An Introduction to Big Tech’s Influence on Politics
In today’s interconnected world, a new and powerful player has emerged and exerted its influence on the political landscape: big tech. Big tech is a term used to describe the world’s most dominant technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. These companies have transformed the ways we interact with the world, generated trillions of data points about our actions, preferences, and behaviors, and arguably changed the nature of democracy. Moreover, they have created a new form of economic activity – surveillance capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism describes the way in which tech companies discovery the digital trace left by users (or personal data), extract it, and then use it to predict, influence, and control human behavior. With so much information at their fingertips – information civilization is facing an evolution. The power of big tech represents a brand-new frontier of influence and pressure on the democratic systems.