Thursday, January 24, 2019
Time Magazine takes on how to fix social media now, with one of Facebook's founders
The January 25, 2019 issue of Time Magazine has several long
articles of major importance.
The cover story is by Roger McNamee, “I helped create this
mess, here’s how to fix it.” The inside address, so to speak, is “How to fix social
media before it’s too late; an early investor on how Facebook lost its way.”
He says he mentored Mark Zuckerberg. He gives the usual
argument now that the business model is predicated on creating echo chambers to
serve users more ads based on passed likes.
It’s so scalable that eventually and actors and would-be authoritarians
would sabotage it. He talks about
democracy, privacy, control your data, regulation, and humanizing. Then there is tech addiction, and protection
of children (especially from cyberbullying). The biggest proposal is
predictable – break up Facebook into competing companies.
Then Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, writes “It’s time for action on
privacy; we all deserve control of our digital lives.” Hate has no place on his platform.
There follows a particularly disturbing story by Philippines
journalist Maria Ressa, “Facebook let my government target me, but the
social-media giant could yet fulfill its original promise.” The problem is that in a country like the
Philippines, Facebook “is the Internet”.
Laurie Segall writes :Be Afraid, Very Afraid” (I use that phrase
in my DADT I book, Chapter 6). One of
the most curious ideas is “neural inequality”, with brain nanochips. But actually, there is a great spread in IQ naturally
among people – not necessarily because of race itself but because of environmental
and upbringing differences that accumulate over generations.
Eli Pariser writes “Restoring Dignity to Technology”, “how
to design tools to set write what has gone wrong online.”
Donald Graham writes “Facebook will thrive: I would bet on
its efforts to fix mistakes.”
Then the issue changes tone, with a big piece by Aryan Baker
in Williston N.D., “The Survivor”, about the victims of sex trafficking,
especially in the Midwest and in native American lands. She focuses on the
deprivation of the young women who become vulnerable through gradual steps to
pimps. But the article does not get into
the Internet or online liability issues that the controversial FOSTA law took
on.
What is missing from all of this is the perspective of the
individual speaker on the Internet. He
has taken for granted as a quasi-fundamental right what is more of a privilege. True, the elimination of most downstream liability
in 1996 (Section 230, and then Safe Harbor in 1998) gave me a new career, but
what first kept politicians and media honest has suddenly grown into a runaway
train where speakers who don’t have all their skin in the game now fuel the
resentment that leads to action you don’t want.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment