Back From Absurdity: The Essential Reframing Needed to Manage Online Speech - Now on Tech Policy Press

My latest article in Tech Policy Press distills the core ideas needed to reform how we manage online speech: From Freedom of Speech and Reach to Freedom of Expression and Impression.

Key ideas: Problems in managing social media news feeds, including disinformation, extremism, and hate speech, are reducing to the absurd because of a misguided focus on censorious removal. A new framing is needed to reverse these problems, from the “Twitter Files” and Musk’s confusion about “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” to the absurd pairing of cases on online speech headed to the Supreme Court. 

The solution is to shift focus to manage the other end of the proverbial “megaphone” – not the speaker’s end, but the listener’s. Dominant social media platforms are co-opting the “freedom of impression” that we listeners did not realize we had. Proposed remedies based on “delegation” and “middleware” promise to address this, but this new framing in terms of “freedom of impression” is necessary to clarify for all concerned why that is needed from human rights, legal, governance, economic, cultural, and technological perspectives -- and how it can work.

This new framing offers a way to apply both/and thinking to cut through many current dilemmas, and to set a direction for the future of freedom and democracy. It also illuminates a new path toward competition in this market.

Operationally, it suggests how to manage networked speech by refactoring the balance of three control points - to balance full freedom of expression with full freedom of impression:

• Censorship as posts and responses enter the network, entirely banning users or removing individual posts before they reach anyone at all -- a threat to freedom of expression.
• Selection of what is fed or recommended out to each user, individually -- a threat or exercise of freedom of impression, depending on who controls it.
• Friction and other measures to enhance the deliberative quality of human social mediation activity -- with little threat to freedom of thought.

There is no quick fix to the problems of social media, but we can quickly change course to begin to undo the disaster of the past decade or two -- and to avoid ill-conceived remedies that will fail or make things worse. As shown here, doing that means: 

• relying less on censorship (bans and removals that have questionable legitimacy, even when guided by the most well-intended proportionality), and
• giving users agency over the selection of what they see (to legitimately balance each speaker's freedom of expression with each listener's freedom of impression), and
• re-creating a truly open and generative social mediation ecosystem that is like what we have been evolving over the past centuries of analog society, but now augmented by digital media tech (instead of de-augmented and disintermediated by it).

Read the full article on Tech Policy Press...

...And dig deeper into the rationale and concepts behind this distillation and update of the Delegation series (co-authored with Chris Riley)

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Podcast: For those who prefer listening to reading, most of these ideas are covered, along with some additional commentary (but a few months less currency), in the Lincoln Network's podcast, The Dynamist, hosted by Evan Schwarztrauber.

Reisman on The Dynamist Podcast - Reforming Social Media with Delegation and Freedom of Impression

Lincoln Network's The Dynamist podcast (Episode 5, 2/7/23) features an interview of me by Evan Schwarztrauber that covers many of the key ideas in my Delegation series in Tech Policy Press with Chris Riley, plus more that will be in an article to be published soon. [Update 2/14: Now online at Tech Policy Press: From Freedom of Speech and Reach to Freedom of Expression and Impression.]

It steps back to consider the inherent absurdity of current approaches to content moderation and the dilemmas of freedom of expression vs. censorship -- as exemplified in the cases now headed to the Supreme Court: some that would require platforms to carry "lawful but awful" speech, and others that would make them liable for carrying it. 

I suggest the way to cut through those dilemmas is by giving users agency to restore their freedom of impression, which the platforms have co-opted -- and to delegate that agency to services that can shape their feeds and recommendations in accord with criteria and values that they choose. (This was recorded on 10/13/22.)

Thought as a Cyclic Social Process: Thought => Expression => Social Mediation => Impression => ...

[Update 2/14/23: The article this previews is now published on Tech Policy Press.]

This is a preview of ideas from an article in the works, introducing some new diagrams seeking to distill and simplify key ideas addressed in the Delegation Series (with Chris Riley).

Freedom of thought, expression, and impression are not just isolated, individual matters, but an ongoing, cyclic, social process. Thought leads to expression, which then flows through a network of others – a social mediation ecosystem. That feeds impression, in cycles that reflexively lead to further thought.

Cutting through the dilemmas of managing networked speech will depend on balancing full freedom of expression with full freedom of impression, by augmenting the social mediation ecosystem with the right balance of three control points:

• Censorship as posts and responses enter the network, entirely banning users or removing individual posts before they reach anyone at all -- a threat to freedom of expression.
• Selection of what is fed or recommended out to each user, individually -- a threat or exercise of freedom of impression, depending on who controls it.
• Friction and other measures to enhance the deliberative quality of human social mediation activity -- with little threat to freedom of thought.

There is no quick fix to the problems of social media, but we can quickly change course to begin to undo the disaster of the past decade or two -- and to avoid ill-conceived remedies that will fail or make things worse. As shown here, doing that means: 

• relying less on censorship (bans and removals that have questionable legitimacy), and
• giving users agency over the selection of what they see (to legitimately balance each speaker's freedom of expression with each listener's freedom of impression), and
• re-creating a truly open and generative social mediation ecosystem that is like what we have been evolving over the past few centuries of analog society, but now augmented by digital media tech (instead of de-augmented and disintermediated by it).