Something is wrong with social media
On the heels of historic and horrifying events in the US capital, we saw some big decisions land by the main social networks to remove access between a person in power and his audience. Other services like Amazon and Google weighed in decisively and used their power in a similar manner. There is no question that most rational people felt good about this and take it as a signal that society is correcting itself; albeit though the activism of a handful of super powerful tech CEOs whose relatively young companies have amassed unimaginable power over people's day to day lives. It took too long and now that it happened, the whole thing feels weird and not entirely genuine to me. What slippery slope are we on?
Like many people, I am wondering if they are now slowly starting to acknowledge and take responsibility for the problems they helped caused in first place. Are they willing to admit they profit from people’s natural tendency towards tribalism or the fact that the truth is boring and hard to engage people with? Or is it just ham-fisted corporate signalling after the fact? Whether you are Twitter, Facebook or Parler your argument continues to be that you provide value to society by freely connecting people with each other around what they are most interested in. This has been the story of the internet since day one and has become the de facto story of the social networks since. But it's also not news to anyone that the things that make these models successful also make them problematic. We find ourselves in a perennial debate between the right of free speech, the right to decide for yourself what is real is what is fake and the divisiveness, oppression and irreparable human damage caused when things become virally amplified by technology designed to virally amplify things.
We act as if these questions are new and complicated because the technology is new and complicated; and so we can't possibly be expected to work it all out. But it's not new and neither are the outcomes. Courts are actually well equipped to handle the questions and the tests for things like: your right to free speech vs the criminal act of yelling fire in a theatre. Or your right to print and share socially distasteful views to a subscribed mailing list of nut jobs vs the criminal act of placing them in public view on billboards all over the airport. These balanced sensibilities and the legal systems that support them are a corner stone of civilized society. Yet we have difficulty applying them to the way we are connected today. The questions haven't changed and neither have the answers, so something must be wrong with the way social networks are constructed as businesses. There is something inconsistent with the value they bring vs the damage they can do and the power they have. The fact that it is not self-correcting tells me something is unnatural and unchecked here. I don't think it's the technology per se. It's how we look at these companies and how we have, through our actions and inactions, made it OK for them to become central to our lives yet opaque and unchecked by either our elected representatives or by market forces. The only thing governing the relationship are increasingly biased terms of service agreements more incomprehensible to the average person than their mortgage documents.
Along this line of reasoning, there is an idea out there that I find compelling and, well…natural. The idea says that breaking these companies up won’t work. At the same time, keeping things as they are and pushing for closer ties between government and a handful of these companies does not seem right either. The idea I like is that we force them to “open up”. Fred Wilson talks about this a few times on his VC blog. Twitter and Facebook should no longer be self-contained applications. As the theory goes, they should become protocols; open infrastructure on which others can innovate and build their own client experiences and applications. E-mail works like this. Facebook can still have a Facebook app of course and if what they do in that application is essentially act as a publisher then they should be held accountable and liable. If they want to kick someone off the app, they can. And there will be other apps or clients running on the Facebook protocol more suited for that individual and his social graph. Those alternate apps also need to consider their liability, shareholders etc. Apps that innovate to give you more control over your data or perhaps do a better job of filtering fake news may be able to charge for it. Apps that focus on more fringe audiences or highly specific interest groups would probably also have a less extensive social graph and so are limited as businesses to the communities they serve. Apps that make a business of promoting reprehensible things will exist too but they will be naturally constrained by the market and visible and discernible by the law, should they break it. So the same way you can’t use the email protocol to email the world, the approach helps add some market forces to limit how and where the algorithms drive any particular message to. It also allows for a potential explosion of real innovation centred around personal choice. The part I like the most is that there is a great business, with a better value to society, in providing these essential protocols rather than using people’s data to promote echo chambers that feed them ads. To my estimation, the shareholders of Twitter and Facebook and the like could expect continued growth based on a more sustainable provider-model along these lines, more naturally aligned with how the internet is supposed to work.
