Alternatives to Reforming Section 230: Refocusing Internet Regulation on Empowering People
This is the third and final installment in our three-part series about Section 230.
(Read the first blog post, and the second blog post)
Written by the Wikimedia Foundation’s: Stan Adams, Lead Public Policy Specialist for North America
In the previous two blogs in this series, we’ve talked about the diversity of online services, all of which rely on Section 230 and that are commonly used by everyone, including Wikipedians. We also discussed how such services might be forced to change if the statute is reformed, and how proposals for reform based on assumptions and misunderstandings could backfire.
Reforming long-established internet policy is complicated and risky, but not impossible. In this post, we’ll offer our thoughts on how the law might address some of the contentious issues at stake while also empowering people and communities to transform the internet for the better.
Our proposals won’t solve every problem or threat that exists on the internet. Many of the problems lawmakers seek to address are social, not technical. Societies have had to continuously address problems like public safety, crime, abuse of power, and economic fairness as technology has evolved since the invention of the printing press, electricity and radio, broadcast television, and now the internet.
Addressing the root causes of such problems is much more difficult and complicated than focusing on the symptoms that arise on the internet. Long-term solutions that also enable open, democratic societies to thrive require supporting, educating, and empowering people and their communities. As discussed in the second blog post, using Section 230 reforms to punish online providers whose websites reflect society’s ills will not eliminate the ills in question. Rather, doing so will likely have broad and negative unintended consequences that disempower people who use the internet to speak and discuss, create all kinds of things, engage in commerce, and access information. However, there are other options for policymakers to consider.
Below we propose ideas to both benefit people who use the internet and the internet as a whole.
Enact strong data protection laws to discourage the collection, retention, and unwanted use of personal information
Many of the largest internet platforms prioritize advertising as their primary source of revenue. Because these are for-profit firms that seek to maximize the value of their advertising space, companies want to keep you (and your eyeballs) “engaged” for as long as possible. The more time you spend on a company’s web property, the more advertisements they can show you. This motivates companies to design their online products and services in ways that hold your attention and encourage interactions with content, such as resharing, reacting to, or commenting on content shared by others.
In addition to prolonging engagement, companies that make money delivering ads online also want to charge the companies whose ads they display as much as possible for “serving” them to you. They do this by increasing the “conversion rate” — which is how they measure how often someone actually interacts with an ad or advertised product, such as when they click on or navigate through the ad to the advertiser’s website. In recent years, advertising companies have focused on ways to display ads so that each individual viewer is most likely to engage with them. One of the primary ways that online companies “target” advertisements to people is to infer each viewer’s interests based on data they collect from that person’s interactions online. Those inferences then inform which brands’, products’, and services’ ads each viewer is shown.
Many of the harms ascribed to social media stem from financial incentives in the digital advertising market. Such harms include the promotion of harmful content, the spread of disinformation, and concerns around the addiction-like behaviors associated with some social media features. These issues arise from companies’ efforts to prolong engagement, and they depend on the collection and use of information about people to inform the algorithmic recommendation systems that select both the content and the ads that each person sees. Rather than holding companies liable for online speech and content, we encourage lawmakers to hold platforms liable for the collection, retention, and unwanted use of personal information by enacting strong data protection laws at the federal level.
In addition to protecting peoples’ privacy, reducing companies’ financial incentives to engage in such practices — sometimes called “behavioral advertising” or “surveillance capitalism” — could provide other benefits. Rather than pushing content and ads that a company thinks viewers will like based on inferences from quietly stalking them across the internet, companies could instead provide options so that each person can express their own choices and affirmative preferences about the content they wish to see. Similarly, for-profit companies could offer more options with regard to advertising, such as allowing people to choose contextual ads instead of targeted ads. Empowering people, in this case by promoting greater privacy and autonomy, helps them to shape their own experiences. It may require a bit more effort, but we think that this kind of “engagement” is a good thing.
Support and promote models that empower community development and decision-making
As lawmakers pursue their goals of reducing the power that individual companies have over online experiences and opportunities, we encourage them to consider regulation not just from a negative posture (i.e., prohibiting things they oppose), but also from a positive posture, where regulation promotes and encourages things that benefit the people and communities they represent. As a starting point, we ask lawmakers and regulators to keep in mind that not all online platforms have the same business models or take the same approach to governance and content moderation. Legislative and regulatory proposals must take these differences into account, and should be flexible to support a variety of platform types and sizes. Furthermore, they should be designed to protect and support the kinds of models that generate the greatest social benefit with the least amount of harm.
We believe society will benefit if more community-led spaces on the internet can survive and thrive. Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are living examples of online spaces that are created, curated, and managed by communities of volunteers who dedicate their time and energy to pursuing a common goal. For Wikimedia projects, that goal is to freely access and share the sum of all human knowledge. This common ideal unites people from all walks of life and from all parts of the world, and serves as a foundation upon which to build a community that works together, online and offline, to make real a shared vision.
Although no community is perfect, we believe that empowering people to cooperate, collaborate, and collectively decide what kind of online space they will build and govern together offers direct benefits to societies and communities. We urge policymakers to promote and protect community-led models as alternatives to models in which attention is monetized and where people have no say in platform design or in how content rules are set and enforced. (For more on how English language Wikipedia volunteers govern content, for instance, see this report from Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center.) Like local governments, self-governing online communities are better able to respond to the wants and needs of their members: They have a deeper, more contextual understanding of the community’s shared values, norms, and unique characteristics. And this understanding helps online communities craft and enforce conduct and content moderation policies that align with their values and norms.
Protecting and supporting communities’ right to self-governance of online spaces will also improve the diversity and pluralism of internet platforms, and people who are able to participate in them. Community-led spaces can offer options beyond the massive, centralized social media platforms that currently dominate the internet. These alternatives could manifest in many ways, from business models with different or fewer financial incentives underlying their goods and services to different ways of structuring, presenting, accessing and sharing online speech and content. Although there are many options for supporting community-led internet projects and empowering people who use the internet, we will highlight a few in the following section.
Invest in digital public infrastructure, and support public interest internet projects
Promoting and supporting the development of new self-governed online communities will require a long-term, multipronged approach. Although governments may play many roles in this process, important aspects of these will include supporting the availability of affordable, reliable technical infrastructure, and providing incentives for community-led development and operation. Federal and state governments are already taking steps to improve the availability of broadband access, and some communities are already demonstrating the consumer benefits of community-managed broadband networks. In addition to investing in affordable, reliable, and available broadband networks, we urge policymakers to consider similar investments to improve the availability and affordability of other pieces of internet infrastructure — including computing power, secure open-source software, connected devices, and information technology support.
To succeed, many communities will also need additional resources, which go beyond technical infrastructure, and extend to education and training in a range of issues: from basic computer and internet usage to cybersecurity to software development. We believe that greater investment in computer and internet skills training would provide value that exceeds supporting online communities. Using the internet effectively, efficiently, and safely has become a critical life skill for many, and making sure that these skills are integrated into both childhood and adult educational curricula is crucial.
Conclusions
Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects represent some of the best, most socially beneficial efforts on the internet. These are public interest projects that would not exist as we know them without Section 230. Although the statute has been identified by some as the reason for many of the internet’s problems and, therefore, ripe for reform, we urge lawmakers to reconsider this approach. As we’ve explained in this blog post series, the statute protects and enables a much wider variety of online services and websites than just the largest social media platforms. We’ve also highlighted that many of the rationales for reform are based on assumptions or misunderstandings that are likely to lead to unintended consequences or ineffective legislation. Finally, we’ve proposed the above three ideas as suggestions to improve the internet for everyone: a combination of discouraging extractive and exploitative business practices and empowering people to collaborate in online spaces that reflect their shared values and norms.
We are eager to work with policymakers at all levels of government to refine and implement these proposals so that people can shape the internet as a tool for social good, and everyone, everywhere, can participate in free and open knowledge online.
