GP
"The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the "switching costs" of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck."
Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic)
Daniel Marks
@gp @pluralistic If you're into something you're afraid to walk away from, you should never have joined.
Cory Doctorow
@profdc9 @gp What a remarkably callus and meanspirited way to thing about billions of people who merely did what everyone they knew had done, assuming they would be protected from predatory corporate conduct.
"Caveat emptor" (AKA "sucks to be you") is no way to live your life, much less run a society, much less respond to a global technology crisis.
Cory Doctorow
@profdc9 @gp "adhere to a code of conduct" is a completely unadministratable remedy. It would require:
a) Agreement on what should be in the code of conduct;
b) Adjudication of whether a given action adhered to the code;
c) Forensic technology analysis to determine whether the firm had been negligent in an adjudicated violation of the code.
You're talking about years - maybe decades - for every user's grievance to be processed.
It's a useless proposal, the mere performance of toughness.
Daniel Marks
@pluralistic @gp Explain the precedent for that! I am not saying people get what they deserve, but for example I use Gmail, and I totally realize that today Google could nuke my account or make the contents of the email public. What's the law regarding social media or other free internet services? Why not propose a law requiring social media companies to adhere to a code of conduct? I bet they would then charge for their services. And people only use these services because they are free.
Cory Doctorow
If you want to help people on social media, don't ask SM companies to wield their power more wisely - take away their power.
Consider a reg that requires platforms to stand up interoperable gateways between services (as the EU's 2024 DMA does), and that guarantees your right (under data protection laws like the GDPR and CCPA) to have legacy SM firms point the people you communicate with to a new platform after your departure.
Cory Doctorow
Here's a wireframe of how that would work:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
Such a rule would be trivial to enforce. "Do you have an API that works" is an easy question to answer. Indeed, you can even let the system answer it itself - just legalize reverse-engineering in furtherance to federation on these lines. If new SM firms prefer to hack their way into, say, FB, then you know that FB's API isn't fit for purpose.
Cory Doctorow
@profdc9 @gp Regulators don't need in-depth investigations to determine whether, say, Zuck has provided his ex-users with the files needed to redirect their social graph to a new host. If a user claims not to have received this doc, the regulator can just order FB to escrow a copy with the regulator, which then passes it onto the user.
This is an enforcement system that 10 people could manage, while managing all of FB's 4 billion users.
Cory Doctorow
@profdc9 @gp Right To Exit is just one way to create highly administratable remedies that break with the failed 20 year project to make platform owners behave themselves, and instead restores power to their users, so they can go elsewhere when (not if) platform owners take enshittificatory turns:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first
Cory Doctorow
@profdc9 @gp As to whether services abuse their users because they don't pay for them, this is manifestly wrong.
Decent treatment isn't a customer loyalty program. Companies treat you like "the product" based on whether they can get away with it - not whether you're paying them.
Sure, Apple blocked Facebook spying on iPhones - and then instituted is own mandatory, no-opt-out advertising surveillance system (and lied about it):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Cory Doctorow
Your iPhone isn't an ad-supported freebie. iPhone users didn't get sold out by Apple because they failed to pay Apple. That distraction rectangle cost you $1k. Apple sells you out anyway - because they can.
Cory Doctorow
@profdc9 @gp "If you're not paying for the product" thinking creates the worst of all worlds - it makes everything more expensive,, AND it fails to protect us from any of the harms attributed to ad-supported services.
Daniel Marks
@pluralistic @gp The vulture capitalists and equity holders don't provide services out of the kindness of their heart. It is wishful thinking to believe anything but contractual obligation or legal coercion would be required to not have them maximize their profit and exploit the consumer. That is why enshittification occurs and goodwill is just another asset to be exploited for profit eventually. Interoperability would be great but users must be willing to shun services that don't provide it.
Cory Doctorow
You've missed the point. VCs don't order their companies spy on you because they're sadists. They do so because it's profitable.
If spying were illegal (e.g. if Congress had updated federal privacy law since 1988, when they passed the Video Privacy Protection Act), then services wouldn't spy on you, irrespective of whether they were VC backed or not.
Cory Doctorow
@profdc9
Keeping companies from engaging in specific types of abuse doesn't require "the goodness of their hearts" - it merely requires banning the abuse such that it is not profitable.
Cory Doctorow
Market definitions of social media exist. They are present in the antitrust investigations into Facebook in the EU, UK and USA, as well as the private and public litigation that followed from those investigations.
Some definitional questions are, indeed, difficult.
This one isn't.
As to whether it's "sufficient to justify regulation," this question is also already settled, in that the EU passed the DMA and DSA with broad support, two years ago.
Daniel Marks
@pluralistic @gp How do you write such a law? For mobile phone providers, bandwidth allocations limit competition and justify regulation. For internet providers, obtaining the rights of way limits competition. How about social media? What is a social media site, does it just pass third party traffic? Is the barrier of changing to another service limiting competition sufficiently to justify regulation? Is every online forum or chat room a social media site? I don't see how this works.
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