August 8, 2018
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Welcome to human machine.
Welcome to the human machine newsletter! I’m super excited you’re here. human machine is a brand new project focused on opening up the conversation around product ethics. Our goal is to help everyone (product people, entrepreneurs, and users) understand what it means to build and use ethical products that take into consideration the safety and accessibility of the users and the impacts a product has on society (the intended good and the unintended bad).
Product ethics sits at the cross-section of design, technology, and policy. In this newsletter, you’ll find a regular digest of articles and analysis that relate to product ethics, from tech news to Supreme Court decisions. Look out for more initiatives from human machine including events and workshops.
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The Internet v. Alex Jones
Over the last week, there has been a persistent back-and-forth about whether or not services like YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Spotify, Pinterest, and Twitter should suspend Alex Jones’ accounts.
Alex Jones, if you are still blissfully unaware, is a bombastic conspiracy theorist & propagandist who peddles dangerous and insane material over the internet. His extremist views include claims that the shootings at Sandy Hook and Parkland were fake, that Obama & Hillary are demons, and that Democrats planned to start Civil War II on July 4th 2018.
Tech firms have dragged their feet on Jones and his channel Infowars for years. Finally, this weekend, Apple decided to take action and remove Jones’ podcasts from iTunes. Quickly thereafter, Facebook and Spotify followed. Twitter did not go along with the trend and decided to keep Jones’ accounts up.
We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.
August 8, 2018This post is not about Alex Jones. I believe that if Jones’ actions are not in violation of your content policy, then you need to reevaluate your policies, and that's what I want to address. The way that tech companies develop and implement their policies is the much larger issue at hand.
Tech companies should not suspend user accounts just because other companies are doing it. They shouldn't wait years and then all of a sudden pull the plug because their peers decided to take action. That is unsustainable, and all around bad policy.
Most tech companies, especially social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, are struggling to figure their policies out. The reason Facebook and Spotify removed Jones’ media from their platforms only hours after Apple did, this after years of not taking action, is because they also lack consistent and sustainable policies. Their decisions are based on the amount of pressure being applying from the outside, which is not a productive or strategic way to approach this. In his series of tweets, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey blamed the problem on poor communication. But in reality, it's their inconsistent and unsustainable policy that lies at the heart of this issue.
That being said, Twitter is not bending to the will of the people. They're sticking to their incoherent approach, while also giving themselves the freedom to change their mind at any time. The way that those changes are made, though, are a complete mystery.
If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That’s not us.
August 8, 2018Developing a coherent content policy that addresses the challenges of today without actually suppressing free speech or tilting the scale towards any preferred political party is really hard. No one has figured it out. And no one will figure it out if they continue to do it in the dark. These companies want to look like they know what they're doing, so they periodically release adjustments or major shifts in their policies based on whatever major news event is taking place. These new policy proposals tend to fail miserably in meeting the actual needs of users and protecting the community that should represent that company’s most valuable asset.
This has been a significant enough problem for Twitter (and all of these other tech firms) to warrant a real public initiative to fix it. There have been stories about Dorsey meeting with conservative groups to hear their concerns, but this needs to happen on a much broader spectrum. Publicly launching an initiative (with plenty of PR firepower behind it) that includes sending researchers out to the field and publishing their findings, holding open town halls across the globe, and co-creating possible policy solutions would give them a ton of insights and elevate their standing in this issue. This needs to be a grassroots approach that both educates the community to the difficulty of this problem and learns from them. Building these policies in the dark and having Dorsey periodically publish these Twitter threads to explain their decisions isn’t working.
What do you think of Twitter’s approach, and how the rest of the tech industry is dealing with content moderation?
Here’s what else you should know...
"White supremacists who used Discord to plan Charlottesville rally may soon lose their anonymity" by The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17660308/white-supremacists-charlottesville-rally-discord-plan)
"Is Apple Really Your Privacy Hero?" by Bloomberg Businessweek (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-08/is-apple-really-your-privacy-hero)
"The problem with Twitter, as shown by the Sarah Jeong fracas." by Vox (https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/8/8/17661368/sarah-jeong-twitter-new-york-times-andrew-sullivan)
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