Many people aren’t aware of it but very few news organizations these days have substantial staffs of reporters. Most of them get their news even local news from one of the big syndicates, Associated Press or UPI. If you want truly local news you must turn to social media sites which include Facebook and Youtube. AP has been around for 150 years. For most parts of the country professional local news coverage went out with disco balls and leisure suits.
Consequently, when I read this passage in David Ignatius’s lament in the Washington Post:
The virtues of a slower, less fluid Internet were outlined in an important recent article on Motherboard by Justin Kosslyn, who heads product management for the Jigsaw think tank operated by Alphabet, which also owns Google. The article’s title makes the basic, heretical argument: “The Internet Needs More Friction: Tech companies’ obsession with moving data across the internet as fast as possible has made it less safe.â€
“Friction — delays and hurdles to speed and growth — can be a win-win-win for users, companies and security,†Kosslyn writes. “Highways have speed limits and drugs require prescriptions . . . yet digital information moves limitlessly.†Unfortunately, he notes, this combination of blazing speed and non-oversight “accelerates the flow of phishing, ransomware and disinformation.â€
I like Kosslyn’s idea because it’s an alternative to the potential trap Facebook has entered, of hiring many thousands of human content assessors and fact-checkers to decide what ideas should be allowed on its platform. To many people, this sounds like Facebook’s version of thought police. Next, alas, come the government regulators.
Rather than create a new regulation regime for Facebook (as Congress is discussing), maybe it would be wiser to treat these social-media companies as publishers of content — and apply the same, well-established legal standards (including libel laws for reckless defamatory comments) that apply to any other publisher. This transition — from platform to publisher — should be implemented carefully, not in the heat of anti-Facebook agitation. In the meantime, slow it down.
I realized that he was engaging in yet another exercise in nostalgia. I wanted to acquaint him with a remark of Stewart Brand’s that goes back long before the Internet, just about 50 years:
Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. …That tension will not go away.
Like school shootings or flying jetliners into office buildings, this is a problem of personal empowerment and it will only go away if the personal empowerment itself goes away. That would have grave implications for our society and our economy.
Just look at the major U. S. companies whose business models are built around personal empowerment. They include not only Facebook but Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, and Microsoft. That drives me to the conclusion that the speed that personal empowerment demands will not go away. Speed is here to stay.
