Asking platforms to do better won't work. We need to force their hands
"If there were a dictator of the internet who intentionally set out to destroy your ability to get accurate information, the result would look a lot like what’s already on your screen. But why?"
Link: You couldn't create a more anti-news internet if you tried, by Matt Pearce
Matt Pearce, Director of Policy for Rebuild Local News, writes a behavioral economics inspired take on why our current embodiment of the internet is so bad for news and information.
In particular, he sees the introduction of “nudges” as being a pro-information feature that search engines, LLM interfaces, and social media platforms could introduce:
“Social media, too, could choose to feature quality news outlets as “defaults” or provide subtle “nudges” on content that prompt users to donate or subscribe to the news outlets providing high quality news videos on platforms like Instagram, which don’t pay for themselves.”
I happen to particularly agree with his implied criticism of newsrooms going deep on Instagram, which usually leads to vanity metrics going up and to the right but not necessarily to conversions, impact, or revenue. And I think it’s true that nudges across all these platforms would have the effect he’s hoping for. But I think the tragedy is that there’s no real reason why any of these platforms would actually do it.
The internet as it stands is perfectly optimized for the needs of these platforms: engagement, advertising revenue, and rapid growth. Adding pro-social nudges would add friction to their well-oiled loops and take users off-platform. That’s exactly why Google has moved from leading people to the best websites for a query to answering those questions on-page: its own needs are best served by keeping users in one place. For them to make different choices, they would need to be far more benevolent architects than they are.
So, one path forward is that they need to be forced to do it. This would need regulations to govern the features an information platform can provide, and could have very adverse side effects. We’re seeing increased regulations with respect to things like age verification, so introducing regulation is possible — but that age verification tech has become a surveillance layer that impacts freedom of speech for vulnerable groups. And if publishers go too far in that direction, for example by dictating that platforms share more ad revenue, the networks might simply stop supporting news content at all, as we’ve seen in places like Canada.
Another is to build new platforms that make better choices for the whole ecosystem: more interesting for readers, more supportive of publishers. We’re already seeing a resurgence in new open social web platforms as well as a regrowth in older technologies like RSS. But the incumbent platforms aren’t going to simply go away; any new pro-social platform has to directly compete with them while also building an ecosystem. Still, I think it’s more promising, particularly in a world where incumbent platforms are losing goodwill with the public. The kind of thinking that Matt’s done here is very useful in helping to design what those new platforms might look like.
We’re not in a great place and there’s a hard road ahead. I’m sure of one thing: asking existing platforms to do better is not going to work. So we need to take matters into our own hands.
