The (non) interoperability of social networks

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We translate for you an article that we find very interesting ANDelectronic Frontier Ffoundation. The original article is called To Make Social Media Work Better, Make It Fail Better and we translated it thanks also to the help of Mate Translate. But above all thanks to Creative Commons license by EFF that allows us to do it.

The EFF article starts here

Have mercy on the content moderator! Big Tech platforms expect their moderators to correctly enforce a set of rules in more than a hundred countries, in over a thousand languages. Millions of online communities, each with their own norms and taboos.

What a feat! Some groups will view a word as an insult, while others will use it as a term of endearment. Indeed, the reality is even more complex: some groups consider some words as insults only when they are used by strangers, which means that a moderator must understand which participants in a single group are considered insider and which ones instead outsider, or those who cannot pronounce that word.

Moderators must also be able to recognize all of this in languages they speak imperfectly (or not at all) aided by machine translation.

It is therefore not surprising that security experts are unable to agree on when to remove content, when to label it and when to leave it alone. Large-scale moderation is a impossible task. Moderators not only fail to recognize a huge amount of abuse and scams, but they also remove discussions of racism because they are racist, they suspend users who report dangerous conspiracies for promoting them, they punish scientists who deny fake news about vaccines For have spread disinformation, they block ads from game designers because they contain the word “supplement” (mistaking it for a vitamin supplement) e they remove comments praising a cute cat by writing “beautiful puss”.

Everyone hates content moderation on Big Tech platforms. Everyone thinks they are censored by Big Tech. And all they are right! 

Every community has implicit and explicit rules about what types of speech are acceptable, and inflicts punishments on people who violate those rules, ranging from banishment to shame. In real life you're not allowed to shout into a funeral, use epithets when addressing your college professor, or explicitly describe your sex life to your co-workers. Your family can forbid swearing at Christmas dinner or arguments about homework over breakfast.

In the online world, moderators enforce these “house rules” by labeling or deleting speech that breaks the rules and warning or removing users.

Doing this job well is already difficult when the moderator is close to the community and understands its rules. It's much more difficult when the moderator is a low-wage employee who follows company policy at a frenetic pace. So it's impossible to do well and consistently.

It's no wonder that so many people, with so many different experiences and perspectives, are unhappy with the moderation choices of Big Tech platforms.

Which raises the question: why are so many users still using these platforms?

Big Tech platforms enjoy the so-called network effect: The more people join an online community, the more reasons there are for others to join. You join because you want to talk to people and others join because they want to talk to you.

This network effect also creates a switching cost: this is the price you pay to leave a platform behind. You will likely lose the people who watch your videos, or the private group for people struggling with the same health conditions as you, or the contact with your distant relationships.

These people are the reason so many of us put up with the many flaws of major social platforms.

We tolerate them because the platforms have taken hostages: the people we love, the communities we care about, and the customers we rely on. Breaking up with the platform means breaking up with those people.

It doesn't have to be this way. The Internet was designed on protocols, not platforms: the principle is to manage many different and interconnected services, each with their own House Rules based on specific standards and objectives. These services might connect to each other, but they might also get stuck each other, allowing communities to isolate themselves from adversaries who wish to harm or disrupt their group.

There are millions of people vigorously trying to create an Internet that looks like this. The fediverse is a collection of free/open software projects designed to replace centralized servers like Facebook with decentralized alternatives that work in much the same way, but delegate control to the communities they serve. Groups of friends, cooperatives, start-ups, non-profits and others can host their own instances Mastodon or Diaspora and connect to all other servers that will connect with them, based on their preferences and needs.

The fediverse is amazing, but it's not growing the way many of us hoped. Even though millions of people say they hate Facebook's moderation policies and privacy abuses, they aren't running for the exit. Could it be that they secretly enjoy life on Facebook?

This is a theory.

Another theory, which requires much less imagination, is that people hate Facebook, but they love the people they would have to leave behind if they moved away.

Which raises an obvious possibility: What if we made it possible for people to leave Facebook without being cut off from their friends?

And here's theinteroperability.

Interoperability is the act of connecting something new to an existing product or service. L'interoperability is why you can send emails from a Gmail account to an Outlook account. That's why you can upload any website to any Browsers. That's why you can open Microsoft Word files with Apple Pages. This is why you can use an iPhone connected to Vodafone to call an Android user on TIM.

Interoperability is also why you can change among these services. Throw away your PC and buy a Mac? No problem, Pages will open any Word documents you created when you were a Microsoft customer. Switch from Android to iPhone or from Vodafone to TIM? You can still call your friends and they can still call you – and they won't even know anything has changed unless you tell them.

The proposals in the United States (the ACCESS Act) and in the EU (the Digital Markets Act) they aim to force larger platforms to allow interoperability with their services. While the laws differ in their specifics, in broad terms both require that platforms like Facebook (now calling itself Half) allow startups, cooperatives, nonprofits and personal sites to connect so Facebook users can leave the service without abandoning their friends.

Based on these proposals, you could leave Facebook and set up or join a small service. That service would set its own moderation policies but would also interact with Facebook. You could send messages to users and groups on Facebook, which would also be shared with people who use other small services.

This moves moderation choices closer to users and further away from Facebook. If moderators on your service allow a blocked word on Facebook, you and others on your service will see it, while Facebook users Not they would see it.

Likewise, if there is some speech that Facebook allows but you and your community don't want to see it, the moderators on the your service can block it, removing messages or preventing users from communicating with your server.

Some people want to try to fix Big Tech platforms instead: make them moderate better and more transparently. We understand it. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement. We also helped draft a roadmap to improve moderation: The Santa Clara Principles.

But improve Big Tech platforms is something that could start well but end very badly. If all the conversations you need to be a part of are on one platform you are hurt by under-moderation or over-moderation.

So there is a better method. Interoperability puts communities in charge of their own rules, without having to convince a huge “trust and safety” department of a tech company – possibly a company in a different country, where no one speaks your language or understands your context – who have lost some contextual nuance in their choices about what to leave and what to eliminate.

Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem by Frank Pasquale poses two different approaches to technological regulation: “Hamiltonians” and “Jeffersonians” (in reference to two different visions of American politics).

Hamiltonians prefer “improving regulation of leading companies rather than dividing them,” while Jeffersonians argue that the “very concentration (of power, patents, and profits) in mega-firms” is itself a problem, making them both irresponsible and dangerous.

And this is where we wanted to arrive. We think users should not wait for Big Tech platform owners to have a moment of enlightenment that leads to moral reform, and we understand that the road to external regulation is long and winding, due to the oligopolistic power of bloated tech giants of money and too big to fail.

We are impatient. Too many people have already been harmed by the poor moderation choices of Big Tech platforms. Let's make platforms better, but let's also make them less important, giving people technological self-determination. We all deserve to belong to online communities that can decide what is acceptable and what is not.

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