The Algorithms of Tyranny

At the beginning of September, the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman) asked Netflix to remove content they considered “offensive”. In a statement followed by two others from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, these countries considered that some of the programs “contradict Islamic and social values ​​and principles”! While the GCC countries did not specify specific programs, a quick overview of the speech those countries usually broadcast, especially Saudi Arabia, indicates that what is angering those regimes is precisely the content related to the LGBTQ+ community.
A few days before the GCC statement, a deputy in the Egyptian parliament had submitted a question to the Ministry of Culture about what he considered a failure to impose censorship on the Netflix platform for the same reasons that prompted the GCC countries to threaten to ban the platform. A day after the Gulf statement was issued, the Supreme Council for Media Regulation in Egypt issued a set of “social and value” controls that broadcasting platforms such as Netflix and Disney are supposed to abide by. Let’s note here that this censorship campaign is not limited to the Arab world, but similar incidents happened earlier this year in China, in which several streaming channels have removed dialogues referring to LGBTQ+ people from some scenes of the Friends series. For its part, Hungary issued legislation prohibiting “promotion” of everything related to the LGBTQ+ community, and the censorship authority in Malaysia prevented the showing of some films that dealt with the subject (albeit indirectly). At the same time, the Turkish president personally intervened to delete some scenes from a Turkish series produced by Netflix in 2020.

Up to this moment, if we think that the films shown on streaming platforms have escaped the scissors of censorship, then this campaign on streaming platforms indicates the intention of many regimes to extend their censorship of artistic and literary productions to the internet and perhaps even broadcast knowledge. Ruling regimes are tightening the control (most of those governments are not created by a genuine democratic process) over all aspects of creative production, from writing the text to distribution. These systems do not have the power to censor streaming platforms because most operate outside the control of these systems and are not subject to their laws. It remains for the authoritarian to exert whatever pressures possible to delete some content or permanently ban the relevant platforms from broadcasting within the state’s territory, which may happen. Let’s look at the number of Netflix subscribers alone in the Arab world at the end of 2021 (9.49 million subscribers). We can estimate the amount of pressure that countries can exert on this platform and others if they threaten to ban them from broadcasting (it is estimated that the number of Netflix subscribers in the Arab world will increase to 21.5 million subscribers by 2027). That will significantly affect the platform’s profits, which surely would like to make as many profits as possible.

We have spoken about censorship over and over again. We are tired and bored with it.
But today, we find a new expansion in the methods and means of censorship. Most countries currently trying to censor films on broadcast platforms invoke two reasons that push them to expand censorship. First, they invoke the principle of “state sovereignty”. They then claim that their societies will not accept content that they claim harms the traditions of these societies and threatens their social security. We see in the two reasons flimsy arguments touching absurdity and showing serious ignorance. It must be emphasized here that those rulers who advocate the principle of “state sovereignty” have no problem giving up the sovereignty of their countries whenever it is necessary to maintain the dominance of their power, and the examples are too many to mention. It is outrageous to use the principle of sovereignty in the service of the policies of repression and control of minds. Whoever fears sovereignty has to secure for his people all the reasons for sovereignty, at the forefront of science, knowledge, freedom of thought, and creativity. Whoever is robbed of his thinking will fall into weakness, which will inevitably cause the fall of sovereignty. One of the reasons for strength is creativity, and we, under the policies of these regimes (in addition to the expansionist policies of the great countries and their domination of the planet’s wealth through war, fraud, and occupation), are almost unable to produce knowledge, in thought, literature, art, industry, and technology. What sovereignty remains if we do not have mastery over our minds?

As for the second reason, i.e., the defense of traditions and the preservation of society, according to the claim of the ruling regimes, there is a great calamity in it. Traditions are not good or evil but neutral concepts that can be described as negative or positive. What traditions protect this power? Is it the tradition of transferring power within the same family or the tradition of flogging, beheading, and amputation? Is one of penance and prohibition of cross-sectarian marriages, taking revenge, or dominating women’s lives and practicing circumcision on them? What are the outdated and destructive traditions? Or is it perhaps protecting the traditions of helping the poor, sheltering the homeless, kindness to orphans, avoidance of violence, love of others, equality between believers (and non-believers!), and so on? What have these regimes done to eliminate hateful traditions and encourage good ones? Is there a need to answer? We are accustomed to its hypocrisy, know it well, and neither believe nor trust it. To claim that our societies are under attack from tradition and values ​​(if true), does not call for more censorship and control over creativity, quite the contrary. If these regimes truly possess the intention of protecting and developing their societies, they must secure for their people all means of knowledge and release freedom of thought to the fullest extent so that these people can confront and respond to this “attack.” He who does not possess knowledge is incapable of creativity, and he who is not capable of creativity is incapable of confrontation. Simple equation!

The obvious reason, then, is the regimes’ desire to complete control over every artistic and cultural expression and use it to serve their interests. In addition, there may be another undeclared reason, which is inherently related to the desire to consolidate power. Some of these systems have their own streaming platforms and are exposed to intense competition from other platforms. The significant difference between subscriber numbers in each platform indicates a huge difference in the number of subscribers in favor of the non-regulatory ones. So, the regimes set two things in mind: to increase the profits of their platforms and to have complete control over what their citizens watch. Eliminate competing platforms from existence to achieve financial profits and dominate people’s minds by having complete control over the content of what they watch.

Of course, we are not defending any of the broadcasting platforms. They all have their flaws.
In short, most platforms’ algorithms to suggest content to their viewers still fail to understand the viewer’s attitudes and intentionally or unintentionally encourage extremism in thought and action. If you think that you are leaning to the left, for example, and for one or more times you watch movies that match your orientation, the algorithms will suggest content similar to those and block out what contradicts them, and vice versa. These algorithms will obscure the variety in opinions, directing knowledge in one direction, limiting the possibility of independent thinking, increasing extremism, and giving platforms tremendous power to control public opinion choices.
How was Donald Trump elected, for example, and how was he subsequently overthrown, and did the algorithms control the voters’ choices? Algorithms are used today in almost everything, from personnel selection to security investigations to the military industry to ad targeting on social networks, election campaigns to finance, business, commerce, stock exchange, etc. All Wall Street companies, for example, use algorithms with tremendous speed in the processes of buying and selling stocks and goods and make huge profits thanks to them. Still, they are algorithms that remain inadequate and prone to making mistakes (for example, hundreds of millions of dollars disappeared from the Wall Street stock market recently due to a malfunction in the work algorithms, and to this day, no one knows where this money has evaporated.) Today, the world is facing a major dilemma regarding the ethics of using algorithms and people’s data on the Internet. Testifying before the British Parliament, former Cambridge Analytica director Brittany Kaiser acknowledged the company’s role in the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s exit from the European Union (by obtaining data from millions of Facebook users and addressing each one of them with their advertisement on various social media). The company brought Trump into office, pulled Britain out of the European Union, and affected many countries’ elections in the developing world. What is surprising in Kaiser’s testimony is that the British government classifies the company’s techniques to direct voters as a weapon! Communication tactics are classified as a weapon! Let us take a closer look at this classification. This is a broad topic; the discussion about it is long, and we may address it later. What concerns us here is the impact of algorithms in our cultural field, especially within the work of film broadcasting platforms.

For instance, Netflix currently uses the “Pragmatic Chaos” algorithm. The program selects 60% of the films that a particular individual will watch. This process can be called the physics of culture or the mathematics of culture! There are algorithm programs today that control people’s culture, and these programs were made by a few individuals who sat behind a desk somewhere on the planet. Meanwhile, behind a desk studded with gold, a few individuals gather in different parts of our Arab world and decide that the best way to confront what they call “cultural invasion” is to impose more oppression and domination! Our systems ignore the ability of algorithms to influence people’s culture and choose to focus on accumulating profits and set more control over thought. The world is way ahead of us, and our systems are in a coma. A study published in 2006 by UNESCO showed that the percentage of spending in the Arab world on scientific research amounted to (0.2%), while Israel spends (0.7%), which is four times the Arab world for a country whose population does not reach 5% of the people of the Arab countries, while for example, China’s spending increased to (8.7%).
These figures indicate the indifference of the ruling regimes in the Arab world to providing knowledge to its citizens, and knowledge is power.

We lived through a time before the Mongol invasion when Baghdad was the center of knowledge.
Where are we today?
How do we recover our strength?
How do we get back to participating in human creativity?
How do we participate in shaping the world we want to be just and based on the principle of cooperation rather than destructive competition?
Will we ever produce algorithms that open knowledge to all humans?
Perhaps we must get the rule back from the systems of regression and oppression first!