Politicians and the Internet, Part 1
What should the rules be for candidates and political figures online?
I was very tempted to just send the newsletter this week with a note that I was overwhelmed by life (why did I decide to renovate my bathroom and all of my closets at once?) and leave it at that.
Fate or the full moon stepped in and yesterday gave me a spark of inspiration that grew when I read two Washington Post columns today - one about Google’s political email test and the other by Will Oremus about how content moderation has become the center of American culture wars.
The question posed to me Saturday was, “Should social media ever have grounds for excluding candidates/public figures?”
This question is a prompt ahead of a discussion I’m participating in Friday at Stanford on if Donald Trump should be let back on social media. You can learn more about the event and register for it here. Some of us even wrote papers ahead of time on our position.
I’m going to dig in more next week on the question about Trump, and so for this week, I thought we’d look at the question of politicians and the internet overall.
In one of the first newsletters, I wrote last year I dug into why social media companies would even want to engage with politicians on their platform. I go into at least 15 different areas where platforms will need rules for politicians and the criteria they might use in making these decisions. Not surprisingly, it’s not an easy answer.
Will put it well in his piece. Over the years, “tech companies were making up the rules as they went, with one finger held to the political winds and one eye on their rivals as each jostled to avoid sticking its neck out alone.”
I’ll add another angle. The politicians we look to make the rules typically exempt themselves from them - including spam laws. That means there is very little you can do around all of the emails, phone calls, and texts you get. Phone calls and texts actually are regulated somewhat, but plenty of vendors have figured out how to get around those.
This is when ironically many turn to tech companies they loathe having this kind of power to hold the politicians in check. The fight Google is having with Republicans around emails is a perfect example of this. I actually think Google is playing this pretty well by first asking for an FEC advisory opinion where they were inundated with public comments of people begging them not to give an exception to political emails. And then when the FEC did approve them doing the test, they said they will try it and make a decision depending on how users react. Which, I’m guessing will be poorly.
Exceptions and special rules for politicians existed before the internet came into our lives. Broadcast stations have to run their ads even if they lie in them, they get special advertising rates and their speech is amongst the most protected.
Moreover, campaigns and political parties suck up massive amounts of our data to identify the issues we care most about, where to advertise to us and what might sway us to vote a certain way. I don’t hear very much clamoring for more transparency into that data, the privacy measures they have in place, or how they are using AI to further refine how they analyze that data.
In an ideal world, many want politicians to be held to a higher standard because of their profound impact on our society. They want platforms to hold them to the same rules everyone else has to follow. But the real world is anything but that.
Voting and elections are the only things that really hold politicians accountable. If we don’t like them we can vote them out of power. Beyond that, you need a once-in-a-generation bill like McCain-Feingold in 2002 to reset the rules - one that the courts ultimately struck down sections of because of the first amendment.
As many of these questions work their way through the courts and elections only come every two years in the U.S. people are looking to the platforms to stand up to the politicians. They aren’t legally beholden to the first amendment (yet) so they can do so. But, should they? Do we really want them making these calls?
In our ideal world, I don’t think we do, but we also don’t like any of the other options. It seems simple, doesn’t it? There should be rules, people should have to follow said rules and if they break them there should be consequences. Problem is, that process of punishing someone through the courts takes time - and by then the damage might already be done.
I’m rambling as I’m honestly thinking through this question as I type. In the early days of Facebook, we generally said we would offer our tools and customer support to any politician who was allowed to be on the platform. The example we always pointed to was how Greece’s ultra-nationalist party Golden Dawn was kicked off for violating policies around violence.
That position became less and less tenable as politicians like Modi and Duterte rose to power partially thanks to their use of social media. After Trump’s win and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we put even more guardrails in place in how we supported political figures.
Platforms started to twist themselves into a pretzel as politicians kept pushing the line of content moderation. This is why it feels like they were making up the rules as they went.
They hesitated to look like they were putting their fingers on the scales of elections, were weary of regulation and overall didn’t want to anger politicians who could inflict some real harm on their businesses. This is why they had a finger to the political wind.
And no one wanted to be the odd platform out in making a call different from everyone else. To do so puts a huge target on your back to be yelled at from all sides. This is why they all keep a close eye on what the other is doing. Once one made a call in deplatforming someone the others usually quickly followed. How platforms approach political ads is the only place where I’ve seen more difference.
I’m struggling with the question of if candidates should ever be excluded from using a social media platform. I think this is why many platforms try to avoid politics altogether and ban ads. TikTok is even prohibiting candidates from organically using its platform to fundraise. That’s their right to do so, but it feels wrong. On Twitter Jenna Golden - another early tech/political person - said it feels anti-democratic. I have to agree with her.
I’m hoping Friday’s conversation will help me to think through this more deeply. I want to spend some time actually thinking through this question more and mapping out some possibilities. Appreciate you coming on the journey with me.
What I’ve Been Doing
I’m adding a new section to the newsletter to highlight various talks and interviews I’ve done that week.
Stanford: Platform Policies for the 2022 Election
Data Nation (Podcast): Misinformation…Democracy’s Downfall?
MIT Election Lab: Announcing the Recipients of the Evolving Election Administration Landscape Grants
Bloomberg Radio: Balance of Power: Russia Aims to Sow Division in Midterms
What I’m Reading
New York Times: This Is Life in the Metaverse
AP: Experts: Russia finding new ways to spread propaganda videos
The Atlantic: The GIF Is on Its Deathbed
CNBC: Biden signs executive order with new framework to protect data transfers between the US and EU
WSJ: India’s Tech Regulation Onslaught Poses Dilemma for U.S. Companies
The Atlantic: The Battle for the Soul of the Web
Washington Post: Supreme Court will hear social media cases that test Section 230
The Onion: Supreme Court Amicus Brief
AP: White House proposes tech ‘bill of rights’ to limit AI harms
Reuters: Russia fines TikTok for 'LGBT propaganda', Twitch over Ukraine content
Bloomberg: Facebook Is the Only Game in Town for Digital Political Ads
The Atlantic: TikTok Politics and the Era of Embodied Memes
Think Tanks/Academia/Other
Pew: The Role of Alternative Social Media in the News and Information Environment
V-Dem: Clean Elections in Asia
Bipartisan Policy Center: Closing Security Gaps in Poll Worker Policy
Amsterdam University Press Journals: Fifteen Seconds of Fame: TikTok and the Supply Side of Social Video
Election Integrity Partnership: Voting Rights Legislation Framed to Support Election Conspiracy Theories About Non-citizens Voting
United Nations: REPORT: Disinformation and freedom of opinion and expression during armed conflicts
Stanford: Global Digital Policy Incubator - Tech4Democracy Global Entrepreneurship Challenge
Stanford Josh Tucker Talk: Echo Chambers, Rabbit Holes, and Algorithmic Bias: How YouTube Recommends Content to Real Users
Companies
DataVault: FEC Advisory Opinion Request on NFTs
Coinbase: COIN Documentary
Job Openings
Wellspring Philanthropic Fund: Program Director, Civil Society
Oversight Board: Senior Officer, Strategy & Development
Meta Oversight Board: Variety of positions open. More info at link.
Freedom House: Policy and Advocacy Officer or Senior Policy and Advocacy Officer, Technology and Democracy
There are **many** open positions at Freedom House. Check them out here: https://freedomhouse.org/about-us/careers
National Endowment for Democracy: Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellows Program
Democracy Works: Openings for software engineer and director of HR
Atlantic Council DFR Lab: Variety of positions open. More info at link.
National Democratic Institute (NDI): Variety of positions open. More info at link.
Protect Democracy: Technology Policy Advocate
Calendar
Topics to keep an eye on that have a general timeframe of the first half of the year:
Facebook 2020 election research
Oversight Board opinion on cross-check
Senate & House hearings, markups, and potential votes
October 12 - 14: Conference for Truth and Trust Online
October 15 - 22: SXSW Sydney
October 30: Brazil Second Round
November 1 - 2: Frontiers fo Digital Development Forum
November 1: Denmark Election
November 4: Workshop on technology, trust, and coordination
November 8: United States Midterms
January 7: Meta/Trump Decision
March 10 - 19: SXSW
March 20 - 24, 2023: Mozilla Fest