The Exploiters Playground: Technology and Modern Rights Abuses - Sagwadi Mabunda,

In recent months, I have been thinking a lot about the ethics that should guide the development and deployment of modern technology. A lot can be said about getting the foundation right to realize the ultimate purpose of technology - which is to benefit human beings and the world in which we live. The lens through which we view technology, will ultimately determine the lens through which we create it. Naturally, the lenses can take varying forms. They can be philosophical, ideological, political, ethical or moral perspectives. Whichever perspective one chooses should ensure a better life for all.

Say, then, we make the correct choice, and we manage to create technology that serve that goal. Does it go without saying that the result will be just that? In other words, say we create technology which understands that umuntu, ngumuntu ngabantu, and which seeks to protect that ethic, what happens when it is deployed? What happens when human beings, beautiful and flawed as they are, enter the chat?

On 20 January 2025, President Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States. In the days that followed, he signed several Presidential Pardons for a wide variety of individuals. The pardon which caught my attention was that of Ross Ulbricht. For those unfamiliar, Ulbricht was the founder of Silk Road, a Dark Web drug marketplace which he created and ran under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Robert. Silk Road was said to be a billion-dollar anonymous black-market site for drugs, for which Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison on charges which included the distribution of narcotics, money laundering, and computer hacking. Silk Road was also one of the early test cases for Bitcoin and was hailed as a ‘principled libertarian experiment in free trade’. Ulbricht believed that drug use was a personal choice and that moving the trade from the streets to the dark web would quell some of the ills of the drug business, including the associated violence, considering the dismal failure of the war on drugs.

The Dark Web forms a small portion of the Deep Web - which are websites not indexed by search engines. The Dark Web is notorious for nefarious activities. It can be accessed through The Onion Router (Tor) which was created by the U.S Government’s Naval Research Laboratory for members of the U.S. Intelligence community to use without the risk of identification. In order to make the anonymizing software work properly, Tor was made open source in 2004, enabling anyone to access the non-surface web.

As with any technological advancement, it is a double-edged sword, which can be wielded for good and evil purposes. The Deep Web is populated by computer enthusiasts, privacy advocates, journalists, dissidents of oppressive regimes and ordinary people who desire strict privacy, secrecy and anonymity. It is however also popular with the criminal and malevolent members of our society - that thrive on criminal enterprises, and which have a taste for human rights abuses, including the vicious sexual abuse of children and snuff films.

A lot of people when learning about the Dark Web express shock and horror at the depravity that exists there - depravity so heinous that it does not make it into a Netflix documentary. It is thus easy to relegate it to the recesses of one’s mind where one knows bad things happen, but it is so far removed that it is almost unreal. What is more, one thinks to oneself, it takes a special kind of person with a special set of skills to find themselves in the Dark Web. Perhaps, one ponders further, if the technology did not exist, that kind of thing would not occur. Thus, one concludes, the technology creates the problem.

What then, do we make of Telegram? Telegram is one of the world’s biggest social media and messaging platforms. One big difference between Telegram and WhatsApp is that the former can have groups with up to 200,000 members whereas the latter limits it to about 1,000.

The arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov in Paris in August 2024, sparked fierce debate. One point of major contention is whether platform owners should be held responsible for the abuse on the platforms? Telegram is no stranger to controversy, having faced fines and suspensions from governments for refusing to cooperate in criminal investigations. And that it is not doing enough to stop the platform from being used to disseminate child abuse material and that it facilitates drug trafficking and money laundering.

Many people may not be familiar with Telegram, preferring the suite of platforms from Meta – Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram etc. And so, it might be easy, once again, to not give a second thought to the deviance occurring on these platforms. One may again say: “perhaps, if Telegram did not allow groups to be as big as they are, it would have better control, or better yet, perhaps Durov should have cooperated better with law enforcement, and he wouldn’t have been arrested. Perhaps, they should have designed the algorithms better to not let it be a haven for sexual torture rings and paedophiles.”

What then, do we make of LinkedIn, Tinder, Instagram and TikTok? What do we make of most social media platforms being used as the hunting ground for the unscrupulous? Shall we then arrest Zuckerberg? It’s difficult to ignore when it’s not just the depravity of the dark web, isn’t it?

Ultimately, we need to remember that everything good has a dark side. That every good neighborhood has a dark alley. Thus, as we develop greater and more powerful technology, we must take care to adopt a holistic approach, that truly does have the betterment of humanity (and life on Earth) as its goal.