2020 was a year like no other. A global pandemic, a divisive presidential election and a national reckoning on race rocked society.
And the tech industry played a critical role through it all.
Technology and business reporters at The Washington Post chronicled the industry’s continued rise in power and influence — and the trade-offs and risks of tech’s growing essential role in people’s lives. They shared their favorite stories from 2020 with The Technology 202, along with some thoughts about the state of technology in 2020.
The coronavirus made society more reliant than ever before on tech companies and industry leaders.
From Elizabeth Dwoskin, Silicon Valley correspondent: The fortunes of tech giants far surpassed the rest of the economy. Yes, there were some unexpected breakout successes in the pandemic, such as the apps Zoom and TikTok, but the amount of value that has accrued to Amazon, Facebook and Google, in particular, during this period is orders of magnitude greater. The pandemic essentially turbocharged trends, such as the rise of e-commerce and the triumph of digital ads, that over the past decade have helped tech giants become superpowers. It ushered in a reshaping of the financial landscape that will lead to Big Tech’s dominance for years to come.
From Jay Greene, Seattle-based technology reporter: Bill Gates emerged as a leading voice to push for science-based approaches to end the pandemic. Gates, whose foundation’s initiatives often benefit from government support, came as close as he could to criticizing the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. “People are hoping for U.S. leadership. It’s still an opportunity we haven’t seized,” Gates told me this spring. “The vacuum of waiting for the U.S. to step in and help out with that, there’s still a huge opportunity there.”
2020 reminded us all just how important an Internet connection is.
From Tony Romm, senior tech policy reporter: No issue touched Americans more directly and deeply than the digital divide, the persistent gap between those who can get online and those who cannot. The coronavirus pandemic forced us to confront this inequality in ways Washington had long avoided, perhaps finally setting the stage for reform.
From Geoffrey A. Fowler, technology columnist: The pandemic forced us to adopt new digital habits: working from home, Zoom school and telemedicine, just to name a few. But none of them worked unless people got the darn WiFi working. Fixing flaky, slow WiFi was by far the consumer tech problem I heard most about from Post readers — and my own friends and family. The good news is that it’s also something many people can address without buying something new.
Post reporters helped people make sense of Zoom and other services they increasingly had to rely on during the pandemic.
From Christina Passariello, technology editor: Jonathan Baran’s video with Geoff ran on March 11 – the same day as the rest of us began working from home. At the time it seemed so strange to all be communicating over Zoom, and even stranger to shoot a video over it – but the themes have held up well over the months. And now it seems so normal to be interacting over Zoom!
From Christina: Seeing Heather Kelly and Geoff joke around on screen in this video from James Cornsilk is just fun.
From Heather Kelly, technology reporter: Early in the pandemic, I looked at people trying to push back against the damage tech companies were doing to local businesses. They were calling instead of GrubHubbing, shopping local instead of Amazoning, and just hiring random people on Craigslist to get groceries. It was also a fun opportunity to talk people in my own neighborhood for a change.
But Post reporting revealed that society’s increased reliance on tech carried new risks and tradeoffs.
From Drew Harwell, aritificial intelligence reporter: I was totally blown away by what college students (and law-school students, and licensure-exam test-takers, and many others) had to go through during this weird stay-at-home all-online-all-the-time year. The anti-cheating “proctoring” systems that I wrote about here and here — which scanned their eyes and faces throughout the exam, dinging them for potentially “suspicious” behavior and preventing them from even using the bathroom – just strike me as so invasive and problematic. I talked to dozens of students during reporting, and the amount of hurt and anxiety they felt from these things was very real — as if they needed something else to be stressed out by! The systems say so much to me about the state of tech surveillance today: How a simple tool like a webcam can be weaponized against people, forcing them to prove themselves in front of a faceless overseer, unclear on what they might be doing wrong (until it’s too late), and all of it done silently in bedrooms across America for students who have no other choice.
From Tonya Riley, Technology 202 and Cybersecurity 202 researcher: The experiences of Premom’s users show the impossible challenge consumers face in deciding whether to trust an app when companies obfuscate their data sharing practices. The story also sparked a call to action from members of Congress led by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn) for federal regulators to enact greater oversight of the privacy practices of fertility and other consumer health apps.
From Mark Seibel, technology policy editor: In the rush to maintain work and personal relationships, Zoom became ubiquitous: business meetings, and schools moved to the largely untested platform. Few thought of how secure the technology was, until Drew uncovered a key weakness in the system.
From Reed Albergotti, electronics reporter: Behind the marketing of giant corporations, the reality is that profits come above all else. There’s a tendency to think of technology companies as something bigger and ascribe motives beyond the bottom line. Human rights is the perfect litmus test because there is no gray area. Concentration camps and forced labor are wrong, plain and simple and U.S. companies should be held accountable for using forced labor, no matter what the circumstances.
The presidential election highlighted the increasing power and influence social media companies have over politics.
From Elizabeth: [This story was] one of the most definitive accounts of how Facebook chose to cozy up to power at the expense of its users. The story revealed that the exception to its policies that Facebook granted for politicians was developed because of President Trump’s flagrant violation of the company’s hate-speech rules when he was an improbable presidential candidate in 2015. Trump’s behavior led executives to consider four options, including kicking Trump off for breaking the rules, getting rid of all hate-speech rules, or creating a two-tiered system in which politicians would not be held to the same standards as regular users. The company chose the latter, a decision — later copied by Twitter — that paved the way not only for Trump to bully and lie with impunity on social media, but for global politicians, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and India’s Narendra Modi, to do the same. I asked myself: If Mark Zuckerberg and his masters-of-the-universe deputies had made a different decision, would the world today be different? I was left with the chilling feeling that it would be.
From Craig Timberg, national technology reporter: Facebook’s political machinations during the Trump presidency made clear that the policies that shape what we see and hear on social media are not driven by immutable principles that tech titans discern after especially deep reflection. Rather, they are pragmatic calculations by company executives who are loath to antagonize powerful people who potentially stand between them and unbridled profits.
A nationwide reckoning forced the industry to confront its track record on race.
From Nitasha Tiku, tech culture reporter: Black workers in Silicon Valley drew public attention to the way that systemic racism has shaped the tech industry’s structure and beliefs — in the hopes Big Tech’s perennial “moments of reckoning” on race might lead to real progress. Many workers spoke on the record for the first time about the professional and personal costs for advocating for diversity that they have faced for years. Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, two former public policy officials at Pinterest, shared their experiences being underpaid, facing racist comments and being doxed by the alt-right, all while Pinterest was publicly celebrated for embracing the duo’s recommendations for forward-thinking policies on vaccine misinformation, content moderation and labor practices.
Worker safety issues were front and center as warehouse employees, gig workers and other contractors confronted health risks.
From Faiz Siddiqui, transportation reporter: Tesla repeatedly defied shelter-in-place orders put into place by its home county in the San Francisco Bay Area, a standoff that precipitated in CEO Elon Musk moving to Texas. But as this story showed, workers were most affected by the company’s stubbornness over coronavirus restrictions — and several ended up losing their jobs as a price for their caution.
The federal government brought historic legal challenges against Silicon Valley companies contesting their power.
From Rachel Lerman, breaking technology news reporter: The challenges began with Google. The company has been criticized for years for amassing power through mergers that grew its search service into the empire it is today. Regulators had many chances to moderate Google’s growth in the past, but their hands-off approach led us to the bombshell lawsuits of this year.
From Geoffrey: 2020 brought three (and counting) antitrust lawsuits against Google. While they make sophisticated arguments about Google’s business practices, one thing they’re bad at explaining is how Google’s monopoly hurts ordinary consumers. So I reviewed Google search like I would any other consumer tech product. Looking deeper at the results from three Google searches — and how they’ve changed over time — is an eye-opening way to see how Google puts its own interests ahead of ours.
Tech enabled flight in new ways – from space to the military.
From Mark: Elon Musk started the year as a joke. His company’s safety culture had been the subject of a NASA investigation because he’d smoked a joint on a video. People scoffed at the production and distribution of his Tesla cars. No one thought his SpaceX company would beat Boeing to carrying NASA astronauts to space. Yet Space X did beat Boeing, launching astronauts to the space station not once but twice, while Boeing’s program remains mired in technology problems. It was huge triumph of a test as you go culture.
From Aaron Gregg, business reporter: According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, this was the first known use of artificial intelligence in a military aircraft. The test shows how advancements in cloud computing and containerization are creating new opportunities to apply artificial intelligence to the physical machinery. Both are accelerating the proliferation of AI into unexpected places.
Technology will shape society in new ways post-pandemic.
From Hamza Shaban, business reporter: The radical experiment in virtual work for countless companies has shown that remote employment may be here to stay for some office workers. Technology is both enabling people to work from anywhere and is likely to keep highly educated professionals clustered in the same batch of densely populated, expensive, high-paying cities.
From Dalvin Brown, innovations reporter: It’s hard to know what the “new normal” will look like exactly, but it’s clear that technology will play a central role. This story showed how creative start-ups are getting as they try to predict what types of services could be in high demand on the other side of the pandemic.
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Nearly 40 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google over its search practices.
The lawsuit alleges that the search engine gives Google’s own products an advantage over rivals, Tony Romm reports.The lawsuit is the third antitrust case U.S. regulators have filed against Google since October.
The latest suit, led by Democratic and Republican attorneys general in Colorado and Nebraska, takes broad aim at Google’s search empire. Like the case by the Justice Department, the complaint touches on how Google shut out the competition by securing special contracts with cellphone providers to become the default search on their web browsers.
The case also mentions deals with connected devices, including smart televisions and speakers. State investigators also took aim at Google’s practice of advantaging its own search results over specialized competitors like TripAdvisor and Yelp. The complaint alleged that Google requires companies to purchase ads to become the top result, which enriches its own advertising revenue.
Google sought to rebut the charges in a lengthy blog post. “We look forward to making that case in court, while remaining focused on delivering a high-quality search experience for our users,” wrote Adam Cohen, the company’s director of economic policy.
The National Labor Relations Board found that Amazon illegally retaliated against a warehouse worker for organizing.
The Staten Island worker, Gerald Bryson, filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board after Amazon fired him shortly after organizing a demonstration protesting working conditions during the coronavirus pandemic, Lauren Kaori Gurley at Vice reports.
Amazon claimed it fired Bryson for bullying a co-worker at the protest. But investigators at the National Labor Review Board’s headquarters in D.C. ruled in Bryson’s favor.
(Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
“I feel justified, I feel exonerated. It’s great to know that some parts of the system still work,” Bryson told Motherboard. “I know I was fired for organizing at Amazon and the NLRB agrees. I started this fight for my fellow employees, for my brothers and sisters. I stood up for a safe and healthy environment, which Amazon did not provide.”
The ruling could help embolden growing efforts by Amazon employees to unionize at the company, which as been historically hostile to unions. The NLRB recently ruled to allow workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama to hold a vote to unionize.
Misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine continues to circulate on social media, researchers found.
False narratives include claims that the vaccine contains tracking microchips and that the government will make vaccines mandatory, researchers at Zignal Labs found, according to Rachel Lerman. Right-leaning figures and dubious websites have amplified the claims.
The spread continues despite social media companies redoubling their efforts to crack down on the misinformation. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok have all announced steps to moderate misinformation and redirect users to accurate information. But researchers warn that quelling false narratives about the vaccine will still be an enormous battle for the companies.
Misinformation spreads rapidly between platforms, making it difficult to completely eradicate, said Neil Johnson, a physics professor at George Washington University who maps the spread of misinformation online.
Vaccine misinformation can also be difficult to police because it is fueled by people’s personal beliefs.
“The platforms cannot control people’s opinions,” said Clemson University social media researcher Darren Linvill. “They can’t stop someone from saying ‘I’m not going to take the vaccine because I don’t think it’s safe.’ And it’s those thoughts and opinions that have as much of an effect on online communities as actual fake news or actual disinformation.”
Trump tracker
Biden says he will make addressing the SolarWinds breach a ‘top priority.’
The missive from the Biden transition team comes as President Trump remains silent about a devastating hack that has left government officials scrambling to assess the full scope of long-running Russian espionage campaign.
Joe Biden said that he has directed his team to “learn as much as we can” about the breach. Biden transition team spokesman Ned Price said the team could not comment on the nature of the presidential briefings it has received. Trump was reportedly briefed on the attack yesterday.
Government officials have been scrambling to assess the damage of a long-running espionage campaign by Russian hackers made possible by the breach of a network management system made by the firm SolarWinds. The company counts numerous government and private-sector clients. The departments of State, Homeland Security, Treasury, Commerce, and the National Institutes of Health, were all reportedly affected by the breach.
Biden didn’t call out Russia specifically but gave a warning shot to adversaries. “Our adversaries should know that, as President I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation,” he said in the statement.
The White House has acknowledged the attack, but Trump has not directly commented.
