Re-thinking Social Media part 1 - It's a Matter of Trust

The past week has marked an interesting nexus in our focus on Social Media - first through the aftermath of yet another mass shooting tragedy - this time in Pittsburgh; an event which it turns out was driven to some extent by a Social Media platform called "Gab." Then this week Frontline aired a two-part expose on Facebook which did an excellent job at highlighting the fundamental flaws associated with a number of Social Media platforms (not just Facebook although Facebook is of course the largest).

It is time however to stop simply deconstructing the now obvious flaws with Facebook, Twitter and similar outlets such as Gab and begin the process of re-imagining and then rebuilding our Social Media ecosystem. It is also important for us to finally recognize that the issues associated with what's going on are not nearly as complex as we might have thought. It is also critical to understand that none of these current problems with Social Media are in any way inevitable - they can easily be corrected and this could all happen through private industry (not because of any altruism on their part per se but due to the fact that correcting this problem ultimately will make Social Media far more profitable than it is today).

The real issue, the one true problem associated with all of the current Social Media flaws is simple - it's all about a "Misdirection of Trust." This problem begins with the business models of all the companies that share these flaws and then it is naturally manifested in the technical architectures of the associated Social Media platforms.

It's also important for us to step back in time about 20 years and recall (for those of us who were adults then) that this same problem was at one point connected with the entire Internet during its early years - and the solution taken then is the exact same path we should choose now. Let's start there.

Internet History Lesson

From 1993 to 1996 few people had confidence in the validity of the Internet as a "Trusted Platform." All content was suspect at that point and very little commerce or monetization was happening - precisely because the (Internet) platform was considered to be full of loonies who published whatever they felt like. This was so pervasive at the time that it became a running cultural joke ("what, did you see that on the Internet?"). A good example of how this played out was in Academia, where very few supported the idea of accepting Internet citations because the credibility of the publishers was so low. It took a number of years but all of these concerns were eventually addressed and surmounted - what's more, the fringe that had seemed to dominate the early Internet faded into the background - effectively self-segregating themselves. Once confidence in the platform was established, e-commerce exploded (this really started in earnest between 1998 and 1999). Perceptions of the Internet shifted from suspicion to nearly absolute trust by the 2000's - and little did we know that would lead directly to our current dilemma.

The Current Dilemma

So what happened to Social Media? Oddly enough, while the vast majority of the Internet was continuing to move towards the Trusted Platform model, as Social Media emerged it adopted a throw-back philosophy - in other words it placed all of its trust in the network or participants of the platform (as opposed to the platform itself) and built that into their business model/s. The business model (for Facebook and Twitter as well as some other Social Media companies) thus was driven entirely by the following goals:

• Goal 1 - Grow the user base as much as possible
• Goal 2 - Allow the user base to use the platform however they want in order to hook them in
• Goal 3 - Build all monetization around opportunities associated with having a captive "universal user base"

We could define this Social Media model as "Universal Access."

 A business model actually determines how the platform will be built and what types of things are likely to happen on it. It's important to note here that the outcomes associated with this Universal Access business model are entirely predictable and should have been expected a long time ago (at the very least by those who developed the platforms) precisely because the entire Internet had already experienced it before.

 This type of Universal Access platform is "Low Trust."

Low Trust (in the platform) manifests itself in the "hands-off" or Laissez Faire policies and lack of controls in regards to what gets on the platform and how that it used. It also forces the platforms to inevitably move towards the monetization of user data - the second dimension of a Low Trust platform - in other words, the users cannot now or ever have faith that their personal data will be safeguarded because this business model gives the companies no alternatives to generating revenue except through mining their users data. The most serious problem we're facing now is that the High Trust associated with the Internet in general has been extended to the Low Trust Social Media platforms. This means that many (and perhaps most) of the participants in the social network/s believe that what they are seeing on Social Media is as credible as what is accessed on the High Trust Internet sites. These participants don't realize or cannot believe that they are deliberately being misled and that no one on the Social Media platform/s are doing anything substantive to stop it.

One of the interesting and frankly inexplicable aspects of how this has played out with Social Media is the way that the Low Trust platform vulnerabilities have been conflated with Free Speech issues. The platforms and some politicians have used the Free Speech argument to justify the platforms not taking steps to stop the radicalization of Social Media communities. The reason this doesn't make any sense is that it can't be compared to any of the Internet or Press-related Free Speech legal precedents already established since the founding of our Republic. Social Media companies are private companies, just like newspapers or magazines and as such have no obligation whatsoever to allow or protect hate speech or even anonymous speech. The majority of the traditional Free Press is managed responsibly precisely because we do have a history of witnessing it being abused through disinformation on many occasions (from Rwanda and Bosnia recently to Nazi's and Soviets in the early 20th century). What's more, in the traditional press credibility is well understood and established. In other words, people who buy the National Enquirer understand what they're getting and how that differs from the Wall Street Journal. So, if the Enquirer displays doctored photos purporting to be an alien autopsy people take that with a grain of salt. However, yesterday when the White House used Twitter to retweet a doctored video that originated on the Infowars website, people were confused as to whether it was credible or not (and the White House may have been as well). This has nothing to do with the video per se, but rather is focused on where the content came from and more importantly whether it was presented as credible. If Twitter and Facebook wish to be a clearinghouse for all possible content (coming from both credible and non-credible sources) there at a minimum needs to be a way to label that content's credibility rating. Anything coming from Infowars for example, by default, would be labeled as suspect.

The traditional Free Press in Western society could be described as a "High Trust Platform." We trust it because we know that they follow processes that keep nefarious players from manipulating messaging in ways to cause harm and / or help themselves gain power at our expense.

There is a reason that our founding fathers added the 1st Amendment first - they understood even then that a High Trust Free Press platform was perhaps the single most important tool to check the rise of demagogues thus safeguarding Democracy. High Trust means that a platform is:

• Credible - (we have a high confidence that what we're seeing on it has been checked / validated for truthfulness because we already know that some participants if given the opportunity will deliberately disseminate false information and engage in malicious behavior)
• Responsible - (that platform maintains its standards of ethics on an ongoing basis - in other the words, the platforms are actively managed rather than being left open to manipulation by whomever can figure out how to exploit the platforms' many vulnerabilities)
• Independent - (not controlled by one political faction or biased in one direction or another)

The Universal Access Social Media business models and platforms typically meet the third criteria of High Trust but fail miserably on the first and second. This effectively takes us right back to the situation we faced in 1996 and threatens all opportunities for commerce on the Internet. The biggest Social Media platforms have taken us backward by adopting the Universal Access business model and because of that they've endangered not only the credibility of all Internet-related business but have also threatened the very markets where most of the business is occurring (e.g. every Western Democracy). It is the ultimate short-sighted, self-destructive move.

In the next article on this series, I will explore exactly how we can move the Low Trust Social Media platforms to High Trust…

FYI - other articles in this series include:

• Fixing Facebook to Save Democracy
• Democracy Hacking: How Social Media is Weaponized 
• A Framework for Hybrid Cyber Warfare
• Politics will Never Be The Same: Revelations & Mysteries from the Intelligence Report on Russian Hacking
• What We Just Learned about Grizzly Steppe
• The 5 Principles of Cyber Warfare
• Technology & The 2016 Election part 5: Voter Beware

Copyright 2018 - Stephen Lahanas