THW End the Private Ownership of Social Media Companies - Julie Cohen - Opp

0:01 [applause]

0:06 Thank you, Madam President.

0:08 I agree that the giant social media companies that now track our every move,

0:12 addict our young people,

0:14 and pollute our public discourse are profoundly destructive.

0:17 My concern is with what happens the day

0:20 after an end to private ownership is proclaimed.

0:22 If not privately owned,

0:24 social media will need to be publicly owned or at least publicly managed,

0:28 but public ownership is a 20th century solution to a 21st century problem,

0:33 and the conditions necessary for public management of social media do not exist.

0:38 Let's begin with a history lesson.

0:39 Following World War II and extending through the 20th century,

0:43 both Britain and France worked to nationalize key industries.

0:46 Such efforts became deeply controversial for ideological and political reasons,

0:50 but their history teaches us two relatively clear lessons.

0:53 First, to successfully nationalize an industry,

0:56 the state needs to be able to define the industry

0:58 and institute control over its key inputs and outputs.

1:01 Second, the state needs to be able

1:03 to operate the activity successfully as a public endeavor.

1:06 In the case of social media, neither is remotely achievable.

1:10 So, on the first point, in both Britain and France,

1:12 the most successful nationalization efforts involved

1:14 infrastructure industries that were also natural monopolies.

1:18 For example, coal mining, electricity production, and nuclear energy.

1:21 British efforts to nationalize transport were much messier.

1:25 Railways compete with highways and waterways.

1:27 Each uses different infrastructures,

1:29 and all must provide for freight and passenger services.

1:33 The British Transport Commission tried its

1:35 hardest to understand and predict usage patterns,

1:38 but there were just too many moving parts,

1:40 and the relevant technologies were changing too rapidly.

1:43 In less than two decades, the effort had failed,

1:45 the assets had been transferred to other owners,

1:47 and the commission had been abolished.

1:49 Let's now consider social media.

1:51 Even defining what ought to qualify as social media is impossible.

1:55 YouTube is a social media company, sure, but what about the rest of Google?

1:59 Google Search uses social information to rank search results.

2:02 Google Gemini uses social information to help determine source reliability.

2:06 Google Scholar uses citation metrics to determine relevance,

2:09 but is any of that the same thing?

2:11 Are the gaming platforms, Microsoft and Roblox,

2:14 on which researchers have documented extremist efforts

2:17 to recruit and radicalize very young children, also social media companies?

2:21 In an era in which many businesses

2:23 depend on extracting and monetizing social data,

2:26 nearly all digital technology companies are social

2:29 media companies to one extent or another,

2:31 but proclaiming public ownership and public management

2:34 of the entire social web is plainly infeasible.

2:37 And regardless of what definition is chosen,

2:39 there will be private workarounds that those charged

2:41 with enforcing the law will struggle to categorize.

2:44 Assuming that some plausible definition can be arrived at, the proposition also

2:48 presumes that social media can be

2:49 operated and controlled within national boundaries.

2:52 This would be necessary to avoid incursions

2:54 by privately owned social media companies located elsewhere.

2:58 But social media companies and other digital services companies now

3:01 operate within distributed digital supply

3:03 chains that are transnational and global.

3:06 Countries with a small number of internet backbone nodes,

3:08 such as China, Saudi Arabia,

3:10 or Turkey, can institute choke points and use them to control content flows.

3:14 Britain is not such a country, nor is the US.

3:17 So, incursions by and competition from privately owned

3:20 social media companies will be impossible to prevent.

3:23 So, to sum up on the first point,

3:24 the state cannot define what counts as social media,

3:27 nor can it institute control over key inputs and outputs.

3:31 Moving on to the second point, capacity to operate the target industry

3:34 successfully as a public endeavor is essential.

3:37 Many nationalization efforts have failed this test.

3:39 Some failures were politically overdetermined.

3:42 So, for example, the last two decades of nationalized

3:45 coal mining in Britain were violent and disruptive

3:47 because governments ideologically committed to privatization pursued policies

3:52 of brinksmanship in their dealings with organized labor.

3:55 In other cases, though,

3:56 governments simply failed to navigate the demands of the relevant industry.

4:00 Here, the French efforts to develop computing

4:02 architectures with distinctly French characteristics come to mind.

4:05 For three decades, France attempted to develop mainframe computing prototypes,

4:09 repeating the same errors over and over again.

4:12 Those in charge rejected scientific and technical

4:15 dialogue with leading researchers in other countries because

4:18 that would interfere with the goal of developing

4:20 a computer that had distinctly French characteristics.

4:23 They rejected plans to source key components from abroad for the same reason,

4:27 and they subjected their chosen private sector partners to burdensome

4:30 financial restrictions rather than laying the groundwork to help them succeed.

4:34 France lost the computing race, and billions in public investment were wasted.

4:38 Let's consider now social media.

4:40 Effective public management would need to perform two functions

4:43 that social media companies currently undertake on a self-regulatory basis,

4:48 as well as others that they are refusing to perform at all.

4:52 First, the two functions that they do self-regulatory um attempts at.

4:56 Begin with the task of identifying harmful content.

4:59 Such content is diverse,

5:00 ranging from live-stream shooter videos and child sexual abuse material

5:04 to hate and harassment to coordinated

5:07 and sometimes automated disinformation campaigns.

5:09 Some kinds of harmful content are easy to identify, but others are not.

5:13 Many of the most insidious campaigns of health hate

5:16 and harassment and disinformation operate through coded language and imagery.

5:21 In a democratic society committed to freedom of expression,

5:24 govern- government should not be responsible for collecting data on everyone's

5:27 social media use and deciding what to allow and what to block.

5:31 Democratic governments, moreover,

5:32 have obligations to tolerate some amount of so-called lawful but awful speech.

5:37 For both of these reasons, a public social media commission,

5:41 even if a public trust or a multi-stakeholder body or some such,

5:45 won't solve the problem of harmful online online speech.

5:48 Such a commission would have a duty to be even-handed, and even so,

5:52 it would be continually embroiled

5:53 in defending itself against accusations of bias.

5:56 Next comes the task of removing or otherwise responding to harmful content.

6:01 There are options here, ranging from removal to flagging to shadow

6:04 banning to account deactivation and so on.

6:07 Some decisions must be made instantaneously,

6:10 whilst others must merely be made very quickly.

6:13 There must be processes for correcting mistakes and revising best practices.

6:17 The scale involved is massive.

6:19 Automation can help, but it isn't a panacea.

6:22 Among other well-documented problems, automated content moderation reproduces

6:26 pre-existing cultural and structural biases.

6:29 It has difficulty detecting certain kinds of coded content,

6:32 and it performs very poorly in languages

6:34 and cultures that its designers do not understand.

6:38 To minimize these problems, which can never be completely eliminated,

6:41 automated systems therefore must be calibrated and recalibrated iteratively.

6:46 I think we should be able to agree that getting all

6:48 of this right would be a very tall order indeed for a government

6:52 that has spent the last part of last decade outsourcing its

6:55 health and national security data operations to American big tech companies,

6:59 including Google, Oracle, and Palantir.

7:01 Yes, I'm talking about the British government, and also mine.

7:04 Doing what is necessary would require a massive expansion of the public fisc,

7:09 the public workforce, and the public digital capability.

7:12 More likely, critical operations would simply be outsourced to private vendors,

7:16 reproducing exactly the same problems that we see now.

7:19 Last come the functions that social media companies are refusing to perform.

7:23 Not coincidentally, these are the functions that strike

7:25 at the heart of the highly profitable behavioral advertising business model.

7:29 So, for example, the government might

7:31 seek to end feed optimization for engagement.

7:34 It might ban addictive design practices.

7:36 It might mandate chronological feed ordering.

7:39 It might prohibit digital ad tech models based on behavioral microtargeting.

7:43 It might seek an end to the dual-class stock ownership structure that tech

7:46 billionaires use to operate their companies as extensions of their own personas.

7:51 It might institute a wealth tax

7:53 or revise the competition laws to reach practices

7:56 under which the giant tech and AI

7:58 companies buy stakes across the startup tech universe.

8:02 It might mandate precautionary threat modeling and mitigation.

8:06 Because such regulations would address the ways

8:08 that social media systems are designed and configured,

8:14 they would be far more effective than

8:16 post-hoc content removal at addressing social media's harms.

8:19 But if you take one message away today, take this one.

8:22 None of these activities requires public ownership or public management.

8:25 What they require is regulatory innovation.

8:28 Such innovation is far likelier to succeed

8:31 if government is not distracted by having

8:33 to take on massive content responsibility

8:35 and then defend its own inevitably poor performance.

8:38 The government wouldn't need to write on a blank slate.

8:40 There are models in pharma regulation and banking

8:42 regulation that might supply useful starting points.

8:46 Financial regulators, as one example,

8:48 have broad authority to require adjustments to capital,

8:50 liquidity, and leverage ratios, and systemically important banks are

8:55 subjected to continual monitoring and supervision, people on the floor 24/7.

8:59 We could do that for the giant tech platforms if we had the will and the model.

9:04 So, to conclude, let me be clear.

9:06 Effective public govern- public governance

9:07 of social media companies is essential.

9:09 Public management is simply the wrong [applause] instrument.

9:13 Thank you.

9:17 [applause]