As a follow up to my post below I want to return to a more technical point but one which is critical to understand as the baseline for any discussion about social media and “platforms.” “Network effects” are an inherent feature of the tech industry. You can go all the way back to what now seems like the quaintly primitive tech of VHS and Betamax. They are also embedded at the core of Silicon Valley/VC business culture in which 9 out of 10 investments fail but one (you hope) has staggering returns which make up for all the rest. “Hockey stick growth” is another side of this many-sided coin at the center of early 21st century capitalism. It is the hunt for a business proposition in which costs are chained to arithmetic growth and returns are exponential. If one of your ten bets holds something like that possibility, you can afford to invest in a bunch of dry holes.
There’s a reason why social platforms played such a crucial role in the tech VC boom era. Create a platform where users create their own content and in which you sell advertising against their content and you have publishing tied to infinity. (As a side note, this is why VC’s role in digital journalism ended as it did: it remains permanently cost-intensive and you can never achieve network lock-in.) But how do you monitor or take responsibility for what everyone says anywhere all the time? Well, you don’t. You can’t. Providing everyone with bandwidth and software keeps expense growth arithmetic. But if you try to exert any control over how it’s used then expenses become exponential too. It’s impossible to do within the business model. Everything about social media comes back to this central fact.
You ever call the help line at Facebook to get customer service to help when you can’t upload a photo to your Facebook page? Of course not, because it doesn’t exist. Do you know the costs of having someone on hand to help every one of the three billion people who need tech support? Impossible. That’s exponential costs. That doesn’t fit with the business model. And any effort to take any cognizance over what people post is the same.
One way to answer this question is to say that it’s not only impossible but shouldn’t be necessary. Everybody is allowed to print pamphlets and newspapers and say whatever they want. That’s free speech — literally freedom of the press. In a 21st century world, TPM pays a hosting service to make our website available over the internet. That’s analogous to setting up a printing press in the 18th century. Our hosting service has no influence over what we publish or who sees it. But Facebook is very different. It uses algorithms to boost some content over others. In other words, it’s really a publisher. Algorithms keep expenses arithmetic. So that still works in our business model.
But here’s the thing. Algorithms — the secret sauce that keeps people glued to Facebook and Twitter and TikTok — are easy to abuse and they create all sorts of negatives externalities. There’s no way around that. You cannot extract that from the model. When society became aware of this the networks tried to use another set of algorithms to keep the bad stuff to a minimum. But that never worked very well. When the public relations problems got really bad they departed a bit from the model to hire a lot of people to clamp down on pedophiles and criminal syndicates and hate speech and the rest. But only a limited amount of that was possible to say within the arithmetic costs/exponential returns model.
This is the baseline of everything to do with social media. You can’t really keep up with the all the bad things people do within the business model. Period. End of story. The efforts at “trust and safety” were imperfect at best and usually far worse. Now we’re back to “free speech” because Meta needs to seek the favor of those in power. So it will tamp down on some of the human monitoring of some keywords. It is inherent to social media business models that you can’t possibly have any substantive and meaningful oversight over the network’s use because doing so at scale would have prohibitive costs. Period.
