Jack Dorsey, who used to run Twitter, has a mea culpa post that, as I read it, endorses Elon Musk’s objectives while insisting that the app’s prior misdeeds weren’t malicious. More significantly, he has an idea for replacing Twitter and its ilk with a structure that will both prevent arbitrary suppression and allow users to be their own content moderators. Here is the core of his argument:
Back to the principles. Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control.
I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible. Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity. There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today. The internet is trending towards a world were storage is “free” and infinite, which places all the actual value on how to discover and see content.
Which brings me to the last principle: moderation. I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, [link in original] the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all. A “follow” action should always deliver every bit of content from the corresponding account, and the algorithms should be able to comb through everything else through a relevance lens that an individual determines. There’s a default “G-rated” algorithm, and then there’s everything else one can imagine.
The only way I know of to truly live up to these 3 principles is a free and open protocol for social media, that is not owned by a single company or group of companies, and is resilient to corporate and government influence. The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content. Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what’s available and seen, or not. This is by definition a single point of failure, no matter how great the person, and over time will fracture the public conversation, and may lead to more control by governments and corporations around the world.
This sounds very much like the distributed ledger technology that underlies cryptocurrency and has many other potential uses. Instead of mining tokens, users could “author” “texts”, which would then be posted to something like a blockchain, where they would be verified as authentic and be alterable only by the author. The details of implementation are far beyond my ken.
Arbitrary censorship isn’t, of course, social media’s only problem. Even more damaging to the qualify of online life are the passions of Twitter mobs and the delight that all too many people take in injuring strangers for the sin of expressing the wrong opinions. Improvement there, alas, will require not a mere restructuring of Internet machinery but a reformation of human nature.
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