Calls to ban free speech and thoughts are always wrong. In addition to shutting down dialogue, they stifle thought. We need to hear alternative viewpoints in order to understand them. The proper response to something we disagree with is to refute it with evidence and reason. Simply calling it “disinformation” and ignoring it does not help. Neither does calling it “indoctrination” and lobbying to stop the teaching of controversial thought.
Does anyone believe that yelling at school board members and ordering them to stop teaching “critical race theory” will help? It only means that teachers who are worth their salt will attempt to explain to their students what critical race theory is about, since it now is a major topic of conversation around the country. A ban always elevates the banned material to something of importance, whereas much of what is banned would be forgotten if people simply ignored it.
The same goes for the torrent of proposals for banning content on social media deemed to be harmful to society. Calls for more oversight by company executives, boards, or regulators do not addresses the core problem of the “attention economy” — the business model that pushes controversial and divisive content to get people’s attention in order to prove to advertisers that they can deliver customers. That model depends upon content that most effectively manipulates people’s emotions. That, in turn, affects society and promotes a toxic atmosphere.
Substack, the platform used for this newsletter, puts it this way: “Social media giants already have too much control over discourse. They have user populations greater than the population of any country on earth, and their moderation policies affect many times more people than the First Amendment does. We should be wary of inviting these companies to referee discourse even more than they already do.
“Instead, the key to a healthier platform is to flip the power dynamic: Give the people themselves the power to choose what they pay attention to. Let the will of the people control their feeds, not the other way around. Instead of … manipulating their attention in favor of the most profitable and provocative content, let them seek out what they really value. Other than in extreme cases involving violence or illicit activity, people should be allowed to decide for themselves who’s worth listening to, what’s trustworthy, and which direction is punching ‘down.’”
Tech companies are using algorithms to amplify the bad and the ugly, rather than discourse that is thoughtful, civil, and diverse. “While people pay attention to content that makes them agitated, they’ll only pay money for content they trust and value. With this kind of model, free content can still exist, but it will be truly free — not masquerading as such while quietly extracting costs in the form of personal data or manipulated behavior,” the argument continues. “Facebook isn’t malevolent and it isn’t unique — it is, like many of its peers, captive to that original sin of the internet, the ad-based business model. But the rest of us don’t have to be.”
A final point: Conservatives are expressing outrage that the Treasury Department is purchasing information from Babel Street, a firm that critics say helps federal investigators buy their way around the Fourth Amendment. Two contracts that Tech Inquiry obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request show that, over the past four months, the Treasury acquired two data feeds from Babel Street: one for its sanctions enforcement branch, and one for the Internal Revenue Service. Both feeds contain sensitive data collected by private corporations that are not subject to due process restrictions. “Critics were particularly alarmed that the Treasury acquired access to location and other data harvested from smartphone apps; users are often unaware of how widely apps share such information,” an article in The Intercept states.
That the critics are not concerned about data harvesting by private corporations is telling. They are not complaining that social media collect that information without people being aware, only that the government is using it. Every time a user responds to a quiz asking for favorite things, best friends, pictures, or other personal information, or falls for those “If you are truly my friend, you’ll share (something),” it is adding to the data points that advertisers are buying and that hackers seek out.
China is close to having developed quantum computers capable to taking all that information and making sense of it all on a large scale, and the United States is trying to catch up. By abandoning the current ad-based business model that depends upon targeted information to generate “clicks” and instead moving to a model where the people choose what is valuable to them, that kind of data collection will end.
Then, there will be no need to call for banning content on social media.
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