TechnoKings rule, but at what cost?

It's perfectly legitimate for people to express strong opinions on issues surrounding equality. But where did folks go to share their anger and angst? To social media. Yet very few people stop to ask about the social inequalities produced by these platforms.

BigTech's titanic leaders are inventing entirely new and global hierarchies, with themselves sitting at the apices. In some respects, they act like imperial rulers, exercising great power without ever having to worry about winning elections.

The new social strata they've engineered are built on several foundations. One of them is politics.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and his senior management recently evicted thousands of users from their service on what appeared to be largely political grounds.

Taking responsibility for content is something social media companies have often failed to do. They've argued that they merely provide a platform for the views of others. But in the wake of attacks on the US Congress, Twitter rightly took action against some users who incited violence.

Many other users, however, had not engaged in violent or criminal acts, or incited the same and were cut off. They were given no warning and little opportunity was given for appeal.

It seems that many were evicted for nothing more than leaning more one way than the other on the political scale. US commentators have noted that Twitter took little action against online activists in earlier, arguably more violent anti-fascist demonstrations. Presumably, because these users were rooted in the "correct" side of politics.

I sympathise with media outfits that attempt some degree of impartiality. They face being branded as biased whatever they broadcast. However, other media companies, especially in the US, unashamedly promote one political brand over another. What CNN is to the left, FoxNews is the right.

As it happens, the world's largest social media companies are also based in America. Perhaps the fact that they exist in this febrile media environment helps explain why they too take sides in the so-called "culture wars". (A case in point was the removal of the Parler platform from app stores belonging to Apple and Google.)

BigTech companies may also now be trying to redress an imbalance revealed in the 2016 presidential election, where fake accounts traced to a foreign government promoted one side of politics.

Whatever the reasons, nobody in the US or anywhere else elected Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook or Mark Zuckerberg to act as political censors. They are primarily answerable only to their shareholders, not to the wider public.

The new social strata promoted by BigTech are also built on access to technology.