Last year’s sensational congressional testimony of Facebook, Google, and Twitter now seems less significant following the recent news cycle dominated by the breach and misinformation campaigns associated with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.
We may never have a clear picture of all state-sponsored actors that used these platforms to help Russia spread false and misleading information. What we do have: Questions — big, difficult questions that should concern not just internet giants but everyone who uses the internet for business or pleasure — in other words, just about everyone.
The internet has become the connective tissue of the world. It’s been this open frontier that’s given rise to incredible innovations. On the flip side, large parts of it are like the Wild West — beyond the reach of the rule of law governing settled societies. If the first phase of the internet was about building it, and the second was about monetizing it, the third phase has to be about governing it. How do we take the rules, regulations and societal norms that exist in the physical world and map them to the digital world?
It will take years to figure out, but we need to start working on it.
What is evil, and who decides?
Clearly, as individual users we need to think more critically about what we read, say and do. We should act on the internet with the same integrity as we do in the real world, if not more, since words have more weight without body language and personal connection to accompany them.
But relying on individuals to self-monitor is not enough in the real world, and it’s not enough on the internet either. When you think about how humans self-organize, we have city councils, state governments, national governments and international bodies such as the UN, and NATO. There’s no perfect system, but there are layers of systems to protect peoples’ rights and interests, keep people safe and create an atmosphere where they can compete on a level playing field.
We need the same kinds of governing bodies on the internet, but the tech industry should not wait for rules to be imposed. We need to start thinking a lot harder about what it means to be a good digital citizen, start taking action now. Google’s famous motto, “Don’t be evil,” which has become the defacto operating standard for much of Silicon Valley, is no longer good enough. What is evil, and who gets to decide?
It’s hard enough to answer that question within the physical boundaries of a country, let alone on the internet where there are no borders. The definition of right and wrong can be fluid depending on the context and who and what is involved, so there has to be some kind of unified layer that can also allow for local differences. Creating these kinds of formal structures like these is best by people who make rules for a living — governments and international bodies.
But that does not let the tech industry off the hook. We need to be part of those conversations, because we have the technology expertise. And, we need to start using that expertise to deliver a higher level of transparency, reliability and accountability than human operated-systems if we want people to trust software-driven systems.
Where the rubber meets the road
In terms of trust in software-driven systems, self-driving cars are literally where the rubber meets the road. Although manufacturers say these cars will be ready to hit the road in four or five years, and there’s plenty of data showing that they’re safer than human-driven cars, interest in them is actually declining.
A study conducted last year by the MIT Age Lab and the New England Motor Press Association found that 40 percent of people age 25–34 said they would be comfortable with fully autonomous vehicles. This year, just 20 percent of people 25–34 said the same. Among older adults, the percentage that say they would be comfortable with them is even smaller. A study released by J.D. Power had a similar finding.
MIT researcher Bryan Reimer attributes these attitudes to peoples’ everyday experiences with technology glitches, and believes that more transparency and education is needed to help establish consumer trust. The same is true for other technologies as well.
Following the breadcrumbs
The difference between the physical world and the online world is that we have a digital trail of breadcrumbs for every interaction that takes place. We need to start using that data to do more than sell people things, and I think there are at least a couple basic things we can all agree on.
First, we have to stop allowing people to hide. It’s really hard to imagine people bullying each other in the analog world the way they do on the internet. Anonymity allows people to be really, really mean, and that’s not how most of us are in society. We want to allow free speech while also making it transparent as to who it is that is speaking and on what authority. We are already using machine learning and other technologies to authenticate people for banking, payments and other online activities. We can do the same for accounts on social media and review sites.
Second, I think businesses could do more to moderate quality and be more forthcoming about where things come from, and how things work. Reddit, one of the top 10 websites on the internet, is a collection of micro-communities, each with a set of volunteer moderators who are often very important for maintaining the quality and integrity of the discussion. But, that can also sometimes lead to echo chambers and/or herd thinking. This is exactly what happened with the U.S. election. People were only hearing news they wanted to hear, and only talking to people they wanted to talk to.
To do community moderation right, you need moderators that are truly diverse and representative sample of the community as a whole, not just that sub-conversation. It should be clear who these people are and why they are qualified to decide, and there should be accountability when they are wrong, or they do something that really rubs the community the wrong way.
All content — whether it comes from major media outlets, blogs, comments or online reviews — is not created equally, and sites should be working to educate people about what it is they are looking at.
A question of citizenship
You could argue that that’s not really their job to police their platform, or that it would hurt profits, but let’s look at the flip side, which is that if you don’t take care of this problem, you get called before Congress and become the wrong kind of headline. This is not technology question or a business question. It’s a fundamental question of citizenship.
I think we can also agree that there need to be legal consequences for extremely bad actions. In the real world, if you talked about doing something dangerous to harm someone, you’d be under investigation. If you helped someone make a bomb or coached them as to how to carry out a truck attack that killed a lot of people, you’d be charged as an accomplice. Yet death threats are commonplace on the internet, and it’s trivially easy to get a tutorial on carrying out all manner of crimes.
Tech companies aren’t really equipped to decide big legal and moral questions about the internet and how it is governed. That doesn’t mean we get to sit on our hands and do nothing. We can be part of those conversations, and we can and should start working towards being better digital citizens. With more and more of life everywhere moving onto the internet, and more and more systems being driven by software, there’s no time like the present to start.
