The Internet, digital media and democracy

The high price society is paying for the illusion of an “open” and “free” Internet

“Big Brother is watching you”

Since the birth of Big Tech media twelve years or so ago, the 240-year-old American republic has been subjected to a grand experiment.

Can a nation’s news and information infrastructure, which is the lifeblood of any democracy, be dependent on digital media technologies that allow unlimited audience size, combined with frictionless “virality” and algorithmic (non-human) curation of massive volumes of mis- and disinformation?

The world has never before seen such all-powerful media and communication technologies like those developed by Facebook/Meta, Google/YouTube, Elon Musk’s Twitter and all their kin. Facebook is no longer simply a “social networking” website, it is the largest media giant in the history of the world — a combination publisher and broadcaster — with approximately 3 billion regular users, and billions more on the Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram. That’s a huge chunk of humanity’s global population of 8 billion.

Playing with Democracy

As the world was coping with a global pandemic, a mere 100 pieces of COVID 19 misinformation on Facebook were shared 1.7 million times and had 117 million views. That’s more viewers and readers than the Washington Post, New York Times, ABC News, Fox News and CNN combined. The old saying that “Lies travel halfway around the world before the truth even gets out of bed” is even more true in the digital age, when information travels with the speed of electrons.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, in 2018 Facebook executives scaled back a successful effort to make the site less divisive. Why? Because it was decreasing their audience share and hence, their profits. The evidence of the damage to the social, economic, political and cultural fabric that these Silicon Valley gorgons have systematically triggered has become frighteningly clear. This grand experiment has veered off course, like a Frankenstein monster marauding across the landscape.

As a remedy, some have called for the Biden administration to revoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the now-ancient law from the 1990s that has allowed the Big Tech media platforms to have near blanket immunity from the misinformation they algorithmically spew.

There are pros and cons to this strategy — endlessly debated by leaders and organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (con) and long-time President Biden advisor Bruce Reed (pro). Revoking Section 230 is not a perfect solution, but it would make Big Tech media more responsible, more deliberative and potentially liable for the worst of the toxic content — especially illegal content — that is published, broadcast and amplified by their media platforms.

Yet let’s be clear: some of the worst outrages that we have seen would not be impacted by 230’s revocation. Most offensive speech is not illegal. For example, even as invaders dressed like Viking barbarians were ransacking the House Speaker’s office, President Donald Trump encouraged his quasi-storm troopers with inflammatory words such as the speech he gave the morning of the January 6 riots. He stated, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength,” as he roused protesters to march to the Capitol. That incitement was broadcast over YouTube to over a million viewers. But revoking 230 wouldn’t have made YouTube or its parent company Google/Alphabet liable.

Similarly, while Trump’s statements about a stolen election were false and provocative, other media outlets publish untrue nonsense all the time. It would be difficult to legally prove that any particular individuals or institutions were harmed or incited by this or many of Trump’s outrageous statements.

Digital Frankensteins

We have seen other internet outrages which probably would not have been impacted by revocation of Section 230. Big Tech media has been used for disinformation campaigns in over 70 countries to undermine elections — even helping elect a quasi-dictator in the Philippines — and to widely amplify extremism, such as child abusers and pornographers livestreaming the most despicable acts perpetrated against victims. There was also the Christchurch mass murderer of Muslims livestreaming his carnage over Facebook that was seen by millions, and more recently the gunman who livestreamed his “performance” as he murdered five co-workers in a Louisville bank. Meanwhile Science magazine reports that on Twitter, with its 400 million users, tweets containing falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than truthful tweets.

Losing Section 230 immunity wouldn’t impact the fact that a vast number of YouTube climate change videos denies the science, and 70% of what YouTube’s 2.5 billion users watch comes from its recommendation algorithm. Nor would it change that a mere $42,000 worth of Facebook ads promoting disinformation about climate change reached approximately 8 million people, especially targeted at older men in rural areas.

At this point, the digital media platforms have become dangerous disinformation cannons that allow bad actors to spew fake news, deep fake videos and manipulated information to global audiences with frightening speed and cost-efficiency. Twitter and Facebook have turned out to be extremely effective tools for helping the crazies of all furry stripes and denominations to find each other anywhere in the world, organize, strategize and prod each other to commit terrible acts.

Algorithmic curators are on automatic pilot without any liability

Traditional media are subject to certain laws and regulations — including a degree of liability over what they push into the world. While there is much to criticize about mainstream media and corporate broadcasters, at least they use humans to curate the news, and pick and choose what’s in and out of the news stream. That results in a degree of accountability — including potentially libel lawsuits and other forms of Madisonian-like checks and balances.

But with Big Tech media, it’s the wild wild West. Facebook, Google and Twitter’s “engagement algorithms” recommend and amplify sensationalized crazytown user generated content for one reason — to maximize profits by increasing users’ screen time and exposure to more ads. In order to wring the most out of their advertising-on-steroids machine, Facebook, Google and Twitter use robot algorithm curators that are on automatic pilot. That is eerily like killer drones for which no human bears responsibility or liability — and is dangerous in a democracy.

Non-human curation, when combined with unlimited audience size, frictionless amplification, and algorithmic curation, has completely failed as a foundation for a democratic republic’s media infrastructure. The occasional use of warning labels are weak substitutes for actual human curation. These greedy companies — which are ostensibly liberal to progressive politically — exhibit an authoritarian tendency to destroy not just the social and political order, but the rationality of Western societies.

All their fake noble pretensions about an “open and free internet” notwithstanding, their primary business strategy has resulted in the dividing, distracting and outraging of people to the point where society is now plagued by a fractured basis for shared truths, sensemaking and common ground.

And yet, the Big Tech companies still refuse to de-weaponize their platforms. Ejecting Donald Trump from their services did nothing to change their destructive business model. All it did was remove the most visible evidence of it. It was a self-serving act that should have fooled no one.

It is time for a major reset.

A better model: investor-owned utilities governed by digital licenses

So revoking Section 230 won’t do a whole lot to rein in these dangerous technologies. What else needs to be done?

To answer this, we have to realize that these Silicon Valley businesses are creating the new public infrastructure for the digital age, including search engines, global portals for news and networking, web-based movies, music and live streaming, GPS-based navigation apps, online commercial marketplaces and digital labor market platforms.

So like it has in the past, the federal government should require a whole new business model for these companies: it should treat these companies more like investor-owned utilities.

Historically, that has been the approach used by the government in other infrastructure industries — such as telephone, railroad and power generation — which were either monopolies or oligopolies. As utilities, they would be guided by a digital license — just like traditional brick-and-mortar companies must apply for various licenses and permits — that defines the rules and regulations of the new business model. Ironically, even Mark Zuckerberg himself has suggested such an approach.

For example, these companies never asked for permission to start sucking up our private data  or to track our physical locations. They just did it. Nor did they ask if they could mass collect the data behind every “like,” “share” and “follow” into psychographic profiles that can be used to target each user. They started this data grab secretly, forging their destructive brand of “surveillance capitalism.” They know what you like, what you think, where you go, which church, restaurants and clubs you frequent — they know you better than your spouse or therapist. And that is pretty alarming.

Now that we know, should society continue to allow this? Shouldn’t the default regulation require platforms to obtain users’ permission to collect any of our personal data, i.e., opt-in rather than opt-out? This is not science fiction, in fact starting with the iPhone 14.5 operating system Apple provided a limited “middleware” version of this feature. Allowing users to turn off Facebook’s data grabs for profit is a potential game changer.

Regulation and enforcement are long overdue

But regulators need to incorporate other frames besides a utility model, such as an anti-monopoly approach. As was the case with AT&T and the telecom industry, the new model should bring about competition by limiting the mega-scale audience size of these Big Tech media machines. The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have called for an anti-monopoly break-up of several of these companies, just like AT&T once was split into the Baby Bells.

This could be a useful approach to take, but let’s be clear: If Facebook is forced to spin off WhatsApp or Instagram and their billions of users, and nothing else about the business model changes, that will just result in more digital media behemoths. More competition is good, but far less so if the newly emerged firms are competing according to the same market rules upon which the companies themselves have decided.

Beyond reducing the size, the new utility model also should incorporate other regulatory frames, such as a product liability and fiduciary “duty of care” frames. This is a kind of Hippocratic oath that entails a legal responsibility to “first, do no harm.” Imagine the potential for danger if a manufacturer of a vaccination or artificial organs could start treating patients with their products without having them tested and certified before widespread use. Nuclear power plants, voting equipment vendors, and many other systemically important businesses follow a pre-approval protocol.

What Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have built is very much like a machine, one in which they can dial up or down various design features to enhance or destroy democracy, disinformation spread, networking, news about pandemics and more. Regulated product design could make these products much safer for individuals, and for society. That could involve restraining the use of specific “engagement” techniques that are contributing to social isolation, teen depression and suicide, as well as damaging U.S. democracy. These techniques include hyper-targeting of content, automated recommendations, addictive behavioral nudges (like autoplay, infinite scroll and pop-up screens), as well as the dark design patterns and filter bubbles that allow manipulation.

The European Union and UK authorities have been trying to erect the foundations of this approach. But outside the state of California, which has passed some digital privacy protections, the United States has been sorely missing in regulatory action.

The United States should also update its laws to ensure they apply to the online world. For example, the United States has laws like the Children’s Television Act that since 1990 has restricted violence and advertising for Saturday morning cartoons and other children’s programming. Yet Google’s YouTube/YouTubeKids has violated these — and other — rules for many years, resulting in online lawlessness. The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees children’s programming, should apply existing law to the online digital platforms.

Similarly, the Federal Elections Commission should rein in the quasi-lawless world of online political ads and donor reporting, which has far fewer rules and less transparency than ads in broadcasting and traditional media sources.

We should not be afraid to regulate the Internet

These frequent outrages against our democracy — and humanity — are supposedly the price we must pay for being able to post our summer vacation and new puppy pics to our far-flung online reunion of “friends.” Or for the neighbor’s kid’s dance video to go viral, or for political dissidents and whistleblowers to alert the world to their just causes, all important uses.

The companies admonish us that they are providing all of this for free, and all we have to do in return is give them unlimited access to our private data. But that has turned out to be a very high price indeed, to be placed under the new digital yoke of surveillance capitalism. Especially as people increase the use of these services and technologies, which are being interwoven ever deeper into our daily lives and the very fabric of our societies, the future looks increasingly troubling.

A new business model for this digital infrastructure — guided by the right guardrails — would be able to retain the valuable uses while reducing the danger. Like the promise of the internet itself, Facebook, Google and Twitter started out small, and then blew up into monopolistic giants. They have established their own toxic and greedy rules that are a threat to our democracy — as well as to free market competition. This is one of the gravest oversights in the history of US democracy, and if we don’t rein it in, we as a society will eventually regret it even more than we do today.

It is time for the days when these monopoly companies are allowed to self-regulate themselves to come to an end.

Steven Hill    @StevenHill1776