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.

A similar idea of a need for equal content was previously used by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and known as “the fairness doctrine”. This doctrine required equal access for groups or individuals wanting to express opposing views on public issues. In the 1980s Reagan era Republicans led the charge against this doctrine arguing that it violated broadcasters’ First Amendment rights and actually went against the public interest. In fact, many have pointed out that the removal of the fairness doctrine is what allowed conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh to become major political forces.  In the 2000s, when liberals suggested bringing back the fairness doctrine, conservatives were aghast and viewed it was an attack on conservative talk radio.  Even now, President Trump has used social media as a way to deliver messaging and set his political agenda in a way that has never been done before. If anything, there are lower barriers to creating a new medium on the Internet than there are on the TV or radio airwaves. As a 2016 National Review article states if conservatives are concerned with how they are being treated by existing platforms, “The goal should not be to create neutral spaces; it should be to create non-neutral spaces more attractive than existing non-neutral spaces.” In other words rather than complaining that the odds are against them and demanding “equal time”, conservatives should try to compete by building more attractive platforms that promote the content moderation ideals they believe are best. But perhaps, the problem is they realize that ultimately difficult or unpopular content moderation decisions must be faced by any platform.

Content moderation is no easy task. Even for small groups differing beliefs can quickly result in grey areas that require difficult calls by an intermediary. For social media and other Internet intermediaries, when dealing with such issue on a scale of millions and a global diversity of what is and isn’t acceptable, content moderation becomes exponentially complicated. It is unsurprising that a rate of human and machine learning errors exist in making such decisions. AI might seem like a simple solution but such filters aren’t aware of the context in many cases. For example, a Motherboard article recently pointed out the difficulty that those with last names like Weiner and Butts face when trying to register for accounts on websites with AI filters to prevent offensive language. Leaving the task of content moderation to humans is both incredibly difficult on the moderators and may result in inconsistent results due to the large volume of content that must be moderated and differing interpretations of community standards. As Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox point out in their Motherboard article on the challenge of content moderation on a global scale that Facebook is dealing with, “If you take a single case, and then think of how many more like it exist across the globe in countries that Facebook has even less historical context for, simple rules have higher and higher chances of unwanted outcomes.” It is quite clear that if we as a society can’t decide on our own definitions of things like hate speech or bullying in many cases, how we can expect a third party public or private to make such decision in a way that satisfies every perspective?

The Internet has helped the world truly create a marketplace of ideas. The barriers to entry are rather low and the medium is constantly evolving. Because of social media and the Internet more generally conservative voices are able to reach a wider audience than before. Conservatives should be careful what they wish for with calls for “fairness,” because such power could actually prevent future innovation or new platforms and extend the status quo instead.

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.

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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

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.

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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

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.

I am so gonna retweet this.

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!

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.   I realize that some people speak of Facebook as a sort of “social utility” or a “social commons” and claim that it is essential to one’s social existence, but that’s just silly.  Life can go on without Facebook. Many of us barely touch the site and still have plenty of ways to find and interact with friends or others. My Facebook page is basically a street sign pointing people to the other places I want them to find me (like this blog or Twitter) or connect with me (like LinkedIn or even just via email). Lots of other Facebook users are like that.  And there are many other ways to “quit without quitting” entirely by minimizing your social presence on the site.

But even if you are an aggressive Facebook user, there’s still nothing stopping you from porting your digital presence over to another site entirely. There are some “exit costs” here, but they are not that significant.  Again, Facebook is hardly a “life-essential” service. And let’s not forget that you don’t pay for Facebook. Not one penny. And most of its competitors don’t charge, either.

So, let’s review:

• There are plenty of alternatives to Facebook (it’s not unique or life-essential).
• Escape from Facebook is reasonably easy.
• You don’t have to pay for Facebook (or most of its competitors).

So let’s stop using “utility” to describe Facebook.  It’s simply incorrect.

“Utilities” are Anti-Innovation

But even if you’re unconvinced and still think of Facebook as a “utility,” here’s why you don’t want it regulated as one:  Utilities are, by their very nature, non-innovative. The whole point of regulating a utility is to get everyone access to it at a cheap rate.  The problem is, there is no free lunch. Regulation is not costless. It entails trade-offs. Regulation is a giant game of economic whack-a-mole: Attempting to control one of the primary variables of price, quantity, or quality inevitably results in non-optimal adjustments in the other two variables.  This is why innovation always suffers in utility businesses. Regulators typically prioritize by regulating access (quantity) and price and then let quality be the free-floating variable.  It’s hardly surprisingly, therefore, that we witness lackluster innovation in utility industries since the incentive to take risks and invest has been greatly diminished. In essence, the regulated utility becomes a “plain vanilla” service.

Now, again, in Facebook’s case, price is not a variable. It’s free! Or, more specifically, it’s ad-supported such that we enjoy the service without paying a direct fee for use. If it was suddenly classified as a “utility” and regulated accordingly, that leaves one less lever for bureaucrats to tinker with.  Regulation in the social networking business will likely be related to the quality variable.  More specifically, to the extent regulation was imposed on Facebook or other social networking sites, it would like be on their data collection practices, advertising business models, privacy policies, etc.

Thus, price quickly could become part of the response for Facebook if it becomes a regulated entity. Namely, the site might – for the first time – impose a fee for service. Seriously, is that really unthinkable? If regulators so undercut the economic engine that powers this and most other Web 2.0-era sites, what else is a site to do?  Do we think sites and services like this just fall like manna from heaven?  Again, there is no free lunch.  Something has to give.

Regulation Tends to Lock Us In

Finally, there’s the problem of “regulated monopoly” becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Again, the irony of people thinking of Facebook as a utility is that Facebook has plenty of competitive (and free) alternatives. That’s not usually the case for other industries we consider “utilities.” But one of the reasons that it typically is not the case for those other sectors is that the very act of imposing “utility” status on a company tends to lock it in as the preferred or only choice. Regulation tends to shelter a utility from competition once it is enshrined as such.  Or, by forcing standardizing or a common platform, regulation can help lock it in for the long-haul.  I think this is less of a concern for Facebook than it is for other technologies or economic sectors, but it’s still worth considering the anti-competitive effects of regulation, because they are legion.

For these reasons, regulating Facebook as a “utility” would be an unmitigated disaster. It would likely result is less innovation by the site or could encourage it to potentially impose fees for a service that has traditional been free to the public.  While I have no problem with danah and others pressuring Facebook to change its privacy policies or approach to other issues / concerns, I do hope they reconsider the wisdom of treating Facebook as a plain-vanilla regulated utility. And if we go the opposite direction and impose regulation, I don’t want to hear any of you complaining when Facebook starts charging $19.95 per month for service!

Addendum: In my haste to post this rant this morning, not only did I make a mistake in the title (doh!) but I failed to address a point I’ve stress repeatedly in other essays calling for “utility” regulation within high-tech markets. Namely, we need to have a sense of historical perspective here and an appreciation for the pace of change in high-tech markets. That is, it’s important to remember that Facebook has only been with us a few of years now. It’s gone from bit player to market leader fairly rapidly but there’s no reason that the opposite couldn’t occur just as rapidly. As I noted in addressing “code failure” arguments in this debate with Larry Lessig, when markets are built upon code, the pace and nature of change becomes unrelenting and utterly unpredictable. So, we need to have a sense of perspective here and not too quickly jump to declare “market failure” and then box a specific technology or provider into “utility” status. Evolution and continued experimentation are good.  Regulation tends to head all that off.

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.

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.

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=whatthefissocialmedia070208-1215026815612657-8

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