Late last month more than one hundred technologists, academics and journalists gathered in San Francisco to talk about the future of free speech. The event—which I organized with Andrew Kortina and Slow Ventures—tackled a range of topics related to how technology is upending how we communicate with each other, consume information and make decisions together as a society.
The event followed Chatham House rules in order to encourage full and open participation. Here were some of my high-level takeaways based on the panels and subsequent conversations:
Advertising-Supported Models Encourage Balanced Journalism / Center-ism, Subscriptions Tend Toward Polarization
In the 20th century, journalism emphasized “balance” in its coverage, reflecting the interests of their advertisers. Macy’s, for instance, needed to reach everyone and therefore wanted the publications they advertised in to be balanced and in the center. The challenge of appealing to “everyone” now falls to the large internet platforms, which is why they struggle so much with polarizing voices on their platforms. Meanwhile, as publications like the New York Times move toward subscription models, they are incentivized to appeal to their “base” rather than the middle.
Broad Acceptance of Balance between Freedom and Security, and Fear of Either Extreme
Technology in theory allows for more centralized control over speech than was ever historically fathomable. Technology also allows for scaled private free speech in forms that are impossible in the real world. Either extreme is very challenging to our current civilization, and everyone seems to prefer some form of balance—more than I expected.
The Original ‘Internet’ Utopian Project is Over
When the internet was young, many saw it as the beginnings of an open global standard that stood beyond the state and connected “the people” directly. That vision now seems utopian. The Chinese have opted out and, in a sense, so have the Europeans. Now individual states and even cities are creating a web of overlapping independent regulation. Everyone seems somewhat unhappy with this, but perhaps it is better for speech, and speech norms, to be somewhat fragmented globally.
Fake News is a Result of Disempowerment
Real news and information is important if you are empowered to make decisions. Part of the rise of fake news might be explained by a sense of disempowerment. If you don’t feel like your voice counts and if you don’t have control, then content as entertainment can serve you by reinforcing your beliefs and making you feel part of a community.
Freedom to Speak vs. Freedom After Speech as a Function of Identity
The assertion is that historically everyone always had free speech, but not necessarily freedom after they speak. You can have multiple identities online that do not match your real world identity—so you can’t be punished in the real world for your virtual speech. The extreme of this would be anonymous speech, but no one will trust anonymous speech in the future, so it is about creating trusted identities that are distinct from your real identity.
Finally, if historically we were only actually concerned with “freedom after speech” because of internet filtering and big data, we should actually be concerned with freedom to speak in the future.
Quadratic Solutions to Power-Law Problems of Speech
Quadratic voting is an increasingly popular theoretical idea for how democracies could better rationalize law-making. The basic idea is to allow people a “wallet” of credits to vote on issues, and enable individuals who care very much about a specific topic—like gun control—to spend the majority of their votes on that one issue. If we are worried about the “power-law” nature of modern speech on the internet—the biggest voices reach far more people today than ever before—we could counterweigh that by taxing political speech based on reach. For example, if you want to reach 10 people you would pay a $10 tax, if you want to reach 100, the tax would be $1,000 and so on.
All News is Paid & All News Serves Whomever is Paying
Hopefully there is a future where different media is paid for by different parties: end users via subscriptions, billionaire benefactors, advertisers and even the government. So long as funding sources are transparent, people need to learn to read better.
Social Norms Are Currently More Repressive than Laws
At least in the U.S., it is interesting that the social norms of private communities and groups are far more repressive to free speech than the law itself. It isn’t about fearing or being limited by the government, it is about being limited by each other.
Demonetizing Content is a Cop-out
Everyone gets the game. Leave something up so that those who support it can’t say you took it down. Demonetize it so that those who don’t support it can’t say you took no action. It makes sense as a PR strategy even if it doesn’t pass the intellectual test. There is a big split on whether platforms should be more opinionated or not about the content on their services. There are obviously big questions about the implications of asserting editorial control.
Era of Successful “Bomb-throwing” Technologists is Over
The last roughly 20 years have been about building the technology that was possible regardless of regulatory interests and letting it play out. In the next era, technologists will need shelter from—or to align with—other states, regulators and powers. The era of “bomb throwing” is over. Of course, large technology powers might be well suited to protect the next era of freewheeling techno-extremists for the sake of technical progress.
A Challenging Century Ahead
No one really has answers. Especially in a world where the extremes of completely unstoppable micro-targeted free speech destroying truth and central control are equally scary and unpalatable. So the default is going to be muddling through an increasingly complicated set of overlapping and conflicting frameworks for a long time. The era of simple philosophical breakthroughs like John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle is over for now.
A Flipping of Speech Rules the Public & Private Spheres
One thing that didn’t come up, but I have been thinking about recently since the symposium, is whether we are going to see a flipping of the public and private spheres of speech. Historically, private speech was unmeasurable and uncontrollable and consistently free across civilizations. Public speech, in the “town square,” was what was “dangerous” and controlled differently in different civilizations.
Is it possible that for the future we need to flip these expectations? Might we move toward a world where you can say anything you want in a public space using your real name, but private speech—newly powerful, scalable and targetable—is what ends up being controlled by societies? I have considered this idea before, but it sticks with me more deeply now.