The Guardian: Trump’s Election Awakened Big Tech to the ‘Horror’ of Its Own Inventions

Julia Carrie Wong writes at The Guardian that the election of Donald Trump has shocked the tech industry into taking a more critical look at their effect on the world:

Tech’s nascent moment of reckoning is welcome – if somewhat belated. Victor Frankenstein recognized that his creation was a “miserable monster” on the very same “dreary night of November” that he created it. It appears to have taken a full decade and a different dreary November night to awaken the new class of tech agonistes to the horror of their inventions.

The election of Donald Trump was “a big slap in the face” for people at Facebook, said Antonio Garcia-Martinez, a former Facebook product manager. To most Facebook employees, Garcia-Martinez said, “Trump is the incarnation of Satan. The fact that they helped Satan get elected does dog a lot of people.”

Ev Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, told the New York Times this spring that Twitter’s role in Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency was “a very bad thing”, adding: “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.”

Read the rest of the story at The Guardian.