Selected Items

Internet Platform Services ...and Middleware

--Saving Democracy
--Augmenting the Wisdom of Crowds

--Bicycles for Our Minds

Delegation of User Control for Social Media Feeds
-- Attention Ranking / Recommender Agent Services (often called "middleware") 
-- growing interest in limiting platform power over truth, value, and the democratic way by restoring user choice over what we feed our heads ("Freedom of Impression").

It is the policy of the United States… to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals… who use the Internet…     (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 1996)

Many of my recent writings are at Tech Policy Press (list).

Featured

• New Logics for Governing Human Discourse in the Online Era (CIGI Freedom of Thought Project, 4/25/24) - Pulls together and builds on ideas about how freedom of impression guides freedom of expression without restricting it, and how combining 1) user agency, 2) a restored role for our traditional social mediation ecosystem, and 3) systems of social trust all combine to synergize that process for the online era. It offers a proactive vision of how that can enable social media to become ever more powerful and beneficial "bicycles for our minds."
  
  
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  A New, Broader, More Fundamental Case for Social Media Agent "Middleware" (discussion draft/deck, 11/9/23+revs) 
  Suggests broad need for middleware services between users and platforms to support three essential pillars, to restore the context that has collapsed online:
  
  • 1. individual agency
  • 2. social mediation ecosystem
  • 3. reputation.
  
  
  
• From Freedom of Speech and Reach to Freedom of Expression and Impression (Tech Policy Press, 2/14/23) - Distilling and updating essential reframings from the Delegation series (just below). Managing society’s problems related to how (and by whom) social media news feeds are composed is rapidly reducing to the absurd. Focus on the other end of the proverbial “megaphone” – not speaker’s end, but listener’s. Restore our Freedom of Impression!
  
  
• We Can Protect Freedom of Thought by Deciding What We Feed Our Brains (Centre for International Governance Innovation [CIGI] 1/17/24)
  A shorter spin on the need to reclaim our Freedom of Impression, a contribution to their Freedom of Thought project.

The Delegation series in Tech Policy Press with co-author Chris Riley

1. Delegation, or, The Twenty Nine Words that the Internet Forgot (2/28/22)
   Why emphasis on user control in Section 230 is far more important than generally recognized, and how an architecture designed to make high levels of user control manageable can enhance the nuance, context, balance, and value in human discourse that current social media are tragically degrading.
2. Understanding Social Media: An Increasingly Reflexive Extension of Humanity (4/27/22)
   With a nod to Marshall McLuhan, we connect the centrality of user choice and agency to the deeper social and human substrate that underpins the potential of modern social technologies to bring positive new dynamics into our human interaction.
3. Community and Content Moderation in the Digital Public Hypersquare (6/17/22)
   Seeing social media as a "digital public square" oversimplifies, and is better seen as a “digital public hypersquare” -- a multitude of digital spaces. Social media must serve an open-ended web of spaces (/squares/spheres), layered & multidimensional, each governed by different rules & norms.
4. Contending for Democracy on Social Media and Beyond (9/22/22)
   Conflict is part of democracy, and this age of rapid change only promises to accelerate that. Just as democracy is weakened by the prevalence of unhealthy conflict, it is weakened by attempts to suppress healthy conflict that is agonistic, rather than antagonistic.

• Running Updates relating to this new series.

Other recent or notable items:

• The Supreme Court Can Help Fix Social Media Governance With NetChoice Ruling (Tech Policy Press, 2/9/23) - One weird trick: Comments/expansion on an amicus brief for Francis Fukuyama suggesting how to overturn the two laws in a way that does not just kick the can of social media governance down a dead-end road – leading to more wasted time and effort – but instead, could show legislators and others a way past current dilemmas.

• How Third-Party Social Media Middleware Can Protect Contextual Privacy (Tech Policy Press, 10/11/23) - The case for social media “middleware” continues to gain support  –  to increase “user control over what information is received” and thus to improve the quality of online discourse while protecting freedom of expression. Our understanding of related concerns and how to overcome them has also advanced.

• My Decades of Blueskying, and Hopes for the Bluesky Project (6/25/23) - My thinking on where I hope they will take us. Even if Bluesky, the company, fails to achieve critical mass, it has potential to lay the foundations for next generation protocols and services that will. (Updated/expanded after comments from Bluesky, others.)

• Context Lost; Context Regained – Comments on iDPI's “A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet” (4/5/23) - Where our social information infrastructure needs go - my comments and expansions on a manifesto from Ethan Zuckerman's iDPI team. A "pluriverse" of many linked diverse platforms and a "loyal" agent that "aggregates, cross-posts, and curates."  

• Into the Plativerse… Through Fiddleware? (Tech Policy Press, 12/20/22) - Suggesting a future that is neither fully centralized platforms, nor a fully decentralized fediverse, but a distributed hybrid (a plativerse?*) that enables nuanced control -- and may enable the emergence of federated middleware (fiddleware?) to best serve users. (*My more recent 4/5/23 post favors the term "pluriverse" as more evocative.)

• The Future of Twitter is Open, or Bust (Tech Policy Press, 11/4/22, with Chris Riley) -- Twitter’s best — and most likely, only — hope to survive as a service and as a business is to find an exit ramp off of the highway to hell it’s on by opening up the platform.

• Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law? (Techdirt, 5/13/22) -- My take on the deeper issues for democracy of Musk's on-again/off-again bid for Twitter. Will Musk or Twitter users jump out of the boiling pot, and how we can take it off the burner.

• The Ghost of Surveillance Capitalism Future (Tech Policy Press, 12/19/21) - Now is the time for policy planners to look to the future – not just to next year, but the next decade. Here is how social media will get far worse without real change, with some suggestions.

• Progress Toward Re-Architecting Social Media to Serve Society (Tech Policy Press, 12/1/21) - Further insights on the unbundling/middleware proposals at the Stanford HAI Conference, with panelist suggestions for bolder variations.
• Directions Toward Re-Architecting Social Media to Serve Society (11/29/21) - Companion piece to above, with my suggestions for bolder, longer-term directions, including infomediary/data cooperative strategies.
  
  
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  Reconciling Social Media & Democracy: Fukuyama, Keller, Maréchal & Reisman (Tech Policy Press mini-symposium, 10/7/21) - Very productive debate with diverse expert perspectives, new ideas, eminent speakers. Moderated this opening segment (audio+transcript). Full program, more segments online.
  
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  Scholars Reckon with Democracy and Social Media (Tech Policy Press, 8/9/21) - 1st of 3 articles, this one surveying a debate in the Journal of Democracy.
• Unbundling Social Media: A Taxonomy of Problem Areas (Tech Policy Press, 8/9/21) - 2nd of 3, this one synthesizing key problem areas to be addressed.
• The Need to Unbundle Social Media - Looking Ahead (8/9/21) - 3rd of 3, a more personal look at the broader history and future of truth, value, and democracy, and specifics on how tech can seek to augment that instead of destroying it.
  
  
• Unbundling Social Media Filtering Services – Toward an Ecosystem Architecture for the Future (9/17/21) - a longer term perspective on why unbundling is essential, even if not a panacea.
  
  
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  The Internet Beyond Social Media Thought-Robber Barons (Tech Policy Press, 4/22/21) - my earlier in-depth proposal and commentary. Proposes a surgical restructuring — to an open market strategy that shifts control over our feeds to the users they serve — as the only practical way to limit the harms and enable the full benefits of social media. This simple twist in the form of an unbundling can put us back on track (and is consistent with antitrust law). 
  ++ Running Updates
  ++ Additional background here.
  

Other selected items:

• Resolving Speech, Biz Model, and Privacy Issues – An Infomediary Infrastructure for Social Media? (11/3/21) - -- how "infomediaries"/"data cooperatives" might enable a 2-level unbundling -- that better distributes control of social media to manage its knotty multi-faceted problems.
• The Best Idea From Facebook Staffers for Fixing Facebook: Learn From Google (10/26/21) - leaked Facebook document recognizes value of my PageRank-based algorithm for augmenting of the wisdom of crowds.
• It Will Take a Moonshot to Save Democracy From Social Media (10/12/21) - Not easy, but necessary.

General issues -- Our platforms should serve us, but have take a wrong turn. (See Supportive references below.)

• Beyond Deplatforming: The Next Evolution of Social Media May Make Banning Individual Accounts Less Necessary 
  Published in Tech Policy Press (and this blog).
  Commentary on how draconian deplatforming is, and how the unbundling I propose can be a better solution for all but the most dangerous offenders. 
• Don’t Swim Against the Tide of “Nuance Destruction”
  Published in Techonomy (now Worth)
  There are clear paths to creating quality-seeking algorithms. Computers can deal with nuance and mitigate conflict when programmers want them to. 
• Making Social Media Serve Society [Discussion Draft]
  Free Our Feeds! Why and how to regain control of how we view our marketplace of ideas.
• Regulating our Platforms -- A Deeper Vision (Working Draft) 
  A review of some of the best think tank proposals, plus visionary suggestions of my own.
• The Augmented Wisdom of Crowds:  Rate the Raters and Weight the Ratings 
  A broad architecture for where we should be going in social media (and digital democracy more broadly), more comprehensive and powerful than any I have seen.
• Architecting Our Platforms to Better Serve Us -- Augmenting and Modularizing the Algorithm 
  Broad solutions to technical issues of openness, transparency, regulation, antitrust, and market forces in platform architecture.
• The Tao of Fake News / The Tao of Truth 
  The inherent limits of experts, moderators, and rating agencies – and the need for augmenting the wisdom of the crowd (as essential to maintaining the intellectual openness of our democratic/enlightenment values).
• A Cognitive Immune System for Social Media -- Developing Systemic Resistance to Fake News
  Why we need a systemic solution to limit the spread of cognitive pathogens.
• In the War on Fake News, All of Us are Soldiers, Already! 
  A simpler view of the massive problem of separating the real from the fake -- and why we must exploit the feedback already available from the crowd.
• Filtering for Serendipity -- Extremism, 'Filter Bubbles' and 'Surprising Validators' 
  How this architecture addresses these specific concerns.
• A Regulatory Framework for the Internet (with Thanks to Ben Thompson)
  Additional perspectives on the issues of free speech versus free reach and advertising.
• Free Speech, Not Free Targeting! (Using Our Own Data to Manipulate Us)
  Much of the disagreement over controlling false political ads stems from confusion over how social media work.
• 2020: A Goldilocks Solution for False Political Ads on Social Media is Emerging 
  A consensus on a stopgap solution.
• The Dis-information Choke Point: Dis-tribution (Not Supply or Demand) [Stub]
  If disinformation falls in a forest… but appears in no one’s feed, does it disinform?
• Full Frontal Reality: how to combat the growing lunatic fringe
  My 2009 comment on the emerging problem

Business model issues -- Specific to user-centered business models for platforms
(See more on my FairPayZone blog)

• To Regulate Facebook and Google, Turn Users Into Customers 
  A surprisingly simple, proven, market-driven regulatory strategy, published in Techonomy (now Worth).
• An Open Letter to Influencers Concerned About Facebook and Other Platforms
  A call to action (with links) on business model incentives and regulation.
• Who Should Pay the Piper for Facebook? (& the rest) 
  A business model solution to the social media business model problem 
• Privacy AND Innovation ...NOT Oligopoly -- A Market Solution to a Market Problem 
  A regulatory approach that incentivizes the business model solution for customer-based revenue 
• Reverse the Biz Model! -- Undo the Faustian Bargain for Ads and Data
  Crediting users for their attention and data to re-align incentives while still enjoying ad revenue
• Yes, You are the Product …It Matters …and Can Be Remedied
  Why this is important, even if a bit of an oversimplification 

Other issues in User-Centered Media (to be added...)

(These address my perspectives as an inventor in the media space and related commentary)

Broader issues in in our intertwingled world (to be added...)

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Supportive References for Augmenting the Wisdom of Crowds and The Tao of Truth

• Scaling Up Fact-Checking Using the Wisdom of Crowds, Jennifer Allen, Antonio Arechar, Gordon Pennycook, David Rand, Psyarxiv Preprint, 10/26/20.
  "Our results indicate that crowdsourcing is a promising approach for helping to identify misinformation at scale."
• Why you don’t really know what you know, Matthew Hutson, MIT Technology Review, 10/21/20
  On the importance of understanding the social nature of truth ("epistemic dependence" -- our reliance on others' knowledge -- "knowing vicariously"), and the interplay of evidence, trust, and authority. It refers to a much-cited fundamental paper on epistemic dependence from 1985.
• Leveraging volunteer fact checking to identify misinformation about COVID-19 in social media, Hyunuk Kim, Dylan Walker, The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 5/18/20.
  Provides empirical support for the value of crowdsourced data for determining the quality of social media information. 

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Where I am coming from: The Roots of My Ideas on Tech Policy 

• As explained there, much of this work builds on my design of a network of social decision support systems for large-scale open innovation and collaborative development of early-stage ideas around 2001-3. 
• That design is still worth reading... 
• While the style required of a patent application is not the easiest reading, the copy I posted adds highlighting of portions that are still very relevant, and provided important added detail on many themes that are still very relevant and still forward-looking -- addressing many issues in social media that are still emerging. 
• Notably, that 20 year-old document includes extensive details on applying the synergy of the three pillars of agency, social mediation, and reputation, supported by middleware, that I refocused on in my 11/9/23 post.