Ok, we understand the dilemma of social media. What now?

In Brian de Palma’s classic “The Untouchables”, set in Chicago at times of alcohol prohibition, police officer Jim Malone, masterfully portrayed by eternal 007 Sean Connery, stops in front of a large warehouse along with Treasury employee Eliot Ness and states: “Well, here we are”. Ness, don’t get it and asks, “What are we doing here?” Malone replies, “let’s raid alcohol”. Ness, looking at the police station across the street, questions: “here?”. So, the policeman says, “Mr. Ness, everyone knows where the booze is. The problem isn’t finding it, the problem is who wants to cross Capone.”

This excerpt from one of my favorite films does not insinuate to compare the leading tech platforms with a tax-evading gangster. First, the sale and consumption of alcohol in Chicago’s 1920s and 1930s was illegal and social media are not! The idea is to expose a real problem, so clear to all that needs to be faced. Right there, across the street, right here in front of sensitive touchable screens. At the end of the day, when everyone agrees about something, it’s why we’re already late.

Okay, we know that social networks polarize and lead to violence. Okay, we have long been aware of the filter bubbles and the engagement model that traps users in harmful content and pushes to extremism. We also know the power of these media and propaganda tools in democratic interaction and the danger of external interference with disinformation. We know as well the culture of cancellation, hate speech, and destruction of reputations. We also understand that programmatic online ad is the big goal of large technology companies over frantic collections of users’ data across multiple services.

What about now?

Now we need to get away from excuses, good intentions, best practices, ineffective fines, and face reality. None of this will be solved without the State action. Whenever I read articles about disinformation, hate speech, or abuse of economic power, rarely they are concluded with concrete suggestions of resolutions, except the media education that, in part, is useful, but in the long run. Today some dare to make concrete proposals. Therefore, I will join them and expose ideas assuming the risk of nonsense, exaggeration, technical inexperience, and inaccuracies. But I still will.

For this, the first reflection is the separation between platform and application. As I have already pointed in another article called “Transversal concentration in the Digital Economy”, the platform, more than a technology, is a business model that creates value, facilitating exchanges between two or more interdependent groups. Companies that do not directly create and control inventory through a supply chain in the same way as linear companies. Platform companies do not have the means of production. They create the means of connection that makes them exponentially scale their multiple businesses. The focus of the platform is the network growth. In the end, the business model is data concentration itself. “We have no better algorithms than anyone else; We only have more data, “admitted Google’s Scientist Chief, Peter Norvig, at the 2011 Zeitgeist event. It is for transnational conglomerate technology platforms that we must address the solutions.

The second is a change of viewpoint from the perspective of a user or consumer to the product. Product is the result of tangible or intangible elements conceived under construction, management, and marketing to be traded in the market for value in cash or exchange, when then finally becomes a commodity. The condition of consumers of social media, message services, and search tools are live commodities.

The third is the comprehension that the global technological conglomerate acts in a broad and highly diversified way by different segments, but that it works as a symphonic data orchestra. E-commerce, application store, social network, geolocation, e-mail service, advertising management, tracking, virtual assistants, analytics, electronic equipment, audio and video streaming, games, mobility, means of payment, defense, connection, messaging, health services, fitness accessories, the operating system for televisions and cell phones, browsers, entertainment, productivity software, search and indexing tools, video conferencing, telecommunications, aerospace, education, jobs, travel, food, supermarket and cloud services in the same business structure cannot. It has to be separated! One strong reason is compromised innovation with its imprisonment in vital areas: health, education, defense, communication, and trade. Big Techs are the stars in Surveillance Capitalism, not because they’re technically efficient, but because they’re big. It brings us to the main issue: size.

Once these three perspectives are met, the primary measure is the reversal procedures of M&As, pieces of the design of tech platforms conglomerate concentration. For this, it is up to the data consumer and competition authorities to recognize the economic value of the services, especially the free ones, and the data collected and the quality of what is delivered in return. In some cases, as CMA – Competition Authority and Markets of Great Britain recently said, some digital services are expensive, even for free.

Some argue that a solution is to impose that Big Techs cannot share data collected and processed by each business unit of the conglomerate platform, but this seems too difficult to monitor. I advocate that the data collected by these global conglomerate groups, based on a platform model, be necessarily shared with their competitors, under the clear watchful eye of the data authority. This action could create a competitive environment in favor of users who may have the power of choice and return to be the owner of their wills.

Platform services with a significant market share in digital should enable interoperability. A good example would be that the three most extensive search engines in the market would necessarily reveal the results of their competitors’ indexing tools prominently on the result page allowing users to click on various answers and criteria distinct relevance provided by other search services. Users of messaging services on conglomerate platforms should have the option to integrate contacts of different messaging services in the same way as in telecommunications; there is an interconnection between networks. Telecommunications networks, by the way, are free for the circulation of information. Access to infrastructure by value-added services should work as a model for access between application services and platforms, allowing APIs interface.

They should not be allowed to charge relevance to press content in search results. Journalistic information should be organic and consider relevant criteria to be objectively noted by vehicles with identifiable editorial responsibility and fair remuneration for their content use and aggregation. It must be banned any political propaganda or boosting social media or messaging services by candidates or party-coalitions, not applying to official accounts of political parties or individuals.

For content, platforms that control users’ connection, such as social media, should be co-responsible for the content driven paid. The core business of these advertising companies is the algorithmic push of third-party content by payment as a real precision missile aimed at bombing content that, unfortunately, in many cases, causes irreparable damage. A reputation of an individual or the outcome of an election are definitive and forge destinies. If they market third-party opinions, they must take the risk of doing so and of the resulting damage. The Brazilian Civil Framework of the Internet does not legally apply to collective damages or even online advertising.

A giant tech recently reported that “only” 20% of content that violates its policies are not harvested by moderation. Imagine industries like air transport using the same argument as excuses to fail. Or a condom manufacturer. If a television signal shut down or maybe a cellular service, it elicits outrage from users, lawsuits, and regulatory fines. The network’s disinformation or hate speech should require social media to deliver the correct information to the affected users. If a platform service with notorious relevance and social impact becomes unavailable, it becomes a trending topic. A correlation between what data is collected and what use is delivered is essential, including sanctions in the case of flaws.

The Documentary “Social Media Dilemma” shows us what matters: the advertising model that finances the engagement of harmful content. In a recent article in Wired, it was suggested in a text by political columnist Gilad Edelman, based on the academic work of antitrust scholar Dina Srinivasan, a regulation of the advertising market inspired by stock market rules, since the purchase of media takes place by an auction model called RTB – Real-Time Bidding. Why not think of an MVC – Media Verification Commission concerning metrics, transparency, Brand Safety, and fight fraud? Advertising contracts must be legally recognized and taxed in the country of its destination. If we are data commodities, at least revert to the country of consumers. Platforms play as advertisers, intermediaries, DSPs, CRMs, publishers, and analytics. As Martin Sorrel, founder of WPP said, “play and whistle at the same time”.

Why is it imposed to use the conglomerate tools to advertise an ad on a platform linked to the group? The only technology system for buying ads on Youtube, the world’s largest video streaming site, is Google’s ad marketing tools. Once again, interoperability applicable to the conglomerate platforms’ model is vital to enable the system to be open, ensuring that applications that do not integrate the platform’s conglomerate framework can monetize advertising on other products of the tech group.

The laissez-faire, laissez-aller, laissez-passer model, written on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, under discussion for review in the US, was essential for developing the Internet of the 1990s. But once allowed, the inaction of public officials allowed a bigness that has formed their nations of billions of “communities” users. We have immersed in infinite mode regulatory sandbox that has created huge deserts with dunes and quicksand. There is no free market without a market itself.

The debate of the day is the power of the applications stores and their use not only to take expressive slices of business hosted there, as well as participations that aim to make competitors unfeasible. Once again invoking telecommunications, the recognition of regulatory asymmetries with other industries and potential competitors, as well as concepts such as Significant Market Power, interconnection, guaranteed network access, and a transparent system for negotiating offers, can serve as inspiration for the understanding that the State recognizes platforms with global market share and information power as such. The companies’ size and the market and information power they exercise with relevant impact on society. All of this is to calibrate the undesirable effects of their actions on services, businesses, and person-products.

Now the elected or nominated authorities must exercise their roles and break this vicious cycle of bigness in the extraction of data from global conglomerate models that performance in various connections of various chains of multiple services. The users even as products are unique; even treated as commodities are citizens. For this reason, representatives of the society must have the courage to fulfill the function for which there is no dilemma, different from the title of the documentary: to protect democracy. Well, here we are.