Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

Content Moderation

from the giving-control-to-the-users dept

The boiling frog syndrome suggests that if a frog jumps into a pot of boiling water, it immediately jumps out — but if a frog jumps into a slowly heating pot, it senses no danger and gets cooked. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has been gradually coming to a boil of dysfunction for a decade – some are horrified, but many fail to see any serious problem. Now Elon Musk has jumped into a Twitter that he may quickly bring to a boil. Many expect either him – or hordes of non-extremist Twitter users – to jump out.

The frog syndrome may not be true of frogs, and Musk may not bring Twitter to an immediate boil, but the deeper problem that could boil us all is “platform law:” Social media, notably Twitter, have become powerful platforms that are bringing our new virtual “public square” to a raging boil. Harmful and polarizing disinformation and hate speech are threatening democracy here, and around the world.

The apparent problem is censorship versus free speech (whatever those may mean) — but the deeper problem is who sets the rules for what can be said, to what audience? Now we are facing a regime of platform law, where these private platforms have nearly unlimited power to set and enforce rules for censoring who can say what, with little transparency or oversight, even though they are fast becoming essential services. Are we to trust that to a few billionaire owners or Wall Street? Pseudo-independent oversight boards? The slowly and erratically turning wheels of government? “Self-sovereign” users or communities of users that may self-organize, but may also run wild as mobs? Or some new hybrid of some or all those that can offer both freedom and order?

Musk now brings this problem to a boil for all users to see. Either democracies will see the urgency and act, or they will die. Even if the boiling is slow and takes decades, leaving this power to control speech in this new public square in the hands of private businesses or governments will leave “a loaded gun on the table,” ready to be picked up by any would-be authoritarian.

It will take time and much sorting out, but some hybrid control is the only feasible solution that can preserve democracy. There are many ideas leading toward that rebirth — the optimistic scenario is that Musk could foster that.

Twitter has already begun to consider a step in that direction with Bluesky, an independent project funded by Jack Dorsey, and consistent with Mike Masnick’s proposals for “Protocols, Not Platforms.” Variations include Cory Doctorow’s adversarial interoperability, and Ethan Zuckerman’s Digital Public Infrastructure. A “middleware” architecture proposed by Francis Fukuyama’s Stanford group would let users select from an open market of delegated filtering services to work as their agents, to feed them what they want from the platforms. Any of these would shift power from the platforms to each user, to control what each sees – a variation on ideas also proposed by Stephen Wolfram, Ben Thompson, and me, among others.

Interestingly, it has been largely forgotten that the much-debated 1996 law that enabled the current legal regime, Section 230, also said “It is the policy of the United States… to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals.” True, there are significant challenges in this approach. The most fundamental is that doing filtering (ranking and recommending) well requires access to sensitive personal data from the platforms. But promising solutions are emerging.

A path to achieving this is outlined in a series in Tech Policy Press by Chris Riley and me. The central idea is to put primary control of what each of us sees in our own hands, choosing from an open market of composable sets of filtering services that suit our individual desires. Complementing that would be a light hand of regulation to ensure minimal constraints on illegal content, while leaving the criteria for handling “lawful but awful” content to services that the users choose.

But that alone is not enough. What traditionally kept “awful” content from us was neither a censoring authority nor direct user control — but a rich ecosystem of mediating services that did filtering the old-fashioned way: Publishers, communities, and other institutions served as an open network of curators serving more or less specific audiences — that we were free to choose or bypass. Now that open meditating infrastructure is being disintermediated by the social media platforms. We had freedom of impression — but are now losing it to platform control.

Real freedom of speech requires re-mediating that kind of infrastructure for indirect user-control. There are already legislative efforts in the US and Europe to mandate interoperability — and some include user “delegatability” — to open the platforms and break up monopolies of platform law. Creation of a layer of delegated user agents can create an opening for an open infrastructure of mediating services, to support filtering, as well as other aspects of social media propagation. This can enable traditional mediating institutions to re-integrate into this online ecosystem and regain their important role — for those who value what they can offer. It can also enable platform support for new breeds of mediating services to emerge and find an important place in our media ecosystem. Some fear that this user control might worsen filter bubble echo chambers, but how many of us really want to close our eyes and remain ignorant and stupid? Individual agency in choosing from a diversity of information sources has always been the hallmark of successful societies.

In this way social media can restore the original promise of the internet as a generative base for a vibrant and open next level of society.

Observers have dismissed Musk as a “mischievous trickster god” and naïve about freedom of speech. Maybe we are all cooked. But maybe (depending on how much pot he smokes?), he might support the nascent potential of Twitter to change the game for the better – or spur the rest of us to take the pot off the burner.

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Richard Reisman (@rreisman) is an independent media-tech innovator and frequent contributor to Tech Policy Press, who blogs on human-centered digital services and tech policy at SmartlyIntertwingled.com.

Filed Under: content moderation, control, elon musk, protocols
Companies: twitter