Verdict Against Meta

[ndrosen]

Elizabeth Nolan Brown has written about a jury’s verdict against Meta, and I share her concern about what this may do to the open Internet. It may be that Big Tech firms are not always as ethical as they should be; I still don’t think that it should be a crime or a tort to provide a platform on which some people spend too much time.

In Victorian England, for example, scolds condemned the publication and reading of cheap novels, as a waste of time, and a source of bad ideas; nor do I claim that these complaints were entirely groundless. However, it is also likely that some of the laboring men and servant girls who read such disapproved literature got harmless pleasure from it, and also expanded their vocabulary, mental horizons, and reading skills. One may say much the same of social media today; some people spend too much time on it, to the neglect of what they should be doing, but others are little harmed, and find their lives expanded by the friendships which they make online, or the chance to learn what a variety of people have to say.

The article to which I have supplied a link was published several days ago; I did not get around to posting this piece until now, because I have job duties, and do not spend too much time posting on Dreamwidth, or even looking at what my friends and their network of connections have to say and to show.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Social media depends mostly on how you use it. Frex, I use YouTube to view videos about crafts, environmental restoration, and paleontology. Some other people watch exercise videos that make them feel bad about their bodies. It's a choice.

Where I think companies have liability is the infrastructure. If a platform is deliberately designed to be addictive, or to burgle people's data and use it against them, that is a problem. Most modern social media has heinous infrastructure.

[ndrosen]

But what does it mean for a platform to be addictive, and who judges? Is anything pleasant or useful addictive? Charles Dickens’s novels were serialized in magazines; could he or his publishers have been sued for using an addictive infrastructure, since he wrote to grab the attention of his readers, and make people want to buy the next issue when it came out?

What about your poems? If you try to get people to pay for poems to be made available, do you therefore have an addictive platform? Could someone who doesn’t like you or your views sue you, and insist that he wasn’t trying to deprive you of your First Amendment rights, only to save The Children, and especially his own messed-up teenager, from your addictive platform?