Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 114

mid-2000s, the web was still largely a "pull"
medium, in which users actively searched
for content and pulled out what interested them rather than passively receiving
content through a "feed." If you wanted to
know what a public figure, politician, or
writer had to say about a topic, you used
your own initiative and a search engine to
find the appropriate web page. This early internet, sometimes called Web 1.0, radically democratized access to information and,
through blogging, expanded opportunities
for ordinary people to share their thoughts
and ideas.
It also, however, led to a fragmented audience that was of little use to advertisers.
And so Web 2.0 came to be. Napoli tells the
story of how social media platforms, especially Facebook and Google-owned YouTube,
finally created products that delivered
the massive, passive audience advertisers

were in turn read by direct news consumers. People who actively followed the news
then played the role of "opinion leaders"
by passing on information through word
of mouth. Today, however, news organizations increasingly feel the pressure to produce content that will be retweeted, liked,
or otherwise shared on social media platforms. And the platforms themselves further filter their own news feeds by using
algorithms designed to "personalize" the
news. The result of both processes is a news
environment that confirms readers' existing prejudices and received ideas as opposed to giving them the truthful information they need to make reasoned judgments
about which parties and politicians represent their interests.
Adding to the dysfunction of today's media environment, Napoli argues, is its weird
combination of monopoly and ruinous
competition. He notes that
Facebook and Google now
thoroughly dominate the
market for digital advertising, both nationally and
globally. This denies news
organizations the revenues
they need to support quality journalism, most notably for reporting. Making
matters worse, news organizations continue to face intense competition with each other for both eyeballs
and the scant advertising dollars that remain, spurring a race to the bottom that
rewards parasitically repurposing content
created elsewhere and replacing resourceintensive reporting with facile commentary. This ruinous competition, Napoli suggests, "takes the form of a decline in the overall quality of the products being produced
to levels that essentially make them incapable of serving their intended purpose-
cultivating an informed citizenry."
This analysis causes Napoli to give up
on the Holmesian idea of an open marketplace of ideas in which the answer to
false or dangerous speech is more speech.
"[W]e may not be able to rely on counterspeech within the context of social media
in the same way that we could with older
media," he writes. Instead, Napoli proposes that we rethink the First Amendment
using a more "collectivist approach." Rath-

From Russia to Myanmar to
Pennsylvania Avenue, social
media increasingly looks like a
boon, not a threat, to illiberal
regimes. What went wrong?
craved. They did so, overwhelmingly, by
running ever-greater quantities of individual user data through algorithms to push
out just the kind of content that would reinforce users' preexisting tastes, attitudes,
and ideas-the stuff that is proven to
keep people glued to the platforms. Napoli
quotes a former Facebook chief technology
officer as saying that algorithmic filtering
"was always the thing people said they didn't
want but demonstrated they did via every
conceivable metric." By 2017, more than 70
percent of the time people spent watching
videos on YouTube was being driven by the
"curation" of Google's algorithms.
Thanks to the increasingly desperate dependence of news organizations on social
media, the biases of these algorithms are
passed upstream to the practice of journalism itself. In the old media environment,
Napoli explains, information tended to diffuse through a two-step process. Editors
used their judgment to select stories that
114

September/October 2019

er than worry about whether everyone
gets a chance to speak, we should worry
about whether everything that needs saying gets said: "Within the realm of social
media, the First Amendment facilitates a
speech environment that is now capable
of doing perhaps unprecedented harms to
the democratic process, while restricting
regulatory interventions that could potentially curb those harms."
Operationally, what Napoli seems to
have in mind is not only holding social media companies accountable for the same libel laws that apply to conventional media
outlets, but also regulating them according
to how well they serve "the public interest."
As Napoli turns to solutions, he becomes
exceedingly vague, but he seems to suggest prohibiting social media platforms
from disseminating information that undermines the functioning of democracy.
The only specific example he gives, unfortunately, is "fake news that leads to misinformed voting behaviors." And even there,
his prescription is lacking detail. Who decides what is fake news? Napoli does not
say. He voices worry about turning that
function over to the Trump administration, but still thinks that the state of technology leaves us with no choice but to embrace much deeper government regulation
of the press.
This is a dark vision. Before we embrace
the notion that saving democracy requires
abridging free speech, perhaps we should
consider other tools, such as applying traditional antitrust and other competition policies to ensure that social media is no longer
dominated by corporate Goliaths. An even
simpler but potentially transformative
move would be to outlaw the use of personal data for targeted advertising. That would,
at a stroke, undermine the business model that underlies so much of the predatory,
addiction-encouraging behavior by Facebook and Google, while also helping the
producers of actual journalism recapture
some of the advertising revenue they need
to survive. If an open marketplace of ideas
cannot be preserved, then liberal democracy may already be dead.
Phillip Longman is policy director at the Open
Markets Institute and senior editor at the
Washington Monthly.



Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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