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Booting Alex Jones from Social Media Wasn’t a Bad Idea. But Is There a Better One?
The social media banning of loopy provocateur Alex Jones is likely to result in calls from conservatives to regulate or dismantle Big Tech. (The left is more worried about the market power of the tech titans.) Actually it is already happening, at least on Twitter. But even before Jones and his Infowars content got the boot from Apple, YouTube, Facebook, and Spotify, Republicans were calling for action against “censorship of conservatives.”
Their evidence, however, appears to be a smattering of weird one-offs rather than a systemic problem. But politicians and pundits continue to connect the dots. As Sen. Ted Cruz said on a Breitbart podcast last spring: “These tech companies are hard left. . . . They are suppressing the views of conservatives. They are blocking conservatives. . . . That is invidious. It is invisible, and it is profoundly dangerous.”
Maybe this is good tribalist politics, but the policy aftermath could be extraordinarily harmful, as I write in my new The Week column, if Congress further scales back or even repeals the regulatory shield that for more than 20 years has provided websites with immunity from liability for what their users post. And some Republicans have suggested doing just that. And it is my concern that the Jones expulsion, though hardly unfair, will further energize the effort.
Drawing bright lines is tricky enough when the questionable content involves hateful speech. So-called fake news is an even thornier problem. But the widespread dissemination of misinformation isn’t good for our democracy. Yet there thankfully remains a right to do so. So how should the private sector respond? Ars Technica’s Timothy Lee offers a valuable suggestion: Avoid banning users or purging content, just downrank it. Lee:
This makes sense because the Newsfeed is fundamentally an editorial product. Facebook has an algorithm that decides which content people see first, using a wide variety of criteria. There’s no reason why journalistic quality, as judged by Facebook, shouldn’t be one of those criteria. Under Facebook’s approach, publications with a long record of producing high-quality content can get bumped up toward the top of the news feed. Publications with a history of producing fake news can get bumped to the back of the line, where most Newsfeed users will never see it.
So, yeah, good news for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, not so much for USAPatriotRealNewz. Algorithms can’t do it all. Human judgement will need to be made, particularly about viral content. But does the idea of Team Zuck making even those decisions still bother you? Here’s a DIY alternative from Mike Masnick of Tech Crunch:
Facebook should open itself up so that end users can decide what content they can see for themselves, rather than making all the decisions in Menlo Park. Ideally, Facebook (and others) should open up so that third party tools can provide their own experiences — and then each person could choose the service or filtering setup that they want. People who want to suck in the firehose, including all the garbage, could do so. Others could choose other filters or other experiences. Move the power down to the ends of the network, which is what the internet was supposed to be good at in the first place. If the giant platforms won’t do that, then people should build more open competitors that will (hell, those should be built anyway). . . .
I expect that many users would quickly discover that the full firehose is unusable, and would seek alternatives that fit with how they wanted to use the platform. And, yes, that might mean some awful people create filter bubbles of nonsense and hatred, but average people could avoid those cesspools while at the same time those tasked with monitoring those kinds of idiots and their behavior could still do so.
Of course if conservatives still find the current social media environment to be massively oppressive, there is yet another option. As I write in The Week: “If [the right] really thinks social media is oppressively hostile to Trumpian America, then there must be a huge market opportunity for Red America-friendly competitors.” I mean, there is a precedent called Fox News. So quit kvetching and build. Indeed, there’s plenty of talk among blockchain enthusiasts about how that technology could disrupt the social media giants.
One more thing: And while it may seem trite, education in media literacy would also seem to be part of the answer here — although I am wondering if we have the educational resources to pull that off.
Published in Journalism, Technology
As I said. You and your friends sought him out.
outside that there is no reason that Facebook and others need to accept his advertising or promoting. Which is what you are describing, advertising based on activity via cookies.
I certainly did not seek him out.
And you could block it with one click if it offended your sensibilities.
I could and did. I’m also not broken up that a private company elected not to carry the content of another private company on their platform.
Since you seem so broken up about it: what’s your solution?
Use the blocking tools given to you or choose to ignore him and stop whining someone you don’t like also has the right to free speech.
No I mean what is your solution to platforms choosing not to carry specific content?