Late last year, I wrote a column about free speech and democracy in the age of micro-targeting. In it I observed that in order to preserve an open democratic discourse, it was critical to require that all micro-targeted political ads and their targeting information be public record, so that advocates and watchdog organizations could keep track of what candidates and their supporters were claiming in private at scale to different constituents.
It was heartening to see that almost exactly a year later Facebook has very strongly committed to move to do exactly that, making all ads and most targeting information publicly available for review on pages.
This was a necessary step, but a year into intense controversy and debate—and on the heels of congressional hearings—it is clear that transparency around paid speech isn’t going to be enough. Unfortunately for everyone, the debates around how the internet should and will evolve only get more controversial, pitting core assumptions of our civilization against one another.
By removing the natural friction of communication in the physical world, and allowing mass targeted speech by people (and machines), technology is forcing us to grapple with beliefs that have always sat in balance with one another. Years ago, it was possible to simultaneously value openness and freedom, equality and fairness, and security and stability. The days where the physical friction of reality allowed these ideas to peacefully co-exist are coming to a close, and the internet is forcing us to reconcile their fundamental inconsistency. In a modern, frictionless world, you can’t have an open and free world that also is equal as well as secure and stable. Something has to give.
We are going to need to make some very tough decisions in the coming years and prioritize our values in new ways.
Towers to the Heavens
When thinking about the problems we now face as a civilization, I am vividly reminded of the story of the Tower of Babel.
The story, which is mirrored in many different cultures, is that in an earlier time humanity was unified and spoke a common language. As a single force people were able to do great things at scale, and they decided to begin building a tower to the heavens together.
The hubris of trying to build a tower to the heavens threatened God, who, as punishment fractured the language of men and made it impossible for people to understand one another.
It has been a foregone conclusion for a long time in many circles that the internet has been a vehicle for moving us toward speaking one common language and being able to work together to solve the great problems of our era, ranging from global warming, poverty and disease, to ideally aspirational missions like interstellar travel.
As I have discussed before, it also is clear that just as in the story of Babel there is pressure built into the internet’s DNA, accelerated by things like artificial intelligence, that threatens to undermine our ability to understand one another, see reality the same way and function on big projects as a unified force.
The sad reality is that the most exciting attempt to bring our world together is putting us at risk of not being able to trust what we see or hear.
What Hard Choices Are We Willing to Make?
As I see it, there are a series of questions that we are going to have to tackle in order to preserve the internet as a functional communications platform, and they are going to require some very deep tradeoffs. We aren’t going to get everything we want. But we are going to have to actually make, rather than just intellectually debate, the following decisions:
1. Is Anonymity a Feature to Be Protected, or a Bug to Be Quashed?
The internet started out as a place where you could be someone other than yourself. The ability to be anonymous has unquestionably allowed ideas and cultures to flourish that otherwise would have never have emerged by allowing individual speakers to distance themselves from reprisals.
Early adopters of the internet years ago saw the anonymity as a key feature to the internet’s value.
That said, the vast majority of people implicitly treat the anonymity of the internet as a bug. Certain governments, such as China, have made that decision at a macro level. Other communities have more implicitly chosen to recognize anonymity as a bug, opting for the convenience and value of having real identity as consumers and communicators on things like Amazon, Facebook, and Google’s platforms. Strong online identity is critical to digital commerce, and is what allows us to trust the messages we read from friends.
In a post-Sept. 11 environment, most people got comfortable with giving up some degree of anonymity and privacy in return for security. In a post-Trump election environment, it is likely that we will be asked, and acquiesce, to giving up our ability to be someone else or speak in another voice online.
In most ways this could return us to the historical norm, where you generally are free to say what you will, but you were accountable for what you say. But it is unquestionable that this is a tectonic shift and will cause some people who used to feel free to speak to stop contributing their ideas and viewpoints.
Accountability will unquestionably limit some forms of speech, but it will also make the internet a far safer place. As a society, which endpoint do we prefer, one where we give back the internet’s special property or one where we tolerate its implications?
2. Should Anyone Be Able to Reach Everyone?
If anonymity was the first magical property of the early internet, the second early property was that any individual could, at least in theory, reach anyone—or everyone—else.
Over the years this concept of total reach has evolved in fascinating ways. On one hand, in a practical sense, more individuals have more reach than ever before. The reach of scores of micro-celebrities in various niches has ballooned, giving individuals more power than they have ever held relative to institutions and formal gatekeepers.
This has led to a lot of good. For instance, the direct social media reach of individual celebrities is precisely what is allowing so much of the sexual misbehavior by powerful gatekeepers in Hollywood to be exposed.
And it isn’t just celebrities. Social platforms in particular have made it easier for almost any individual to consistently communicate with and influence more people than ever before.
At the same time, at a technical level, the internet has grown in a direction of taking power away from others in non-obvious ways. The decline in the use of the open web in favor of social media and messaging means that people can’t express themselves as they want in any way people will ever see. Instead, they have to conform to platform standards, be they iOS or social platforms or video hosting, if they want to have their content seen.
Even email, in theory still an open protocol, has been so severely locked down by providers, ostensibly to block spam, that it no longer is an open platform. Instead, you have to comply with several layers of gatekeepers if you ever want your messages delivered.
The upshot is that the debate is still very much open about who has access to mass distribution and on what terms individuals are allowed to speak to wider audiences.
If we decide that anyone should be able to reach everyone, then we need to be willing to tolerate a lot of painful speech. If we decide that that should no longer be the case as we chip away at the means of open distribution, who gets access to it, and the messages that are permissible, then we have to accept preventing some voices from expressing themselves broadly.
3. Is Money a Form of Speech?
While this question far predates the internet, digital communication has amplified it. Should I be free to spend money as an individual or institution to advocate for an idea I believe in? How do you regulate this?
Our laws in this area are murky. Spending money to endorse a candidate is governed by certain rules, but spending money to increase one’s personal reach, fame and acclaim and then using non-paid scaled speech to endorse someone is acceptable.
Not all ideas cost the same to express. Because of dynamic pricing and targeting, where things that are more interesting or engaging are fundamentally less expensive to distribute online, there is a tendency for more extreme messages to be cheaper to distribute. So, we might have campaign finance laws and other rules about how much money a candidate can spend, but if one candidate’s extremist message is 20 times less expensive to distribute than another candidate’s centrist views, then the playing field is fundamentally unfair to moderates compared with an earlier world where all ad rates were the same for the same reach on TV and in print.
We could decide that money is a form of free speech and lift many of the murky rules on how money can be spent on distributing ideas. We also could decide to level the playing field on how money can be spent to distribute speech. What we shouldn’t do is tolerate the current reality that we exist in, where arbitrage opportunities abound to use money in speech in unequal ways, fueling a bias toward ever more extreme statements.
4. Who Decides What Algorithms and Human Policies Control Our View of Reality?
Big platforms, faced with this enormous challenge while trying to avoid outside regulation, have consistently made the decision to bias toward building algorithms that attempt to prioritize or balance speech and add human moderation to deal with speech’s fundamental messiness.
On one hand, they basically are forced to do this. Because they are centralized corporations with shareholders and employees, they have no option but to take on the increasingly serious and clearly Sisyphean task to decide what they will and won’t allow to happen on their sites.
On the other hand, in doing this, private companies are effectively taking on a role in moderation of conversations that is unprecedented in human history, especially by a non-governmental organization.
This is uncomfortable, to say the least.
The global patchwork of jurisdictions, where large, multinational companies and hundreds of small and medium-size countries try to understand and control what speech is expressed is going to lead to some very strange and uncomfortable outcomes if this isn’t clarified.
One option would be global government where the people, in some process, decide the ground rules we want to live by and then enforce the human and algorithmic application of those rules, and private companies stay completely out of the business of moderation.
Another option would be for governments to step back and let private platforms play the moderation role, choosing which algorithms and moderation tactics they think are best and then letting individuals choose which platforms they want to use.
A final option would be no moderation whatsoever, a scenario that we have been able to mostly maintain until now, but which is clearly beginning to crumble.
In all likelihood, we will choose none of these options and instead grapple with overlapping viewpoints and regulations globally. Such an outcome will either fracture the internet into local players aligned with local governments, or reach a point where only a small number of internet companies survive because it costs billions upon billions of dollars to navigate a fundamentally complicated global political landscape.
5. Will We Tolerate Unregulated Escape Hatches for Free Speech?
For a generation, the idea that communications technology has shrunk the world into a global village has been seen as a largely positive development in the technology community.
What is scary is that it is starting to feel that the collapse of the world into a pinhead online might actually be the first step in a chain reaction that, just like a nuclear weapon, will cause the world to violently explode. There is simply too much energy packed into too little space to be stable.
Historically, we have always had spaces for blowing off steam and preventing pressure from bubbling over. In the back rooms of pubs, at private parties in private homes, and in countless other unmonitored, safe spaces, individuals could speak their mind freely, out of the public eye.
But if the consolidation of the platforms of speech, power, and regulation persists, those spaces will evaporate and pressure will only build.
For now, none of the discussions about moderation of online communities has reached into private chat and speech. But it is only a matter of time before more private spaces come under scrutiny.
Don’t Envy the Leaders
Philosophers have been debating questions similar to these for generations. What is pretty clear, however, is that the era of the primacy of John Stuart Mill and the Harm Principle has ended. What we do and say in any forum has real impact on others, which means we all have a stake in everything everyone else is doing.
The internet is forcing us to come up with new philosophical underpinnings for how we interact with each other. Realistically, whatever we come up with will make us sacrifice some priorities to achieve other goals.
No one is really equipped to deal with this shift. There is no script, and the reality is that no leader even has enough clout or jurisdiction to take the necessary steps. The exception here is perhaps China, whose model, while rejected by most in the West, at least seems to be a self-consistent way to manage a society.
The best we can hope for is that we actually make some hard decisions in the coming years rather than simply kicking the can down the road.
If we have a clear system with clear decisions about what we value and what we are willing to sacrifice, we will be able to move forward.
If, however, the result of the discussions about speech is continuous compromise and reactionary moves that try to thread the needle without taking on hard structural decisions, I fear we will end up a fractured civilization, unable to clearly hear or understand each other at a time when it is critical for us to be able to do both.