Socialize Journalism in Order to Save It?
by Adam Thierer on September 9, 2019 · 4 comments
The Problem with Calls for Social Media “Fairness”
by Jennifer Huddleston on September 6, 2018 · 1 comment
There has been an increasing outcry recently from conservatives that social media is conspiring to silence their voices. Leading voices including President Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz have started calling for legislative or regulatory actions to correct this perceived “bias”. But these calls for fairness miss the importance of allowing such services to develop their own terms and for users to determine what services to use and the benefit that such services have been to conservatives.
Social media is becoming a part of our everyday lives and recent events have only increased our general awareness of this fact. More than half of American adults login to Facebook on a daily basis. As a result, some policymakers have argued that such sites are the new public square. In general, the First Amendment strictly limits what the government can do to limit speakers in public spaces and requires that such limits be applied equally to different points of view. At the same time, private entities are generally allowed to set terms regarding what speech may or may not be allowed on their own platforms.
The argument that modern day websites are the new public square and must maintain a neutral view point was recently rejected in a lawsuit between PraegerU and YouTube. Praeger believed that its conservative viewpoint was being silenced by YouTube decision to place many of its videos in “restricted mode.” In this case, the court found that YouTube was still acting as a private service rather than one filling a typical government role. Other cases have similarly asserted that Internet intermediaries have First Amendment rights to reject or limit ads or content as part of their own rights to speak or not speak. Conservatives have long been proponents of property rights, freedom of association, and free markets. But now, faced with platforms choosing to exercise their rights, rather than defend those values and compete in the market some “conservatives” are arguing for legislation or utilizing litigation to bully the marketplace of ideas into giving them a louder microphone. In fact, part of the purpose behind creating the liability immunity (known as Section 230) for such services was the principle that a variety of platforms would emerge with different standards and new and diverse communities could be created and evolve to serve different audiences.
Joshua Gans on the economics of information
by Jerry Brito on April 2, 2013 · 0 comments
Joshua Gans, professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and author of the new book Information Wants to be Shared, discusses modern media economics, including how books, movies, music, and news will be supported in the future.
Gans argues that sharing enhances most information’s value. He also explains that the business models of traditional media companies, gatekeepers who have relied on scarcity and control, have collapsed in the face of new technologies. Equally important, he argues that sharing can revive moribund, threatened industries even as he examines platforms that have, almost accidentally, thrived in this new environment.
Related Links
- Information Wants to be Shared, Gans
- Is There a Market for Ideas?, Gans and Scott Stern
- The Product Market and the Market for ‘Ideas’: Commercialization Strategies for Technology Entrepreneurs, Gans and Stern
- The Impact of Uncertain Intellectual Property Rights on the Market for Ideas: Evidence from Patent Grant Delays, Gans, Stern, and David H. Hsu
Joseph Reagle on the gender gap in geek culture
by Jerry Brito on February 26, 2013 · 0 comments
Is geek culture sexist? Joseph Reagle, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies at Northeastern University and author of a new paper entitled, “Free as in Sexist? Free culture and the gender gap,” returns to Surprisingly Free to address geek feminism and the technology gender gap.
According to Reagle, only 1% of the free software community and 9% of Wikipedia editors are female, which he sees as emblematic of structural problems in the geek community. While he does not believe that being a geek or a nerd is in any way synonymous with being a sexist, he concludes that three things that he otherwise loves—geekiness, openness, and the rhetoric and ideology of freedom–are part of the problem inasmuch as they allow informal cliques to arise, dominate the discussion, and squeeze out minority views. Reagle also comments on a unintentional androcentricity he has observed even amongst free software community heroes, highlighting the ways in which this behavior can be alienating to women and prevents geek culture from growing beyond its traditional base.
Reagle prescribes a 3-step solution to sexism in geek culture: talking about gender; challenging and expanding what it means to be a geek; and not allowing the rhetoric of freedom to be used as an excuse for bad behavior.
Reagle further supports efforts to form female-only subcultures within the geek community, which opponents argue goes against the free software value of openness. Instead of the balkanization of their movement that opponents fear, these closed-group discussions actually strengthen geek culture at large, according to Reagle.
Related Links
- “Free as in Sexist? Free culture and the gender gap”, Reagle
- Geek Feminism, blog
- Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog, blog
- Geek Feminism Wiki, Wikia
video: Panel on Governance of Social Media & Competition Law
by Adam Thierer on November 13, 2011 · 1 comment
On Friday, both Josh Wright and I spoke on a panel at the Michigan State University’s conference on “Governance of Social Media.” Our particular panel focused on emerging competition policy issues affecting social media and social networking sites. Also joining us on the panel were Nicolas Economides of NYU and Michael Altschul of the CTIA. The video of the panel can be found here and I have also embedded it down below. [My remarks begin around the 23-min mark of the video.]
At the event, I presented my forthcoming paper on “The Perils of Classifying Social Media Platforms as Public Utilities,” which is currently out for peer review. I outlined the rising calls for treating social media or social networking sites as public utilities, essential facilities, or natural monopolies. Next, I briefly discussed some basic law and economics of public utility / essential facilities regulation. Third, I detailed six specific problems with efforts to classify these services as such. Finally, I briefly discussed regulatory proposals set forth by Professors Jonathan Zittrain and Tim Wu to apply traditional antitrust or public utility remedies to social media or information platforms. Specifically, I address Zittrain’s call for “API neutrality” (which would apply net neutrality-like principles at the applications and device layer) and Wu’s call for a “Separations Principle” (which would forcibly segregate information providers into three buckets: creators, distributors, and hardware makers). Watch the video for more details and see this for more critiques of the Zittrain and Wu proposals.
Social Media Replacing Traditional News
by Jim Harper on December 6, 2010 · 0 comments
Social Media as a News Source
by Jim Harper on September 2, 2010 · 4 comments
To hails of derision in some quarters—I’m looking at you, Adam—I have talked about how social media will occupy some of the space being ceded by traditional news reporting, which is struggling to find a business model. Perhaps with validation from an official, vetted, professional, dead-tree news source, it will seem less ridiculous to talk about news reporting being generated spontaneously by people “on the scene” or with the greatest knowledge of facts and conditions in a particular area.
Think of the mental habit that has us calling police and fire personnel “first responders.” They are almost always, in fact, second responders, with first response undertaken by average citizens, who often do a pretty good job of it. Think of the true first responders to recent attempted bombings on transatlantic flights: ordinary citizens who thwarted the underwear and shoe bombers. (I risk painting too heroic a picture . . . .)
Newspaper reporters and photographers are intellectual second responders, who come in after the fact, as generalists, to summarize events and trends for us. Yet these are who we look to as authorities on what happened, and how to think about it? That doesn’t seem to make sense if there are other options for being informed. And now there are.
I’ll take a cue from Adam’s good work in debunking the Internet pessimists who argue that “closed” access and technology models are strangling the open/’generative’ Internet: There’s plenty of room for both—both traditional journalism, as it finds its new niche, and reporting by ordinary people who are on the scene and who have superior knowledge in a particular domain.
I suspect that we’ll find better media and filters than Twitter’s firehose of info-pellets by which to learn about things like the hostage-taking in the D.C. area. There may even be a business model in it. Go to it, technology and markets!
Facebook Isn’t a “Utility” & You Certainly Shouldn’t Want it to Be Regulated As Such
by Adam Thierer on May 16, 2010 · 23 comments
I have a lot of respect for danah boyd and have had the pleasure to interact with her when we both served on the Harvard online child safety task force, and at other times. She’s a very gifted social media researcher. But there are three big problems with her argument that Facebook should be treated as a “utility” and regulated as such. (See: “ Facebook is a Utility; Utilities Get Regulated.”)
What a Utility Is, and Isn’t
First, and most obviously, the term “utility” has a fairly well-understood meaning in economic literature and Facebook does not possess the same qualities:
- A utility is usually something thought to be an “essential facility” in that the service or network in question is highly unique and possess few (or no) good alternatives. (Regulators typically require “non-discriminatory access” for that reason.)
- The service in question is also typically regarded as being something approximating a “life-essential” service, like water or electricity. (Regulators typically require all to be served in a fairly uniform fashion for that reason.)
- The service is also something that typically entails significant fixed costs and that requires us to pay good money to use. (Regulators typically impose price regulation for fear of “gouging” for that reason.)
Again, Facebook possess none of those qualities. Continue reading →
ClaimMyName: Self-Help Against Name-Squatting on Social Media Services
by Berin Szoka on August 8, 2009 · 11 comments
The proliferation of Web 2.0 social media services has magnified the old problem of cyber-squatting: Every new service represents the possibility that someone else might claim your name, or your organization’s trademark, as a user name before you do! This problem is especially significant where user names correspond to vanity URLs, as with Twitter and, more recently, Facebook.
So I was intrigued to discover that the market is responding to this need: ClaimMyName (CMN) will take care of user registrations on 30 Web 20 services for $329 or on an astounding 300 services for $799. CMN is a “freemium” service offered by DandyID.com, a nifty free service that allows users to organize all their social media profiles for something like 390 services so that buttons for each service can easily be added to an author bio page on a blog, as we’ve done at the TLF. So if I really wanted to make sure that no one else registered http://<WEB2.0service>.com/berinszoka, or /techliberation or /ProgressFreedom, this service would allow me to do so with just a few clicks—at a price of either $10.97/service for thirty or $2.66/service for 300 services.
CMN is essentially a mini-Mark Monitor, the international company famous for protecting trademarks online—except that CMN facilitates self-help by users outside of trademark law: No registration is required; everything is done on a first-come-first-serve basis. Pretty cool.
Social Media Slide Show
by Adam Thierer on July 8, 2008 · 11 comments
Via ParisLemon… Here’s a really outstanding (albeit somewhat vulgar) slide show about the increasing importance of social media and how social networking is profoundly changing the way we humans communicate. Some great stats in there.

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