Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?
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.
"Will every user want this level of control?"
There is a better answer coming... Users can delegate the details of making those choices to independent services that do that for them. WE need multiple levels of such services, and they can be branded so users get to understand their orientations intuitively and easily choose, just as we chose between CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, etc. I give a NY Times example here: https://ucm.teleshuttle.com/2024/10/making-social-media-more-deeply-social.html
Hidden in plain sight?
This is a very nice analysis of a very interesting and potentially transformative case (with legal details far beyond me)… At the same time, at a high level, this was hidden in plain sight -- as Chris Riley and I wrote in 2022, in “Delegation, Or, The Twenty Nine Words That The Internet Forgot.” The title refers to the preamble to 230: “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… who use the Internet…” We took that as a US “policy” that clearly implies that the platforms should enable middleware. But we assumed that enforcing that policy would require regulators to apply that policy as mandated by Congress, or that Congress pass more specific enabling legislation, like the Senate ACCESS Act. So, I am very happy to see Ethan’s request for a declaratory judgement as a brilliant and novel gambit – with a basis that has been in plain sight, as we had highlighted.
A new economics is needed for infinite abundance
The problem with digital pricing models is that the invisible hand fails when replication is essentially free. What is needed is an invisible handshake, negotiating not a price, but a method of fair value exchange that supports content creation in ways specific to each customer's realized value surplus (including the value of continuing the relationship). A new kind of repeated game that builds cooperation. A big picture explanation is at https://www.fairpayzone.com/2018/05/the-relationship-economy-its-all-about.html. How the old models fail is examined more closely at https://www.fairpayzone.com/2018/11/the-case-against-micropayments-from.html
Optimism about Freedom of Impression and Fiddleware (Federated Middleware)
A new reason for optimism is outlined in my latest Tech Policy Press article. The Fediverse can create a fertile market for a new, federated kind of middleware that can give us back control of our impressions -- without need for legislating delegatability. (If that emerges, the platforms will have to join in.) https://techpolicy.press/into-the-plativerse-through-fiddleware/
We need to Free Our Feeds!
Well put. Very disappointing that Dorsey put this on a platter and invited them to ask, and none did.
But at least there may be some momentum for this, now that Dorsey is supporting it as a possible solution (having cited you as one of the triggers for that), and a number of people beside you and me and Stephen Wolfram (recently in Foreign Affairs and WSJ) are promoting this idea as the only solution that gets to the root cause of disinformation becoming an extreme and seemingly intractable problem in social media. (My recent summary of these efforts is at http://bit.ly/SavDem0, and I expect to publish a fuller summary soon.)
Of course the problem in the hearings is that the solution is nuanced, and nuance is an ever tougher sell these days. As I put it in my post:
"Democracy depends on an open, diverse, and well-structured marketplace of ideas. Freedom of speech and of association are essential to our social processes for organically seeking a working consensus on ground-truth. But now, the “feeds” from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few others have become the dominant filters controlling which information, and which other users, billions of people see. Those oligarchies have nearly total power over what they selectively present each of us, with almost no transparency or oversight – and systematically against our interests!"
"…democracy requires that our marketplace of ideas be controlled by “we the people,” not platforms or advertisers. We must take back control as soon as possible. Current efforts at antitrust breakups and privacy regulation that leave filtering in the hands of others with their own agendas will perpetuate this mortal threat to democracy. Return of filtering power to citizens can revitalize our marketplace of ideas. It can augment our social processes for “mediating consent” and pursuing happiness – and provide a healthy base for gradual evolution toward digital democracy. But so long as others subvert control of our bicycles for the mind to their own ends, we have no time to lose.”"
Modularizing the platforms is the real answer
As you say, "the real way to "break up" big tech platforms is to push for a world of protocols, rather than platforms, which would push the power out to the ends of the network, rather than keeping them centralized under a single silo with a giant owner."
Look at the example of the Bell system -- first with Carterfone and the modular jack, then with the modular business breakup into local (subdivided by regional geography), long distance, and manufacturing -- which opened up huge competitive innovation.
I expand on this and related issues in my post "Architecting Our Platforms to Better Serve Us -- Augmenting and Modularizing the Algorithm" at http://bit.ly/PlatMod.
It takes some sophistication to do this well, but the government once has that sophistication, and could again.
A radical enhancement of PWYW, with consequences for unfairmess
Freakonomists will be interested to consider a new variation on PWYW that has potential to change the game in pricing, especially for digital media.
FairPay (Fair PWYW) is a radically new pricing process that builds on the flexibility and participation that PWYW offers to buyers, but motivates them to pay fairly. It works where there is an ongoing relationship of continuing sales, and tracks how fairly buyers pay. If they pay fairly, the seller continues to extend more FairPay offers to them. If they do not pay fairly, they lose the privilege of continuing to buy on a FairPay basis, and must pay a conventional set price for future purchases. Unlike PWYW, FairPay is a two-way dialog that creates consequences for not paying fairly.
Because of this feedback cycle, this FairPay process may not work so well for single sales, like one movie or one album or one book, but can be very powerful for an ongoing series of sales. For example:
--An ongoing service of movie previews much like the Freakonomics movie offer...
--Individual songs from a collection of albums, offered in series, one at a time, or in small bundles...
--Individual items from a catalog of book chapters, articles, podcasts, or videos...
The process begins with one of a few low-value items, to test how the buyer sets prices. If the prices are reasonable, a few more items are offered. As the buyer builds a reputation for pricing fairly, more FairPay credit is extended (but never so much that there is too much risk that the buyer is done and will pay nothing for a valuable bundle). So perhaps it might better be called Pay-What-You-Think-Fair, because that is the result.
Details are at teleshuttle.com/FairPay.