Chris Powell: Regulations for social media can’t substitute for parents

—Graphic by Jason Howie

MANCHESTER, Conn.
 
According to a report issued the other day by Dalio Education, the Connecticut-based philanthropy, thousands of children and young adults in the state are "disconnected" -- uneducated, alienated, unemployed or even unemployable.

Meanwhile, Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong had the state join a national lawsuit against Meta, operator of the social-media companies Facebook and Instagram, alleging that thousands more of the state's children are too connected to social media. Instagram particularly, Tong and other attorneys general claim, has grabbed kids with "addictive platforms" that have caused a "youth mental health catastrophe."

The attorneys general assert that this attractiveness to children violates state consumer-protection laws and the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

But the essential claim of the lawsuits is just that the "platforms" are too interesting to kids. A statement from Tong's office condemns "features like infinite scroll and near-constant alerts," features that "were created with the express goal of hooking young users. These manipulative tactics continually lure children and teens back onto the platform."

But the only new element here is the technology being used in pursuit of an objective, not the objective itself, which is as old as storytelling: gaining and holding on to an audience. That was the objective of troubadors, fairs and theaters, and then newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, long before computers and the internet. Newspapers, magazines, radio and television still sensationalize to grab audiences to sell advertising, just as Facebook and Instagram do, though Facebook and Instagram may do it better because their subjects are the members of their audience themselves.

Kids spent much less time gossiping about each other before the advent of the telephone. Before television they were far less fascinated by violence and guns. Before welfare for childbearing outside marriage they were far better raised and educated and healthier mentally and physically.

Any "addiction" here is not physical, as with drugs, but psychological. People can walk away from Facebook and Instagram if they have something else to do. Indeed, most users of Facebook and Instagram do have other things to do -- like make a living.

It's just the nature of young people to be self-absorbed, neurotic, insecure and idle, more so if they live in homes with little parental supervision and in a society that demands no educational accomplishment from them.

Citing company documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal, the attorneys general cite the indifference of Facebook and Instagram to the neurosis that its "platforms" can induce in children, especially girls. Of course, children probably shouldn't be exposed to some things until they are older, if then. But if Facebook and Instagram are destroying young people, it couldn't happen if their parents didn't provide them with mobile phones and computers that allow internet access to those "platforms."

Attorney General Tong blames Facebook and Instagram for the inability of children to get enough sleep, as if children didn't lose sleep because of other obsessions long before social media. But if some children still aren't getting enough sleep, who should be called to account first? The distractions that interest the kids -- that is, themselves and their friends and acquaintances? Government? What about their parents?

Whether they are "disconnected" or too connected, children need constant attention from parents so they remain engaged with life without becoming alienated, neurotic, self-absorbed and obsessed. Is a government that increasingly throws gambling, marijuana and transgenderism at children, a government that lets just about any danger bypass immigration law and infiltrate the country, really fit to regulate children's use of social media even in their own homes, as the attorneys general suggest?

In the land of the First Amendment, is government really fit to prevent any particular mechanism of expression from reaching young people? If so, how would that be any different from the supposed "book banning" many of the attorneys general oppose?

Or might the country do better in regard to social media, "disconnection," and other troublesome issues if it stopped destroying the family with welfare policy and education with social promotion?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net). 

Llewellyn King: Censorship isn’t the solution to the ills spread by social media

Censorship came to British America when the governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, learned in 1629 that Thomas Morton, founder of the relaxed settlement of Merrymount (now part of Quincy), had '‘composed sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness.’’ The solution was to send a military expedition to arrest him (above) and stop the good times at Merrymount.

This society, founded in 1879 and dissolved in 1975, pushed to censor material it saw as immoral.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Technology is tampering with freedom of speech, and we don’t know what to do about it. At issue are the global platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the disturbing propaganda, disinformation and lies propagated on them.

The inclination, on the left and the right, is to censor. It is a terrible solution, more toxic and damaging to the body politic than the disease.

The left would like to shut down Fox Cable News and its principal commentator, Tucker Carlson. The right would like to have Twitter sold, presumably to Elon Musk, so that it stops blocking tweets from the right, notably those from former President Trump.

How our society and others deal with the downside of social media — racial incitement, disinformation, mendacity and opinions that are offensive to a minority, whether that is the disabled or an ethnic group — is a work in progress. The instinct is to shut them down, shut them up. The tool — that old monster solution — is censorship.

The first trouble with censorship is that it has to define what is to be eradicated. Take hate speech. The British Parliament is struggling with a bill to limit it. The social networks seek to exclude it, and there are U.S. laws against crimes inspired by it.

How do you define it, hate speech? When is it fair comment? When is it satire? When is it truth taken as hate?

I say if you can untie that knot, go ahead and censor. But I also know you can’t untie it without savaging free speech, doing violence to the First Amendment, arresting creativity and hobbling humor.

The censor is often as much clothed in moral raiment as in political garb. Take Thomas Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta, who in 1807 published an expurgated version of the works of Shakespeare. Henrietta did most of the work on the first 20 plays, later Thomas finished all 36. They expunged sex, blasphemy and double entendre. Thomas was an admired scholar, not a crackpot, although that might be today’s judgment.

Oddly, the Bowdlers are credited with increasing the readership of Shakespeare. People reached for the forbidden fruit; they always do.

Likewise, many a novel would have avoided success if it hadn’t been serially banned, like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The moral censorship of movies by the Hays Office, starting in 1934, didn’t save the audiences from moral turpitude. It just led to bad movies.

The censors often begin with specific words; words, which it can be argued, represent offense to some group or some social standing. So specific words become demonized — whether it is the naming of a sports team or a colloquial word for sex, the urge to censor them is strong.

Jokes, like the English ones about the Welsh or the Scots ones about the English, became victim to a newly minted sensitivity, where political activists sell the idea that the joked about are victims. The only victim is levity, to my mind.

When you start down this slope there is no apparent end. Euphemisms take over from plain speech, and we live in a society in which the use of the wrong word can suggest that you are not fit for public office or to teach. Areas around ethnicity and sexual orientation are particularly fraught.

Until the 1960s and the civil rights movement, newspapers de facto censored people of color: They ignored them — a particularly egregious kind of censorship. At The Washington Daily News, where I once worked, a now defunct but lively evening newspaper in the nation’s capital, some of us once ransacked the library for photos of Blacks. There were none. From its founding in 1927 until the civil rights movement took off, the newspaper simply hadn’t published news of that community in a city that had a burgeoning African-American population. 

That was collective censorship as pernicious as the kind that both political extremes would now like to impose on speech.

Alas, censorship — banning someone else’s speech — isn’t going to redress the issue of the rights of those maligned or lied to or excluded from social media. In print and traditional broadcasting, libel has been the last defense.

Libel laws are clearly inadequate and puny against the enormity of social media, but they are a place to begin. A new reality must, and will in time, get new mechanisms to contend with it.

One of those mechanisms shouldn’t be censorship. It is always the first tool of dictatorship but should be an anathema in democracies. For example, it is an open issue as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been able to invade Ukraine if he hadn’t first censored the Russian media.
 

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Save disgusting social media from censorship

— Photo by Johnscotaus

WEST WARWICK

I don’t know a lot about social media. I don’t know how it works technically. I don’t know why it is such a force in society. I don’t know why very prominent people, such as comedian Steve Martin, prognosticator Nate Silver and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who have plenty of outlets, tweet.  

I don’t know why people who are great company, need to post on Facebook tedious photos of  a. their cats, b. their grandchildren, c. their hobbies, and d. their vacations (“That’s Ann and myself in a Costa Rican rainforest.’’). 

Because of this personal bric-a-brac, I tend to avoid Facebook and solicitations to befriend people there. I fear those children, that cat, those hobbies, and snaps of my friends despoiling places of natural beauty.  

What I do know is that we face a clear-and-present danger of social media censorship.

What makes it worse is those calling for censorship should know better. They are, many of them, of the progressive left. It seems they hate “hate speech” more than they hate anything else, including censorship by machine or, worse, censorship deep in Twitter or Facebook by committees of the nameless wonks. 

Now social media is full of remarkably ugly, vicious, deranged and fabricated things. The truth isn’t safe with social media. The truth is scarcely an ingredient. But that isn’t reason enough to introduce censorship, whether self-censorship or some other adjudication of what we see and hear. 

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, et alia, aren’t publishers. They are common carriers, like the post office, the railroads and the telephone companies. Certainly, they aren’t publishers or broadcasters in the traditional sense. 

The remedy for the excess on social media – conspiracies, homophobia, Islamophobia, and even my phobia about cat photos – won’t be cured by getting the companies that carry them to introduce censorship, however well-intentioned and noble in purpose. 

The right to free speech is ineradicable, absolute and cardinal. Without it we start sliding down the slippery slope – except the internet slope is steeper, greasier, and globe-circling. 

So, I defend President \Trump, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D.-Minn.), Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow as having a right not to be censored. That is all I’m defending: only their right not to be censored, not their speech or even the ideas behind it. 

There was a time, before former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cracked down on unions, when the printers of British national newspapers set themselves up as de facto censors. Not the editors or owners, but the press operators: They wouldn’t print stories that they disapproved of. The newspapers were forever making statements like this, “One third of last night’s print run was lost due to industrial action.” That meant a shop steward didn’t like the content.  

The issue now revolves around hate speech, a social construct. It is, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” That means that there can be no standard when the offense is so subjective that it is in the eye of the beholder. 

The blanket indictment of hate speech, if applied to any discourse – for example, political, literary or sports --  is that it can’t be conducted without the honorable traditions of wit, invective, ridicule, scorn, and satire. If a sports columnist berates a fumbling NFL quarterback, is that hate speech? 

Until now the laws of libel and slander have worked imperfectly, but they have done their bit to protect reputations, to halt dishonest and malicious allegations, and to give a kind of discipline, sometimes lax, to journalism.  

These laws aren’t adequate for the Internet, but they hint at future concepts that might endeavor to quiet the internet and its social media sewers. Censorship won’t do it with perpetrating a greater evil. 

When you’ve read this, you may want to hurl used cat litter at me in the street. Your right to want to do that should be unassailable, but if you do it, you should be prosecuted for assault.

Hate is a human emotion, and emotions aren’t criminal until they’re acted on.

If you censor the Internet, as many would like, the workaround will come in seconds. Social media and its sewer of disgusting, repugnant and vile assertions won’t be silenced, but honest disputation may be banned.  

Actually, I love cats

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Website: whchronicle.com

David Warsh: A way to change tech giants' behavior?

Google headquarters, in Mountain View, California

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

“What is so rare as a day in June,’’ as New England poet James Russell Lowell wrote, or, for that matter, in May, in Somerville, Massachusetts? A genuinely powerful intellect, that’s what. Enough to elicit a weekly instead of a walk.

The most interesting thing I saw last week was A Tax to Fix Big Tech, an op-ed by economist Paul Romer in The New York Times, proposing a progressive tax on corporate revenues from sales of search advertising. “Putting a levy on targeted ad revenue would give Facebook and Google a real incentive to change their dangerous business models,” he wrote.

About those dangerous business models, Romer had little to say except that

It is the job of government to prevent a tragedy of the commons. That includes the commons of shared values and norms on which democracy depends. The dominant digital platform companies, including Facebook and Google, make their profits using business models that erode this commons. They have created a haven for dangerous misinformation and hate speech that has undermined trust in democratic institutions. And it is troubling when so much information is controlled by so few companies.

What is the best way to protect and restore this public commons? Most of the proposals to change platform companies rely on either antitrust law or regulatory action. I propose a different solution. Instead of banning the current business model – in which platform companies harvest user information to sell targeted digital ads –  new legislation could establish a tax that would encourage platform companies to shift toward a healthier, more traditional model.

He relied for a foil on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposals to break up big tech companies, using antitrust statutes or regulation. He wrote, “Existing antitrust law in the United States addresses mainly the harm from price gouging, not the other kinds of harm caused by these platforms, such as stifling innovation and undermining the institutions of democracy.”  And regulators and judges can be captured by clever lawyers and patient corporate lobbyists.  (Nothing here about the legislators who would enact and monitor the tax statutes and laws.)

There are several advantages to using tax legislation as a strategy, according to Romer. The tax he had in mind could apply to revenue from sales of targeted digital ads, the core businesses of Facebook, Google and other firms that make money monitoring users’ searches. “At the federal level, Congress could add it as a surcharge to the corporate income tax. At the state level, a legislature could adopt it as a type of sales tax on the revenue a company collects for displaying ads to residents of the state.”  Such a tax could be progressive, creating an impediment to growth through acquisition, and an incentive to periodic spin-offs, and thus greater competition. He added several FAQS the next day on his Web site about various tax aspects.

There was, alas, very little speculation about the new ad-free subscription models that might emerge as a means of avoiding taxes on targeted ad revenue, except to say that subscribers would be mindful of the privacy they obtained by avoiding the ever-more sophisticated surveillance of their habits by traditional search services, and subscription companies “could succeed the old-fashioned way: by delivering a service that is worth more than it costs.”

Along with countless others, I share Senator Warren and Nobel-laureate Romer’s sense that Facebook and Google and other big Internet firms have become highly undesirable corporate citizens in their current gigantic and highly profitable ad-supported form. Surely newspapers are among the “institutions of democracy” that would be strengthened by some governmental reshaping of advertising markets.

Those with long memories will recall that, as a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Romer was the government’s expert in the remedy phase of the Justice Department’s successful (to that point) antitrust complaint against Microsoft Corp. His recommendation was to break the company into two competing firms – one selling its Windows operating systems, the other marketing software applications (including its highly profitable Office suite). The remedy was headed for implementation, until an appellate court sent the case back to a different judge. The election of George W. Bush mooted the issue; the Justice Department withdrew its complaint: a salutary victory against big business slipped away.

Romer had left research by then to start an online learning company.  In 2007 he quit Stanford altogether to work as a policy entrepreneur – a natural enough path for the son of a former governor of Colorado who had harbored national ambitions.  Romer spent several years advocating for “charter cities,” tax-favored enterprise zone in developing nations whose governance was to be somehow outsourced to independent authorities. Two attempts failed on the eve of what would have been their creation.  In 2010, he joined New York University’s Stern School of Business as a University Professor and for a time, director of NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management.

In October 2016 he signed on as chief economist of the World Bank, with hopes of transforming its large and well-funded research department. Fifteen months later, he resigned, after a series of controversies with staff. By then he had come perilously close to gadfly status as a critic of macroeconomics. He could speak so freely, he explained, “because I am no longer an academic. I am a practitioner, by which I mean that I want to put useful knowledge to work. I care little about whether I ever publish again in leading economics journals or receive any professional honor because neither will be of much help to me in achieving my goals.”

The Nobel award last year, jointly with William Nordhaus, “for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis,” rescued Romer from that limbo by certifying his stature. He married the same day he received the prize.  Since then, Romer has offered advice to incoming Word Bank President David Malpass, in an op-ed in the Financial Times (outsource the bank’s research function and concentrate on infrastructure planning and financial diplomacy instead), and, last week, the op-ed in the Times

Op-eds are only slightly better than TED talks.  But, as noted, really good ideas are rare. This one may be profound.  It deserves plenty of further study.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.

Llewellyn King: Notebook --The new publishing giants; failing upwards; U.S. gastronomic capital?

When A.J. Liebling said that freedom of the press meant freedom for those who owned the presses, he spoke in a time when there were nearly 2,000 daily newspapers in the United States. Today there are fewer, and they depend on more than presses to stay in business. They depend on the indulgence of Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Freedom of the press now depends on those few companies that own the algorithms on which all publishers depend to get a wider range of readers, even while making no money off them.

The newsboys and newsgirls of yesterday delivered the papers. That is all. The news deliverers of today control the whole publishing world. They can determine success or failure and, as we are seeing, have the power to censor.

William Horsley, a retired BBC correspondent who is involved with media studies at the University of Sheffield and is vice president of the Association of European Journalists, says that the newsboys are now the publishers.

In the billions of words that have been spouted about freedom of the press here and around the globe, Horsley has identified a new and terrible reality about the freedom of the press and along with it, the freedom of ideas.

Quite simply, we now live in an era in which an algorithm buried somewhere in the secret depths of Google can do more to change what we know, think and say than any dictator has been able to achieve.

While the creators of Google, Facebook and Twitter probably did not dream of such power, such control, such hegemony, it has come to them.

The mind reels with possibilities, each more disturbing than the previous, of what would happen if any of the Internet giants fell into the hands of malicious owners or a dictator. Think of the damage if Steve Bannon, who presides over Breitbart, or some like ideologue, were at the helm of Google, Facebook or Twitter.

George Orwell, at his most pessimistic, could not have imagined the existential evil that could await us, courtesy of technology, plus a sociopath.

Dumb Luck, Sir. Dumb Luck.

A professor at Brown University congratulates me on my life choices. He implies that my peripatetic journey through the world, clutching a press card, has been because of sound choices. To which I have to respond, “My life has been one of dumb luck and failure.”

Luck, I say, because it is what determines your being at the right place at the right time. Failure, I say, because it is possible to fail upwards: I have, often.

Had my career been on an even keel, I would have finished high school, maybe gone to university and then gotten stuck in one of the early jobs, making it my “career.” As it is, I dropped out of high school, went into journalism and failed a lot.

If I had kept any of those jobs I failed at, I might have had a duller life: a jobbing writer in Africa, a news writer at ITN in London, the creator of America's first women's liberation magazine (which failed to liberate any women, but liberated all my money) in New York, an assistant editor at The Washington Post, and a trade journal reporter at McGraw-Hill.

So, Mr. Professor, I recommend that you prepare students for the success of failing upwards. Sometimes that goes for relationships and marriages. Do not bivouac too early on life’s open road.

The Gastronomic Capital of the U.S.: Is it Rhode Island?

In France, it is pretty well agreed, the area around Lyon is the gastronomic capital.

In the United States, New Orleans is mentioned. Well I have eaten many a meal in New Orleans, especially during a time when I was making a lot of speeches at conventions in New Orleans. But I have to say that good food rolls in Rhode Island. So much so that smart visitors come to Li'l Rhody on gastronomic tours, including friends of mine, who, like myself, have eaten the world over.

Now there are a few quibbles, to be sure. One big one is that there are woefully few French restaurants in the state, and the Italian influence in the restaurants is pervasive. Also I think that there could be more top-of-the line and regional Chinese restaurants, although a Uighur restaurant has just opened in Providence. Other Asian cuisines -- Korean, Indian, Thai and Japanese -- are well represented.

Still, the eating in the Ocean State leaves New Orleans with a way to go in my book.

{Editor’s Note: Rhode Island does have a few good French restaurants,  such as Chez Pascal, on Hope Street in Providence.}

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.