There is a healthy debate going on now about the role of Twitter, Facebook, and others (Google, Apple, …) with regard to moderating speech on their platforms. Rather than writing something entirely new, I decided to go back and look at what I have written and whether my opinion has changed since then. As I did that I was happy to find that I have had a fairly consistent approach based on who has power.
Over the years I have written a lot about keeping the government out of regulating content on the internet. For instance, in a post from 2010 titled “We Need an Internet Bill of Rights (And Fast)” I wrote:
If you care about freedom and democracy you do not want to give the government a wholesale way to shut down access to sites on the Internet. The potential downside from abuses of such as system far outweigh the upside to copyright holders.
Much of my writing about various content bills, most recently about FOSTA, has been around limiting government power to interfere with speech on the internet. Government has a monopoly on hard power within a country (e.g. throwing you in jail) and so government intervention in speech is particularly problematic.
What about the platforms themselves? Here I have written for some time that they have a responsibility to society to moderate content. Here is a quote from a post that I wrote shortly after Trump was elected President, titled “We Must Talk About the Role of Facebook, Twitter in Society.”
Imagine a system that at the push of a button allows its users to deliver a physical object into the homes of hundreds of millions of other people. Now imagine the operator of that system saying: “we don’t ‘edit’ what people send via the system.” You could put in a hand grenade with the pin removed or a bouquet of flowers. “We just deliver it. We are only in the delivery business.”
We would find this position preposterous. As society we would have none of it. Yet we have exactly that when it comes to information. The system operators are making no distinction between uplifting content and propaganda. They allow for “mind grenades” to be lobbed into millions of homes.
So how to square the positions from the first and the second post? I don’t want government regulating speech on online platforms but I also want online platforms to take responsibility. The answer is take power away from the platforms so that competition is possible. Rather than antitrust, which is an industrial age tool, I would like to see the large platforms become programmable via APIs. Again I have written about this extensively, for instance most recently in a post titled “We Need Mandatory Enduser APIs for Social and Search Systems.”
[…] with an API key I can have an intermediary software layer that operates on my behalf. And that layer can connect me with friends and family that are split up across multiple social networks. This would allow for real competition to Facebook to arise. And once there is competition there is a strong check on behavior as a future #DeleteFacebook campaign would be far more impactful.
Even just the potential of competition (known as “contestability”) will allow users to exert real power over what kind of behavior is acceptable on a platform.
Of course much of the work on decentralized systems is meant to provide alternative platforms that do not have a central point of control. While I am supportive of this and have invested in a number of projects, such as Blockstack and Algorand, It would be a mistake though to think that these kind of systems will automatically lead to good outcomes for speech (or for anything else). Here is a talk I gave at Blockstack Summit making that point
In a follow up post I will write more about the problems with speech that we can already tell will arise with decentralized networks. While they do have the potential to guard against government power, they will definitely invite the kind of manipulation I flagged as problematic in the context of the election.
