Diogenes
It's my prerogative
Nous SOMMES l'État!
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” is the important question posed by the Roman poet Juvenal, translated by the English author Alan Moore as “Who watches the watchmen?”.
But it is perhaps a question with a complacent implicit assumption.
It presupposes that it is possible to watch the watchmen — and all that one needs to do is work out how this is done and by whom.
Regulation, however, is not magic. Just because one wants a thing to be regulated, that does not make it capable of actually being regulated.
If a thing is unpleasant or unwelcome, the instant demand is that something should be done, and that the unwanted thing can be regulated so it cannot happen.
The notion that all we need to make the world a better place is “better regulation” is deeply embedded in our culture. And one thing for which the cry for regulation is made is social media platforms.
If only they were “better regulated”, the popular sentiment goes, then various political and social problems would all be solved.
But there are two problems with regulating social media platforms. The first comes from the very technology that gave rise to this fairly recent but now almost ubiquitous phenomenon.
The second is that to impose effective regulation against unwilling platforms will require determined, unflinching governmental action and political will — the possibility of which the platforms can avoid.
At base, social media is about the ability of anyone with an internet connection to use an online platform to say anything they want about anybody to anyone.
As soon as what they want to say is typed — or recorded in video and audio — all they need to do is press enter and it is published — or broadcast — to the world.
This ease of publication or broadcast contrasts with the position up to about 30 or 40 years ago where a private individual would normally have to pass a number of gatekeepers — at newspapers, publishing houses and broadcast stations — before having what they wanted to say go far beyond their immediate circle.
The law in turn followed this restrictive model. Liability for, say, defamation or infringement of copyright, or for non-compliance with broadcasting standards, would usually bite at the moment the gatekeepers permitted publication or broadcast.
Yes, of course, it was open to eccentric and determined individuals to “vanity press” a book, or to promote home-printed pamphlets, or even start a pirate radio station.
But these were intensive and expensive courses of action.
And then came along the world wide web, user-friendly internet browsers, and the social platforms that made online publication easy. Everyone could publish to the world about anything they wanted. How was this constant babble to be regulated? Would it be possible? Or would it be as futile as seeking to regulate everyday conversations in the home or in the street?
One idea was to try to make the platforms themselves like the gatekeepers of old: to treat the social media companies as “publishers” of what was published by their users.
But the obvious problem was that the platforms did not have, and could not have, any form of prior approval to what was published. All they could do would be after the event, once the unwanted thing was already published. They were gatekeepers only able to close the gate after the animals had bolted.
Platforms thereby lobbied successfully for legal liability only to be incurred if a valid takedown request was not granted. And in any case this approach only worked where there were pre-existing individual legal causes of action: it made sense in respect of defamation of a specific identifiable individual.
The re-election of convicted felon Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States provided Meta with a glorious opportunity to pivot from futile cooperation with the censors to confrontation and coercion. If Meta could get the US government onside in its battles with the gatekeepers, then it would maximize freedom of speech.
In his Facebook announcement this week of changes to various policies, Mark Zuckerberg candidly said that he wanted to “work with (convicted felon) Donald Trump to push back on repressive governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.”
This was listed in his pre-prepared statement as the sixth policy change, but it was plainly the most important — for it also explained the other five points, which included abandoning fact-checking and moving content moderation from California to less biased Texas.
Everything in that statement went towards aligning Meta with the values and priorities of the Constitution.
The tech giants adopting this robust strategy make a lot of strategic sense.
And with the US government bullying other states for the benefit of free speech, this is a battle and a war that the tech companies can win.
The coming battle between social media and the state
Behind the alignment of X and Meta with Trump is a cold business logic — and a position of weakness rather than strength
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