Tech Companies Find a New Legal Shield in Blockchain
For decades, tech companies like Facebook and Google have been protected from the materials published on their platforms by relying on Section 230. But as Silicon Valley becomes increasingly challenged by Washington, tech companies are looking for a new shield in blockchain instead.
Waya looked out over the vast plains of the Cherokee nation and contemplated what would become of his people when the “white man” finally conquered it all.
Unlike his tribes elders, Waya had seen for himself the terrible technologies that the “white man” was bringing to bear on his people.
Although the Cherokee were excellent horsemen and accurate with a bow and arrow, Waya had seen how the “white man” used long metal weapons that fired projectiles at high speed to hunt and to defend their land.
Waya warned his tribal elders that if they did not adopt the technology, their people as well as their lands would one day be usurped by these new immigrants as they grew in number — when one day these weapons were turned towards the Cherokee nation instead of the bison.
Yet Waya’s Cherokee elders resisted the adoption of firearms, despite being gifted several examples by the incoming waves of migrants from Europe.
Instead Cherokee elders insisted that their skills with a bow and arrow would ensure that they, not the “white man” would prevail in the event of any conflict.
Waya was not so sure and instead trained a cadre of like-minded Cherokee youth to learn to shoot while mounted on a horse using this new terrifying weapon that the “white man” called a “rifle.”
And when that eventual, inevitable clash between the European settlers and the Native Americans eventually precipitated, Waya and his small band of rifle-equipped Cherokee made short measure of the “white man,” but ultimately, the failure of the Cherokee to embrace this new weapon contributed in no small part to the ultimate running down of their once proud people.
Convenient Technology
So when blockchain technology first appeared, many touted it as one of the best hopes to challenge the enormous, centralized power of companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google.
Yet in a surprising twist, many of these internet giants are now looking to the technology powering Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to shield them from the mounting regulatory challenges to their business models.
And much of that challenge is being directed towards Section 230, a 23-year-old law hailed as the pillar of the American internet economy, for protecting any “interactive computer service” from being sued because of the bad behavior of its users.
This legal shield has meant that online platform providers such as Reddit and Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook have been able to host freewheeling discussion with minimal repercussions.
But in recent years, culminating in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, Section 230 has been blamed for enabling the worst aspects of the tech industry — be it fake news on Facebook, terrorist propaganda on Twitter, or the worst excesses of 4Chan and 8Chan and even revenge porn.
In August this year, Section 230 gained even more notoriety when e-commerce giant Amazon invoked it to argue that it had no legal responsibility for dangerous and defective products sold on site, an argument which is just a logical stone’s throw away from the Silk Road website which facilitated the sale of weapons and illegal narcotics.
Because surely, mutandis mutandis if Amazon can’t be held responsible for products sold on its site, why ought the creator of Silk Road?
Public pressure on lawmakers to do something about Section 230 is mounting and these days, politicians from both parties are increasingly happy to oblige.
Democrats blame Section 230 for letting the likes of Facebook shrug while bullies and Russian provocateurs run riot on its services, while Republicans accuse the same platforms of censoring conservative news while promoting libertarian content, reflective of the left-leaning political views of their creators.
And unlike the financial services industry, which is far more heavily regulated and has prohibitive instead of permissive regulations, Section 230 has become an easy target for lawmakers who argue that its repeal would make tech companies accountable for the vitriol hosted on their platforms.
If It’s No One’s Problem, It’s Everyone’s Problem
Recently, Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Montana, introduced a bill that would strip big tech companies of their Section 230 protection, with only sites found by the Federal Trade Commission to monitor content in a “politically neutral manner” being able to keep their legal shield.
The bill, which is likely to be found unconstitutional, has stalled for now, but what is more worrying for tech company bosses is that the idea of modifying or repealing Section 230 has been gathering bipartisan support.
But even if Congress does find a way to take a sledgehammer to Section 230, it’s really the First Amendment, not Section 230 that protects much of what people abhor online, including hate speech and fake news.
Nonetheless, tech companies are not taking the challenge to their hitherto unbridled freedoms for granted and are increasingly looking to blockchain technology to potentially solve their problems.
Twitter CEO and longtime Bitcoin proponent Jack Dorsey said that he hoped the creation of software for social media, inspired by the design of Bitcoin, would give Twitter less control over how people use the service and shift power toward users and programmers outside of Twitter.
By using the decentralized model of blockchain technology, Twitter would function purely as an “organizer” of decentralized content — in other words, it couldn’t be liable for what its users post, because the development and growth of the platform wouldn’t technically be within its hands.
It’s a bit like organizing a protest — the organizers can’t be held personally responsible if the protest descends into violence unless they specifically initiated it.
So since blockchain technology allows anyone to build on the platform, it’s technically no one’s responsibility which way it goes.
Echoing similar sentiments, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose cryptocurrency project Libra is still facing substantial resistance, said that he hopes the same concepts from Bitcoin could “take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands.”
And if you think that sounds familiar, like you’ve heard it before, that’s because you have. Putting power back into people’s hands was the raison d’etre of Bane’s takeover of Gotham City.
But the more cynical would observe (and I believe rightly) that this push into decentralization, by some of the biggest social media companies in the world, whose entire business model and existence revolves around immense amounts of centralization, is nothing more than window dressing.
There’s even a name for such a strategy, it’s called an “Overton Window.”
The idea behind an “Overton Window” is that in any given society, at any given moment, there is a range of policies, politically acceptable to the mainstream.
Generally, politicians will only propose policies within that window, because fringe elements (in general) don’t win re-election.
So it falls to think-tanks (and others) to propose unpopular things outside of the window in the hope of shifting the window and making the previously unthinkable, thinkable.
Which is precisely what is happening here.
For anyone who genuinely believes that companies such as Twitter and Facebook are looking to relinquish their monopoly on the centralization of power and influence, then there may also be a bridge out there somewhere waiting to be bought by them.
The truth is, by proposing decentralizing the management and responsibility of their platforms, social media companies are essentially killing two birds with one stone.
Regulators will know that overseeing companies like Facebook and Twitter, while challenging, is not impossible — because there’s a target, there’s a single point of control, there’s a CEO that can be summoned to appear before Congress — now try regulating an entity that has no central governance structure — that’s precisely what “power to the people” means and we all saw how that worked out for the people of Gotham City.
And even if social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have their governance structures decentralized, what this allows them to do is continue to preserve their profits as platform “organizers” while delegating away responsibility for the most hateful and vile content that inadvertently gets posted onto their platforms.
In other words, it’s like losing a bunch of weight, while still getting to eat massive amounts of your favorite foods — the ultimate diet.
But how did we even get here?
The idea of decentralization is not new and harks back to the basic design and ideals of the internet, which was supposed to be a global gathering place where everyone was welcome and no one was in charge.
That obviously didn’t happen.
Which is why even Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web is working to fix the problems of the centralized internet, by shifting the ownership of personal data away from big companies and back towards users.
Twitter’s Dorsey believes that the invention of Bitcoin has made it possible to revive those early ideals because the underlying technology powering Bitcoin — blockchain — which provides a way for a network of disconnected computers to agree on a single set of records for every Bitcoin in existence — a technology that could one day find its way into the way we manage all aspects of our digital and physical lives, from finance to social media.
Dorsey is certainly not the first person to express optimism that blockchain technology could one day be used to record all the users and activity on a social network and to agree on a single set of rues for that network, without having any company in charge.
But if Congress is any example to follow, the odds of such a Utopian vision, of an engaged and participatory platform democracy, lie some distance in the future.
Already, many start-ups have tried to use blockchains to construct rival social networks to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, companies such as Steemit and Minds, to limited success.
These blockchain-based social media platform alternatives have failed to gather mainstream attention and to make matters worse, because they are decentralized, users have been left to fend off hackers by themselves.
Because in a landscape where no one is responsible, it means that every one is responsible, including for their own safety and security.
There’s no helpline, no person to email if you’ve forgotten your passwords or God forbid, your private keys.
And if users are not happy with the way the blockchain-based social media platform is being run, they can just up and go start their own rival platform, which has created an entirely different set of problems.
For instance Mastodon, a blockchain-based Twitter rival, was created to form a refuge from the anger and hate speech that can be pervasive on Twitter.
But recently, Gab, a far right hate group with close ties to alleged hate crimes, recently set up a safe sanctuary for itself on Mastodon soon after it was edged off the mainstream internet.
And because it’s an open source platform, Mastodon’s leaders could do little more than oppose the move, but nothing to stop it.
Which is why when it comes to the internet and social media, the technology powering Bitcoin may not provide the silver bullet that some are touting and we should be wary of anyone offering it as an easy fix to what is a complex and nuanced problem.
It’s notable that several up-and-coming projects focused on decentralization, including Berners-Lee’s project called Solid, have steered clear of the blockchain entirely, because they don’t believe that the blockchain is useful for anything other than financial transactions.
The Right Tool For The Right Job
When it comes to financial transactions however, blockchain, while not perfect, at the very least, makes for a plausible solution.
Given the great degree of trust required when ordering matters of economic life, rent-seekers abound in the industry, which has progressively gotten fatter as economic life has progressively gotten more complicated.
Yet software and code itself can provide a solution, while not necessarily to eradicate “trusted” third parties altogether, but at least to pare down their influence, size and significance so that they no longer are able to demand their “pound of flesh.”
Which is why when incumbent social media companies tout blockchain technology as the antidote to problems wrought by their very social media platforms themselves, we should take such suggestions with a pound of salt.
Because while it may be tempting to believe that blockchain technology holds promise to decentralize social media, all it really will end up doing is decentralizing responsibility and accountability.
When everyone’s accountable, no one’s accountable.
Published at Tue, 31 Dec 2019 21:03:12 +0000
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