After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically—now it seems that almost no one is happy. Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred. Meanwhile, others feel that these platforms have become too aggressive in policing language and are systematically silencing or censoring certain viewpoints. And that’s not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect.
The situation has created something of a crisis, both inside and outside of these companies. The companies are constantly struggling to deal with their new positions as arbiters of truth and kindness online, despite historically promoting themselves as defenders of free speech. Meanwhile, politicians from the two major political parties have been hammering these companies, albeit for completely different reasons. Some have been complaining about how these platforms have potentially allowed for foreign interference in our elections. 3. A Conversation with Mark Warner: Russia, Facebook and the Trump Campaign, Radio IQ|WVTF Music (Apr. 6, 2018), https://www.wvtf.org/post/conversation-mark-warner-russia-facebook-and-trump-campaign#stream/0 (statement of Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.): “I first called out Facebook and some of the social media platforms in December of 2016. For the first six months, the companies just kind of blew off these allegations, but these proved to be true; that Russia used their social media platforms with fake accounts to spread false information, they paid for political advertising on their platforms. Facebook says those tactics are no longer allowed—that they've kicked this firm off their site, but I think they've got a lot of explaining to do.”). Others have complained about how they’ve been used to spread disinformation and propaganda. 4. Nicholas Confessore & Matthew Rosenberg, Facebook Fallout Ruptures Democrats’ Longtime Alliance with Silicon Valley, N.Y. Times (Nov. 17, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-democrats-congress.html (referencing statement by Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.): “Mr. Tester, the departing chief of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, looked at social media companies like Facebook and saw propaganda platforms that could cost his party the 2018 elections, according to two congressional aides. If Russian agents mounted a disinformation campaign like the one that had just helped elect Mr. Trump, he told Mr. Schumer, ‘we will lose every seat.’”). Some have charged that the platforms are just too powerful. 5. Julia Carrie Wong, #Breaking Up Big Tech: Elizabeth Warren Says Facebook Just Proved Her Point, The Guardian (Mar. 11, 2019), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/11/elizabeth-warren-facebook-ads-break-up-big-tech (statement of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)) (“Curious why I think FB has too much power? Let's start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power. Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isn't dominated by a single censor. #BreakUpBigTech.”). Others have called attention to inappropriate account and content takedowns, 6. Jessica Guynn, Ted Cruz Threatens to Regulate Facebook, Google and Twitter Over Charges of Anti-Conservative Bias, USA Today (Apr. 10, 2019), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/10/ted-cruz-threatens-regulate-facebook-twitter-over-alleged-bias/3423095002/ (statement of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)) (“What makes the threat of political censorship so problematic is the lack of transparency, the invisibility, the ability for a handful of giant tech companies to decide if a particular speaker is disfavored.”). while some have argued that the attempts to moderate discriminate against certain political viewpoints. 7. Press Release, Louie Gohmert, U.S. Congressman, Gohmert Introduces Bill That Removes Liability Protections for Social Media Companies That Use Algorithms to Hide, Promote, or Filter User Content (Dec. 20, 2018) (statement of Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex): “Employees from some of these companies have communicated their disgust for conservatives and discussed ways to use social media platforms and algorithms to silence and prevent income to conservatives.”).
What is clear is that there is no simple solution to these challenges, and most of the ones that are normally presented tend not to deal with the reality of the problems or to understand the technical and societal challenges that likely make them impossible.
Some have argued for much greater policing of content online, and companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have talked about hiring thousands to staff up their moderation teams. 8. April Glaser, Want a Terrible Job? Facebook and Google May Be Hiring,Slate (Jan. 18, 2018), https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/facebook-and-google-are-building-an-army-of-content-moderators-for-2018.html (explaining that major platforms have hired or have announced plans to hire thousands, in some cases more than ten thousand, new content moderators). On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly investing in more and more sophisticated technology help, such as artificial intelligence, to try to spot contentious content earlier in the process. 9. Tom Simonite, AI Has Started Cleaning Up Facebook, But Can It Finish?,Wired (Dec. 18, 2018), https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-started-cleaning-facebook-can-it-finish/. Others have argued that we should change Section 230 of the CDA, which gives platforms a free hand in determining how they moderate (or how they don’t moderate). 10. Gohmert Press Release, supra note 7 (“Social media companies enjoy special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, protections not shared by other media. Instead of acting like the neutral platforms they claim to be in order obtain their immunity, these companies have turned Section 230 into a license to potentially defraud and defame with impunity… Since there still appears to be no sincere effort to stop this disconcerting behavior, it is time for social media companies to be liable for any biased and unethical impropriety of their employees as any other media company. If these companies want to continue to act like a biased medium and publish their own agendas to the detriment of others, they need to be held accountable.”); Eric Johnson, Silicon Valley’s Self-Regulating Days “Probably Should Be” Over, Nancy Pelosi Says, Vox (Apr. 11, 2019), https://www.recode.net/podcasts/2019/4/11/18306834/nancy-pelosi-speaker-house-tech-regulation-antitrust-230-immunity-kara-swisher-decode-podcast (statement of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal)) (“230 is a gift to them, and I don’t think they are treating it with the respect that they should. . . . And so I think that that could be a question mark and in jeopardy.... For the privilege of 230, there has to be a bigger sense of responsibility on it, and it is not out of the question that that could be removed.”). Still others have suggested that there should be no moderation allowed at all—at least for platforms of a certain size—such that they are deemed part of the public square. 11. Robert Burnson, Twitter Beats Censorship Lawsuit By Banned White Nationalist, Bloomberg (Aug. 23, 2018), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-24/twitter-beats-censorship-lawsuit-by-banned-white-advocate (self-proclaimed “white advocate” Jared Taylor argued that it was a violation of his rights to be removed from Twitter, but a California state appeals court rejected that argument).
As this article will attempt to highlight, most of these solutions are not just unworkable; many of them will make the initial problems worse or will have other effects that are equally pernicious.
This article proposes an entirely different approach—one that might seem counterintuitive but might actually provide for a workable plan that enables more free speech, while minimizing the impact of trolling, hateful speech, and large-scale disinformation efforts. As a bonus, it also might help the users of these platforms regain control of their privacy. And to top it all off, it could even provide an entirely new revenue stream for these platforms.
That approach: build protocols, not platforms.
To be clear, this is an approach that would bring us back to the way the internet used to be. The early internet involved many different protocols—instructions and standards that anyone could then use to build a compatible interface. Email used SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Chat was done over IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Usenet served as a distributed discussion system using NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol). The World Wide Web itself was its own protocol: HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP.
In the past few decades, however, rather than building new protocols, the internet has grown up around controlled platforms that are privately owned. These can function in ways that appear similar to the earlier protocols, but they are controlled by a single entity. This has happened for a variety of reasons. Obviously, a single entity controlling a platform can then profit off of it. In addition, having a single entity can often mean that new features, upgrades, bug fixes, and the like can be rolled out much more quickly, in ways that would increase the user base.
Indeed, some of the platforms today are leveraging existing open protocols but have built up walls around them, locking users in, rather than merely providing an interface. 12. For example, Google’s Gmail service is based on open email protocols like SMTP and IMAP, but with additional features built on top of it. Facebook uses the Signal Protocol to handle end-to-end encryption for its Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger services. This actually highlights that there is not an either/or choice here between platforms and protocols but rather a spectrum. However, the argument presented here is that we need to move much more to a world of open protocols, rather than platforms.
Moving to a world where protocols and not proprietary platforms dominate would solve many issues currently facing the internet today. Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional services, allowing whichever ones work best to succeed, without having to resort to outright censorship for certain voices. It would allow end users to determine their own tolerances for different types of speech but make it much easier for most people to avoid the most problematic speech, without silencing anyone entirely or having the platforms themselves make the decisions about who is allowed to speak.
In short, it would push the power and decision making out to the ends of the network, rather than keeping it centralized among a small group of very powerful companies.
At the same time, it would likely lead to new, more innovative features as well as better end-user control over their own data. Finally, it could help usher in a series of new business models that don’t focus exclusively on monetizing user data.
Historically, the internet moved more and more to a world of centralized platforms over decentralized protocols due, in part, to the incentive structure under the old internet. Protocols were difficult to monetize. Because of that, it was difficult to keep them updated and to provide new features in a compelling way. Companies often came in and “took over,” creating a more centralized platform, adding on their own features (and incorporating their own business models). They were able to put more resources toward those platforms (and business models), creating a virtuous cycle (and some number of locked-in users) for the platform.
However, that has brought its own difficulties. With control has come demands for responsibility, including ever greater policing of the content hosted on these platforms. It has also created concerns about filter bubbles and bias. 13. Alex Hern, How Social Media Filter Bubbles and Algorithms Influence the Election, The Guardian (May 22, 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/22/social-media-election-facebook-filter-bubbles. In addition it has created a dominance of a few internet companies, and that (quite reasonably) makes many people uncomfortable. 14. Everybody Wants to Rule the World, The Economist (Nov. 27, 2014), https://www.economist.com/briefing/2014/11/27/everybody-wants-to-rule-the-world.
Moving back to a focus on protocols over platforms can solve many of these problems. And other recent developments suggest that doing so could overcome many of the earlier pitfalls of protocol-based systems, potentially creating the best of all words: useful internet services, with competition driving innovation, not controlled solely by giant corporations, but financially sustainable, providing end users with more control over their own data and privacy—and providing mis- and disinformation far fewer opportunities to wreak havoc.
While the early internet was dominated by a series of protocols, rather than platforms, the limitations of those early protocols show why platforms came to dominate. There are many different platforms, each one coming with its own set of reasons why they were successful for a time and failed (or not), but to help illustrate the issues discussed here, we’ll limit our comparison to Usenet and Reddit.
Conceptually, both Usenet and Reddit are quite similar. Both involved a set of forums generally organized around a particular topic. On Usenet, these were called newsgroups. On Reddit, they are subreddits. 15. About Usenet: Information About Usenet and Usenet.nl, Usenet.il, https://en.usenet.nl/usenet/; The Conversation Starts Here, Reddit, https://www.redditinc.com. Each newsgroup or subreddit tended to have moderators who were empowered to put different rules in place. Users could post new posts within each group, leading to threaded replies from others in the group, creating an approximation of a discussion.
However, Usenet was an open protocol (technically, the Network News Transfer Protocol, or NNTP) that anyone could tap into, using a variety of different applications. Reddit is a centralized platform controlled entirely by a single company.