigator of AlgoSoc and together with Dr. Chiara de Jong researcher of Communication and Change at the Movez Lab of the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Buijzen is Erasmus Professor of AI in Society and also academic lead of the Erasmus Initiative Societal Impact of AI (AiPact).

This post was originally published in Dutch as an opinion piece in the Dutch regional daily newspapers Brabants Dagblad and Leeuwarder Courant.