The best answer I can come up with for this problem is much stricter enforcement of antitrust laws. Private organizations should not be compelled to carry content they find objectionable, but they should also not be allowed to dominate the channel.
I agree in principle, but it's worth also examining the effect this has on how people end up in media echo chambers— when the media is a monopoly like the BBC and people expect to hear Jeremy Paxman grill you, you're going to go face the music, because not doing so will be even worse for you than going and faceplanting (a similar thing could be said historically about Peter Mansbridge on CBC in Canada).
In the US, though, there's no such impetus. Interviewers and even whole outfits can get cut off from access for the slightest thing, so then you have the phenomenon of politicians only ever being interviewed in increasingly safe environments, with friendly hosts who suck up to them, following prearranged lines of questioning, etc. Any apparent instances of toughness are basically theatre, with both sides in on the act.
Anyway, I don't have an answer here. Choice in media is absolutely a net good, and competition is critical to a healthy overall dialogue. But I feel that some of the more subtle costs of this approach are not always considered in discussions about it.
> people expect to hear Jeremy Paxman grill you, you're going to go face the music, because not doing so will be even worse for you than going and faceplanting
the lesson of Republicanism/Trumpism in the last decade is that this is very much not true. If parties are sufficiently polarized, you can just not go and nothing will happen, people will even defend your decision for not participating in a "biased" interview.
No actual bias need occur of course. And on the flip side refusing to participate in the actual hyper-partisan media will be perceived as justification for the former action. "Both sides do it!" and so on.
Yes, that is precisely the point I am making— that this effect is only a thing in places like the UK with a strong national public broadcaster to whom politicians must answer.
but what if they simply... didn't? Most of the tories are going to turn out to vote Tory regardless, no? Negative media coverage of, let's say, brexit hasn't significantly dissuaded them, even after the initial leave vote when the forthcoming consequences were explained to them in appropriate detail by that strong national public broadcaster.
What if the politician in question just said "my party's position is clear and I won't be repeating myself ad nauseum, good night"? What would really happen? Would those tories really not turn out, or even vote for the other guy? Really actually?
The thing we are finding in the United States is that a lot of those "musts" in our media and in our government turn out to just have been social convention, a "would normally" if you will. People assume that something bad will happen to anyone who doesn't play fair, or someone who tells blatant lies, or who doesn't execute some duty of their office in an evenhanded way. But if you just don't, and you do it shamelessly enough - nothing actually happens. Particularly if you control enough of the government.
But the public is not really so good at actually holding politicians to account. Those tory voters will pull the lever regardless, if nothing else "because the other guy's worse, isn't he?".
And you have your own Murdoch media to radicalize those voters too. They don't have to play to the state broadcaster, if you have enough voters who think the BBC is just being unfair to their guy. And Murdoch media lets the party get the message out directly to the voters.
There's no easy solution, these kinds of attacks fundamentally "break" democracy, democracy works on the idea that voters are fundamentally well informed and at least somewhat even-handed. But Murdoch media and other greasy rags use the freedom of the press as a trojan horse to spread lies, and fundamentally a lot of voters are susceptible to it and will just keep voting for "their guy" regardless.
> should not be compelled to carry content they find objectionable, but they should also not be allowed to dominate the channel
How do you do that though? The network effect almost always chooses a single winner in the social media market. YouTube is a perfect example. The content creators go where the market is. How do you make sure YouTube doesn't dominate the channel?
My (imperfect) solution is that once you get to the channel domination point, you should be treated as a utility - e.g. you can't kick people off your service unless they've broken the law.
Your solution means no real competition or innovation could take place in that space then. I know it was just a quick take but there's a lot of consequences to that route imo. There's also nothing saying that everyone always goes to one social platform. Facebook for instance bought all of their recent potential competitors so it's more of a self fulfilling prophecy right now and one that really needs to be handled by anti trust imo.
All I said was that YouTube should be treated as a utility - - e.g. you can't kick people off your service unless they've broken the law. That is the extent of its treatment as a utility. It doesn't prevent anyone from competing against them.
"All I said was that YouTube should be treated as a utility"
Right I don't think you've understood the implications of being a utility in the US.
In the US:
"Public utilities commissions may grant public utilities certain monopoly rights to facilitate servicing a given geographic area with a single system. For example, in California, prohibitions against anticompetitive behavior under the Unfair Practices Law do not apply to public utility corporations."
There are solutions through antitrust law. One is that dominant carriers can't own content. AT&T should have to sell off Warner.
Another is to make local carriers common carriers, so they just provide transport independent of content. Telcos are still common carriers for analog telephony, but managed to escape it for Internet services.
I assume incumbents might end up in the position where their smaller competitors have to deal with less regulation. For example, if MySpace had been treated differently than Facebook, it might have brought MySpace down much more quickly, but at the same time kept a lid on Facebook’s influence.
The implication of what you're saying is that fighting for net neutrality isn't enough, we need to ensure ample platform to everyone. But is it true? Isn't free speech more about not suffering legal persecution?
Government acquisitions regulation for tech itself is also a good example.(for COTs products, contracting dev/integration, consulting, research, etc). Gov't acquisition law has become so complex, yet has one single constraint in mind with every update:
Protect and enable small and disadvantaged businesses.
It's not perfect, in many new ways inefficient, but seems to do its job.
But what is the constraint we need when it comes to propagating information? It's not as objectively clear as the acquisition case.
I'm all for that, but I think more radical action is needed in the case of social networks. Should social networking sites funded by advertising be allowed to exist? The business model rewards maximizing "user engagement". However much Facebook might be removing provocative material now (which I am in favor of), the fundamental incentives of their business will push them back to where they were, letting outrage-driven content spread. It's unreasonable to expect a corporation to do otherwise without intervention.
Not an external remedy, but one thing I wish Facebook would do is offer the equivalent of rel="nofollow" for engagements. I know there's a separate workflow for "show me less like this" or "mute this user for 30 days" but that feels more like me creating my own little banlist. Instead, I want a box I can tick which means "I'm posting here to fact-check this or attempt to correct the record; please don't treat this as an engagement for the purposes of recommending this link/story/comment to others, or for finding more things like it for me to look at."
I know it's still counter to their business because ultimately outrage -> engagements -> ad impressions. But I can't help thinking it might be a start.
I think this is the only answer. I see a lot of people up in arms when it comes to speech they care about (e.g. Twitter removing QAnon) yet utterly silent when it comes to speech they don't (e.g. Tumblr removing NSFW). The "slippery slope" is only a problem when it hits close to home. This makes me think that if the shoe were on the other foot, team "free speech" would be more than happy to play censor.
The only way to prevent that is to keep entities from gaining so much power in the first place.
Facebook is a channel. Here's my rationale. They have a dominant position in personal data gathering and targeted advertising, with algorithms that couple the creator and recipient of content. It's a made for purpose propaganda service.
If you host your own web server with a particular message that you want to express, it will be lost in a sea of servers, and never reach your intended audience.
If you host it through Facebook, the Facebook algorithms and targeting will help you direct it towards your intended audience, or help your audience find your content.
Actually, despite saying they're a channel, I don't think access to a targeted advertising channel is a right. Taking it to an absurd level, is it something that the government should provide? I'd prefer to see it abolished.
I tend to think that private platforms should mostly operate how they want. Ads, whatever. They shouldn't be allowed to use acquisitions to eliminate competition (like Facebook buying Instagram).
If there is gonna be access guarantees, I think they come at the network and routing level. Comcast shouldn't be choosing who their customers can reach, and neither should Level 3 (or whoever it is now).
