Hi all, it's Eric. There has been a lot written in this newsletter and elsewhere about technology companies making decisions that used to be the provenance of legislators, bureaucrats and judges. Tech giants are deciding what speech is allowed on their websites, whose products they'll permit on their platforms and what mandatory fees are owed them. For example, both Apple Inc. and the U.K. have influential anti-pornography stances, but only one of them democratically elects its leaders.
The topic of technology companies supplanting governments comes up most often around content moderation. So far, it's been the tech companies, not regulators, deciding questions over whether a conspiracy theory is kooky or insidious, and whether political screeds are unpleasant, or racist hate speech. (And if the latter, should they be banned or just demonetized?)
This week, YouTube, run by Alphabet Inc.'s Google, hemmed and hawed over what to do about a conservative channel that used epithets to refer to a gay reporter and has sold shirts with derogatory phrases on them.
YouTube kept vacillating tweet-by-tweet about what to do with respect to the host Steven Crowder's homophobic comments. And in the middle of the firestorm, the company released a new articulation of its policies around conspiracy theories. It all gave the impression that YouTube was trying to read the mood of the internet, rather than make judicious rulings.
Incorporating reasonable criticism might be a good thing, and kudos to the reporters holding YouTube accountable for its failings (see: this recent story from the Times, and this from Bloomberg). But rushing to placate internet fury is clearly not a sustainable long-term strategy for moderating content on these massive sites.
The good news for YouTube and other tech titans is that time-tested best practices do exist – in the governments these companies are so often replacing. Even non-democratic states have adopted good-governance principles like an independent judiciary. Governments tend to have individual people who are visibly accountable for decision-making. They also have channels for formal appeals. Even if boards and shareholders have been frequently sidelined from these debates, there's nothing new that needs to be invented here.
Often, the process matters almost as much as the policy. And tech executives have an alternative to relying on their own personal moral intuitions—or outsourcing them to their lieutenants and hoping for the best. But I actually think Facebook's proposal to bring in an oversight board is a step in the right direction, as was Google's effort to create its own review board for artificial intelligence development, even though it unfortunately imploded.
There are clearly problems with asking tech companies to write their own rules (some of which I outlined last week). And even if those rules are well-made, tech giants' pseudo-democratic processes could lead real, elected leaders to abrogate their responsibility to set standards themselves.
But right now, better rule-making would benefit everyone. It's not just a matter of bringing in outsiders—it's also about setting distinct responsibilities and goals for each step of the review process, so that its outcomes don't look like capricious reactions to the latest controversy. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, "Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint." If only he'd seen the internet. —Eric Newcomer
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