The forgotten (and now threatened) right of Freedom of Impression affects all four of the models in Ethan’s taxonomy with regard to their different paradigms for reach and control -- and how the three different levers of mediation and who controls them apply (censorship, friction, and selectivity, as shown in my second diagram).
In the spirit of that Though as a Social Process cycle, I will be thinking further about how Ethan’s taxonomy can add richness to my framing of Thought => Expression => Social Mediation => Impression => further thought…
Ethan’s taxonomy – and the “pluriverse,” “a complex world of interoperable social networks where one can choose a technical architecture and governance structure appropriate to a community’s needs” -- also ties in with to the ideas of interlinked webs of digital “hypersquares” (or “hyperspheres”/”hyperspaces”) suggested in Community and Content Moderation in the Digital Public Hypersquare (https://techpolicy.press/community-and-content-moderation-in-the-digital-public-hypersquare/, with Chris Riley).
Thanks, Richard, and thank you for encouraging me to read the freedom of impression piece. It makes me think of a classic law review article - "Access to the Press - A New First Amendment Right" by Jerome Barron. Barron argues that freedom of speech is essentially meaningless without the possibility of having that speech be heard. For him, this turns into some sort of a right of access. But that obviously comes into tension with the rights to control what impressions we get (and don't get! something that's part of Section 230 as written.) I appreciate the thinking you're doing on impression, expression and the broader challenge of the public sphere - I am fairly narrowly focused on questions of how interventions in the space might rejigger the contemporary landscape, but I agree that thinking through the larger theory of impression and expression is worthwhile.
Thanks, Ethan -- interesting converse in that Barron piece. It suggested a “right of access” in 1967, when historically wide “access” had become very constrained. Now we are reverting, with wider-than-ever access, but that brings the new challenge of constrained individual attention in the face of unlimited global speech. That seems like a lasting issue for advancing media tech, thus placing new importance on impression rights issues that seem unlikely to go away. My hope is that better and more widely understood theory of where we should be going and why can help align an era of innovative positive interventions and avoid short-sighted ones.
I feel that this taxonomy - and the major tech platforms themselves - would benefit from the classical legal distinction between 'malum in se' and 'malum in prohibitum', or 'bad in itself' and 'bad in prohibition'.
Certain things can be understood as bad in themselves because wherever these rules are discarded or not enforced sufficiently those people subject to the rules, assuming they wish to maintain the integrity of the group or community, will come back to those precise rules irregardless of local context. Murder, for example, is fairly universal for societies of any scale. Racism is also probably malum in se, since it is explicitly an act against integration and shared or aligned purposes.
But other rules are contextually sensitive, and would not automatically be the rules that any community would come to. For example, you might say the word 'idiot' is forbidden, given that it is racist (associating people whose native language is not English with stupidity), and racism would seem to be a fairly low level thing to forbid. But since it is a word its meaning may have evolved, and as such the people who use it may not have any knowledge of its roots. It is not clear that every community whose aim is to come into confluence would forbid it.
A "big room" social network can separate communities into 'spaces' based upon topics or interests, or value systems, and therefore set 'ground-rules' (malum in se), while those spaces layer their own local contextual rules on top.
By nesting these spaces such that all of the content in the niches also gets published into the shared spaces that contain them, where those who achieve the most amplification are the users who obtain reputation by peer endorsement from multiple orthogonal communities (bridge builders), it is plausible to build an architecture with all of the benefits of federated and 'big room' social networks, without the major drawbacks of either.
It is also important that the 'ground rules', central to which is the core algorithm, is open sourced and totally transparent about how content is amplified or suppressed wherever it gets published.
Ciarám, the challenge with context-specific rules is, as you identify, when you break that context. It reminds me a bit of danah boyd's discussion of context collapse: she argues that early civil rights leaders often suffered when they began speaking on much larger stages to white audiences because they sounded "inauthentic" as compared to how they spoke to black audiences. The trick with bridging between the small and large networks is maintaining a way of speaking that allows people to connect with their contextual audience and also reach a much larger audience. I don't think it's easily solved, which is why in part I'm so interested in creating plural spaces, and less in nesting spaces.
Its easily solved in system design through network mathematics. In shared spaces between communities you amplify the people who are reputable within multiple orthogonal spaces, because they demonstrate an ability to express the views of those communities in terms that they would accept, rather than the nutpicking that goes on across tribes today.
Shared spaces can be geographic (content related to a city, or country, or continent), or defined category (e.g. science, politics).
Plural spaces lead to the opposite of that bridge building during the civil rights era that you referenced, or a more contemporary example being the TV series Will & Grace, where the lead male was essentially a heterosexual gay man, but other characters were more stereotypical. What plural spaces leads to is more monomania and ubiquitous cults, where nobody can communicate their authentic views for fear of treading on some statement that sounds sort of like forbidden opinion, and wise people keep their mouths shut. This is why the federated model will ultimately fail without a common set of ground rules that the vast majority of people can get behind. Most people don't want to be in any cult at all, unless it is based around some healthy real world activity. Rules, of course, don't have to be about discourse directly, but can be baked into the reputation algorithm (for search and suggestions) within spaces based upon subject-matter authority, in an alternative paradigm to the behavioural model of social media.
Integrating spaces in a big room is what most people want, and it is why there is an increasing divide between people who wish their lives to be increasingly digital, with all of the perverse effects that has on social epistemology, in journalism, the academy, politics, etc... and those who wish for analog lives, with the sense of powerlessness and lack of influence, recognition, visibility, reach, and voice that this implies. The digital natives, coordinating in their many silos, are the loud minority that own the public discourse, acting against global confluence.
I like the taxonomy and argument for diversity. However I do think that these new platforms need scale and simplicity where an average unmotivated person can ask simple questions like ‘what are people saying about x? What did famous person y do? How do I follow everything that z does?” To that end I think we should try to convince as many of these systems to adopt a compatible protocol (eg Activitypub extended) so that they can all prosper without solving the scale and end user simplicity problem individually.
Ravi, I think that's right: one of the problems we return to in brainstorming about these systems is search. Searching reddit - which has become a very common trick for finding real human reviews rather than SEO spam - necessarily means collapsing context. You may find a response, but sometimes it's important to know what the rules and assumptions are for the community where something is posted. I think we are going to need something significantly more sophisticated than just a search that covers all VSOPs who want to be engaged - we're going to need something that helps put a context layer around results too.
Being able to search across platforms is an interesting case. I personally would like something that pushes content that I care about to me. I'd love to follow everything you write, for example, but I'm not sure I can keep track across all mediums. There are niche topics and filters I'd create and perhaps someday an AI system can be a beneficial agent that sends it all to my inbox? I know you've worked on similar beneficial systems in the past and I think creating some kind of data layer for these systems to read from would eventually be a service with rewards both for the longevity of these new platforms and for readers.
Do you happen to have any specific opinions about the specific "context layer" or data layer we need to build? Is anyone you know working on that in ways that excite you?
Great taxonomy, clarifies many issues and possibilities that are widely conflated and misunderstood!
For a complementary perspective that is also very relevant, consider the model of online conversation in From Freedom of Speech and Reach to Freedom of Expression and Impression (https://techpolicy.press/from-freedom-of-speech-and-reach-to-freedom-of-expression-and-impression/).
The forgotten (and now threatened) right of Freedom of Impression affects all four of the models in Ethan’s taxonomy with regard to their different paradigms for reach and control -- and how the three different levers of mediation and who controls them apply (censorship, friction, and selectivity, as shown in my second diagram).
In the spirit of that Though as a Social Process cycle, I will be thinking further about how Ethan’s taxonomy can add richness to my framing of Thought => Expression => Social Mediation => Impression => further thought…
Ethan’s taxonomy – and the “pluriverse,” “a complex world of interoperable social networks where one can choose a technical architecture and governance structure appropriate to a community’s needs” -- also ties in with to the ideas of interlinked webs of digital “hypersquares” (or “hyperspheres”/”hyperspaces”) suggested in Community and Content Moderation in the Digital Public Hypersquare (https://techpolicy.press/community-and-content-moderation-in-the-digital-public-hypersquare/, with Chris Riley).
Thanks, Richard, and thank you for encouraging me to read the freedom of impression piece. It makes me think of a classic law review article - "Access to the Press - A New First Amendment Right" by Jerome Barron. Barron argues that freedom of speech is essentially meaningless without the possibility of having that speech be heard. For him, this turns into some sort of a right of access. But that obviously comes into tension with the rights to control what impressions we get (and don't get! something that's part of Section 230 as written.) I appreciate the thinking you're doing on impression, expression and the broader challenge of the public sphere - I am fairly narrowly focused on questions of how interventions in the space might rejigger the contemporary landscape, but I agree that thinking through the larger theory of impression and expression is worthwhile.
Thanks, Ethan -- interesting converse in that Barron piece. It suggested a “right of access” in 1967, when historically wide “access” had become very constrained. Now we are reverting, with wider-than-ever access, but that brings the new challenge of constrained individual attention in the face of unlimited global speech. That seems like a lasting issue for advancing media tech, thus placing new importance on impression rights issues that seem unlikely to go away. My hope is that better and more widely understood theory of where we should be going and why can help align an era of innovative positive interventions and avoid short-sighted ones.
I feel that this taxonomy - and the major tech platforms themselves - would benefit from the classical legal distinction between 'malum in se' and 'malum in prohibitum', or 'bad in itself' and 'bad in prohibition'.
Certain things can be understood as bad in themselves because wherever these rules are discarded or not enforced sufficiently those people subject to the rules, assuming they wish to maintain the integrity of the group or community, will come back to those precise rules irregardless of local context. Murder, for example, is fairly universal for societies of any scale. Racism is also probably malum in se, since it is explicitly an act against integration and shared or aligned purposes.
But other rules are contextually sensitive, and would not automatically be the rules that any community would come to. For example, you might say the word 'idiot' is forbidden, given that it is racist (associating people whose native language is not English with stupidity), and racism would seem to be a fairly low level thing to forbid. But since it is a word its meaning may have evolved, and as such the people who use it may not have any knowledge of its roots. It is not clear that every community whose aim is to come into confluence would forbid it.
A "big room" social network can separate communities into 'spaces' based upon topics or interests, or value systems, and therefore set 'ground-rules' (malum in se), while those spaces layer their own local contextual rules on top.
By nesting these spaces such that all of the content in the niches also gets published into the shared spaces that contain them, where those who achieve the most amplification are the users who obtain reputation by peer endorsement from multiple orthogonal communities (bridge builders), it is plausible to build an architecture with all of the benefits of federated and 'big room' social networks, without the major drawbacks of either.
It is also important that the 'ground rules', central to which is the core algorithm, is open sourced and totally transparent about how content is amplified or suppressed wherever it gets published.
Ciarám, the challenge with context-specific rules is, as you identify, when you break that context. It reminds me a bit of danah boyd's discussion of context collapse: she argues that early civil rights leaders often suffered when they began speaking on much larger stages to white audiences because they sounded "inauthentic" as compared to how they spoke to black audiences. The trick with bridging between the small and large networks is maintaining a way of speaking that allows people to connect with their contextual audience and also reach a much larger audience. I don't think it's easily solved, which is why in part I'm so interested in creating plural spaces, and less in nesting spaces.
Its easily solved in system design through network mathematics. In shared spaces between communities you amplify the people who are reputable within multiple orthogonal spaces, because they demonstrate an ability to express the views of those communities in terms that they would accept, rather than the nutpicking that goes on across tribes today.
Shared spaces can be geographic (content related to a city, or country, or continent), or defined category (e.g. science, politics).
Plural spaces lead to the opposite of that bridge building during the civil rights era that you referenced, or a more contemporary example being the TV series Will & Grace, where the lead male was essentially a heterosexual gay man, but other characters were more stereotypical. What plural spaces leads to is more monomania and ubiquitous cults, where nobody can communicate their authentic views for fear of treading on some statement that sounds sort of like forbidden opinion, and wise people keep their mouths shut. This is why the federated model will ultimately fail without a common set of ground rules that the vast majority of people can get behind. Most people don't want to be in any cult at all, unless it is based around some healthy real world activity. Rules, of course, don't have to be about discourse directly, but can be baked into the reputation algorithm (for search and suggestions) within spaces based upon subject-matter authority, in an alternative paradigm to the behavioural model of social media.
Integrating spaces in a big room is what most people want, and it is why there is an increasing divide between people who wish their lives to be increasingly digital, with all of the perverse effects that has on social epistemology, in journalism, the academy, politics, etc... and those who wish for analog lives, with the sense of powerlessness and lack of influence, recognition, visibility, reach, and voice that this implies. The digital natives, coordinating in their many silos, are the loud minority that own the public discourse, acting against global confluence.
I like the taxonomy and argument for diversity. However I do think that these new platforms need scale and simplicity where an average unmotivated person can ask simple questions like ‘what are people saying about x? What did famous person y do? How do I follow everything that z does?” To that end I think we should try to convince as many of these systems to adopt a compatible protocol (eg Activitypub extended) so that they can all prosper without solving the scale and end user simplicity problem individually.
Ravi, I think that's right: one of the problems we return to in brainstorming about these systems is search. Searching reddit - which has become a very common trick for finding real human reviews rather than SEO spam - necessarily means collapsing context. You may find a response, but sometimes it's important to know what the rules and assumptions are for the community where something is posted. I think we are going to need something significantly more sophisticated than just a search that covers all VSOPs who want to be engaged - we're going to need something that helps put a context layer around results too.
Being able to search across platforms is an interesting case. I personally would like something that pushes content that I care about to me. I'd love to follow everything you write, for example, but I'm not sure I can keep track across all mediums. There are niche topics and filters I'd create and perhaps someday an AI system can be a beneficial agent that sends it all to my inbox? I know you've worked on similar beneficial systems in the past and I think creating some kind of data layer for these systems to read from would eventually be a service with rewards both for the longevity of these new platforms and for readers.
Do you happen to have any specific opinions about the specific "context layer" or data layer we need to build? Is anyone you know working on that in ways that excite you?
Amazing taxonomy, thanks! I just quoted this work in my newsletter about the current Twitter (X) exodus and its alternatives. https://inspiratoriogenero.substack.com/p/cortamos-definitivamente-con-twitter