Saturday, February 08, 2020
The "platform or publisher" issue: the public doesn't get it, and that's bad for the future of user-generated content
Just a quick note to start the weekend.
I’m quite struck in eavesdropping on ordinary
conversations that “ordinary people” online don’t understand the concept of
downstream liability protection for platforms, in either the usual torts like
defamation (Section 230 in the US) or copyright infringement (DMCA Safe Harbor,
which requires a platform to respond to a complaint and then ask questions
later). The recent developments in the
EU, especially for copyright, do make this a lot more problematic for the entire
western world.
Furthermore, people have different perceptions of the
social consequences of speech. In the
early days, like the late 90s, practically unlimited free speech from any other
“nobody” was considered a way to enhance democracy and encourage equality. That wasn’t questioned at first but has
gradually eroded. But this perception
was largely true even during the early days of big social media.
Remember, Zuckerberg was “person of the year”
for Time’s 2010 cover, as “the connector”. We had an Arab spring, and the takeout of
Osama bin Laden by Obama. But by 2014,
things were changing.
We saw more
evidence of identarianism, as with Ferguson, even while Obama was
president. Radical Islam, now ISIS, was
recognized as am essentially identarian theocratic threat, but relatively easy
to spot and isolate. Because of the
nature of some aspects of US History, “white nationalism” was becoming a more
insidious threat, which connected underground to some people who would support
Trump’s 2016 rhetoric (and greatly exacerbated by Charlottesville, and then
Pittsburgh and Christchurch). The
identity-centered concerns of some groups on the Left do have some validity,
such as security issues when people in various groups assemble. I say this as a libertarian to centrist “gay
conservative” (David Rubin makes sense to me) myself.
Today, we have a “crisis” in the way people perceive
the “value” of individual speech. More
people on the Left see it as a manifestation of inherited advantage and
privilege (sometimes connected to race).
I personally value nuance and seeking truth and provable facts in
debate. The practical reality is that
most people today believe that access and propagation of information should
come from social structures (families, countries, religious or tribal
authority, and now intersectional groups) and be related to meeting real needs
of other people, sometimes in “creative” channels (as Paul Rosenfels used to
describe them). This view would require individuals to contribute to others' social capital as understood by localism before they could have a soapbox to be heard globally.
So now we see the public as a whole seeing the big
social media platforms as publishers, who should no longer just allow anyone on
to self-publish anything. Generally,
(leftist) activists want speech to be justified by follow-up of action (as Burt
Neuborne explained in Madison’s Music) so that, at least politically, people
will come together in enough numbers (as “foot soldiers” or “proles”) to make
real political change. A parallel idea
exists with gun control: if you want to
claim the natural right to own a gun, you ought to belong to a volunteer fire
department, so to speak (the “justification” clause regarding militia, which
the Supreme Court says is not actually incorporated into exercising the natural
right, as Eugene Volokh has explained).
So, we are likely to see a future where there will be
many more “publishers” than in the past (before the Internet) but they will
have to be screened to ensure the legitimacy of their intentions. They generally will need to be running a real
business (actually conducting commerce and selling things) or doing legitimate
organizing and activism. That is how
the tech world is seeing things, as being pressured by the corporate world,
which in turn has become unexpectedly responsive to the threats of the
established Left (read – organize boycotts).
The Left is about getting people to show up and protest, not to film and
remain spectators (which is what conservatives like to do, including myself).
No wonder, big tech seems favorable to the Left and to
collectivists, and has turned against conservatives, not so much directly about
ideology, but because conservatives tend to act individually, not in
groups. (David Pakman is a “liberal” but
has gotten in trouble because he also is a very strong individualist, unusual
on the Left.) Indeed, Tech has fallen
into a spell related to Herbert Marcuse and to neo-Marxism. Another way to perceive what is going on is
to ponder Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “skin in the game” or the idea of “no
spectators” as expressed by Burning Man in Nevada or even the Netflix satire
“Rebirth”.
My own situation is related to the idea that my setup
is very old, dating as far back as 1996, before my first “do ask do tell” book
was self-published (1997). I don’t have
advanced video skills, because I did all my stuff before YouTube really took
off. My setup has multiple entry points,
set up over time, so it may sound like it has redundancies and seem
non-transparent. Yet, I am trying to do
something about this, but it will take until the end of 2021 (there’s a lot of
detail I can’t cover in one post).
The redundancies and multiplicity of access routes,
and my strategy of simply letting people find me, was very effective in the
early years but could be a source of criticism and even threats of shutdown
now, because I don’t “play ball” with the tribal climate today. This observation reminds me of the “media
manipulation” policies and takedowns of “coordinated inauthentic behaviors” by
Facebook in 2018, which are not quite the same things operationally. They are basically related not just to spam
(as usually understood) but to the inflation of metrics (especially on large
social media platforms) to convey the misleading impression of more popularity of a speaker than
actually exists or "earned". In the future, social
media will pay much more attention to the “authentic” metrics of all speakers
--- does this content pay its own way?
Does it fill real needs of consumers?
The use of persistent identifiers clouds these questions (COPPA and
CCPA, in different ways) as does the practice of patronage. It’s much healthier if consumers really pay
for what they consume -- but paywalls are just too cumbersome. We have a lot of work to do.
I will also say this.
I don’t have particularly good numbers in the legitimate sense, but I
know that my content,, however "gratuitous", has been politically influential about certain issues (it
was very important in ending “don’t ask don’t tell” some years ago). In perhaps two instances my hidden
participation has turned out to be very critical for the final outcome of a
situation. But that’s because the “right” people find it and the nuanced ideas
about moral ambiguity (sometimes traceable to some bizarre ironies or incidents
in my own narrative history) stick. Yet
that doesn’t seem to be as acceptable a way for global speakers to operate now
as it had been twenty years ago, because it gives covert intellectual “elites”
with no direct responsibilities for others who need them, too much covert power. That is a real problem for me. Back in 2005, there was an argument going
around that McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform would shut down political blogging
because it could give bloggers too much covert power – the FEC eventually calmed
that situation down (as I have explained in the past), and then we had Citizen’s
United and various other rulings. But
now the problem is coming back just with pressure on Tech itself, and gain from
political candidates (like Biden and Warren).
So yes, I am watching this carefully.
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