By Horace Palacio:
Ask a hundred Belizeans to name the most powerful person on the planet and you will hear the usual answers. A president. A general. A banker.
All wrong. Power, at its purest, was never the ability to command armies. It is the ability to decide what billions of human beings see, think about, argue over, and feel, every single day, without them ever noticing the deciding. And that power belongs today to a handful of men most people could not pick out of a crowd, the men who own and control the algorithms.
Let me explain the word at the kitchen table, because it hides behind its own jargon. An algorithm is simply an editor. An invisible editor. Every time you open Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, or a search engine, thousands of items could appear before you. The algorithm chooses which few you actually see, and in what order, top to bottom. That choosing, repeated billions of times a day, is the single greatest concentration of influence in the history of the human race.
Now hold the scale in your mind, because the numbers barely fit inside it. More than three billion human beings use one company’s family of apps every single day. Nearly nine of every ten searches on earth flow through a single company’s ranking system. YouTube’s own executives have said that roughly seventy percent of everything watched on the platform is chosen not by the viewer but by the recommendation machine. The invisible editor never sleeps, never takes a holiday, and edits the mental diet of most of our species before breakfast.
And who commands this editor? Here is where the story sharpens, because the answer is not shareholders, not governments, not you. Mark Zuckerberg holds special super-voting shares that give him unbreakable control of Meta. He cannot be outvoted. He cannot be fired. Google’s two founders built the same fortress, minority owners with majority control. Elon Musk simply bought the global town square outright for forty four billion dollars, and tech reporters later revealed that engineers were directed to boost the visibility of his own posts to millions. And TikTok’s algorithm is so prized that the Chinese government placed recommendation algorithms under national export control, treating the code that entertains your children as a strategic state asset.
Read that list again slowly. A handful of men, none elected, none removable, none answerable to any voter anywhere, hold editorial control over the attention of mankind. No emperor in history came close. Caesar ruled Rome but could not whisper into every subject’s ear each morning. These men can, and do.
Perhaps you think I exaggerate the power of a mere feed. Then let the documented record speak, because every claim that follows is on the public record.
In 2014, Facebook’s own researchers published a study in which they quietly altered the feeds of 689,000 unknowing users, showing some more negative posts and others more positive ones, and measured the results. The users’ own moods shifted accordingly. The company proved, in writing, that it could adjust human emotions by turning a dial, without consent, without detection.
In 2021, a whistleblower named Frances Haugen walked out with internal documents. Among them, company research finding that Instagram worsened body image for one in three teenage girls. Leaked files also showed the machinery of outrage, at one point the angry reaction was weighted five times more than a like, meaning fury traveled five times farther than approval. European political parties privately told the company they had turned to more negative, divisive messaging because the algorithm punished anything calmer. The editor was not merely reflecting our anger. It was farming it.
And when the editor fails, nations bleed. United Nations investigators concluded that Facebook played a determining role in the spread of hatred that fueled violence against the Rohingya people of Myanmar. In the Cambridge Analytica affair, the data of up to 87 million users was harvested to target political persuasion. And when governments in Australia and Canada dared to pass laws the company disliked, Meta simply switched off news for those entire countries, Australia briefly, Canada lastingly. Flip a switch in California, and a whole nation’s journalism vanishes from the feed. That is not a metaphor. It happened.
One of Facebook’s own founding executives, Sean Parker, confessed the design openly years ago, saying the platform was built to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology.” Their words, not mine.
So now, Belize, the only question that matters. Why should any of this trouble a small nation on the Caribbean coast? I will lay out the stakes, and then, as always, you will judge for yourselves.
Consider where Belizean public life now happens. Our politics is argued on Facebook. Our news travels through Facebook. Our businesses sell through Facebook. Our children are raised, hour by hour, inside feeds engineered abroad. Which means the invisible editor now sits inside Belizean democracy, deciding which candidate’s message spreads and which dies quietly, inside Belizean commerce, deciding which shop is seen, and inside Belizean childhood, deciding what our daughters believe a body should look like. I wrote months ago that the Belize on your screen is not the Belize on your street. Now you know who edits the screen.
Consider the dependency. Belizean media houses, this one included, reach you largely through a platform whose rules can change overnight. Canada woke up one morning to find its news switched off. Nothing but goodwill prevents the same switch being flipped on us, and goodwill is not a national security strategy.
And consider the accountability ledger. This column spends most weeks holding Belizean politicians to the fire, and rightly so. But our politicians, whatever their sins, must face us every five years. The algorithm kings will never face a Belizean ballot, never sit for an interview with a Belizean journalist, never answer a question in our National Assembly, and, as I wrote in the broadcasting debate, they currently pay this country nothing for the attention they harvest from it. We are governed daily by editors we did not choose and cannot summon.
What, then, can a small nation and its citizens do? More than you think.
As a person, know that the feed is built, not natural. It is a shop window arranged by a stranger with his own interests. Curate on purpose, follow what feeds your mind, starve what farms your anger, and put the phone down knowing the editor hates when you do. Guard your children’s feeds like you guard their friendships, because that is precisely what they are.
As a builder, own your channels. I wrote it at the start of this year and it grows truer monthly, the walled garden, the direct list, the audience no algorithm can confiscate. Rent reach if you must, but build ownership.
And as a nation, aim our laws upward, tax the harvest as other countries do, enforce our data protection rules, teach algorithm literacy in our schools alongside reading, because a child who cannot see the editor cannot resist him.
The most powerful men alive do not command soldiers, Belize. They command attention. Yours. And attention, when all is counted, is the raw material of your one life, the thing your hours are actually made of.
They built machines to take it.
Decide for yourselves, Belizeans, whether you will keep handing it over unexamined, or take it back.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.
The post The most powerful men on earth write the algorithms, and Belize should understand what that means appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Horace Palacio: Ask a hundred Belizeans to name the most powerful person on the planet and you will hear the usual answers. A president. A general. A banker. All wrong. Power, at its purest, was never the ability to command armies. It is the ability to decide what billions of human beings see, think
The post The most powerful men on earth write the algorithms, and Belize should understand what that means appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
