THW End the Private Ownership of Social Media Companies - Kyle van Oosterum - Opp

0:02 [applause]

0:04 Thank you.

0:05 Tonight, my fellow opposition members have laid out

0:07 how private platforms can be bulwarks against authoritarian governments,

0:10 how the governments today are simply

0:12 not capable of successfully administering platforms,

0:14 and that some form of regulation would be a far

0:16 more proportionate response to the problems we see today.

0:19 The proposition, on the other hand,

0:20 has said things that are not incompatible with maintaining private ownership,

0:23 and they've critiqued billionaires and forgotten that government

0:26 officials in the public aren't saints, either.

0:29 So, in closing, I want to make three final points.

0:31 First, I'm going to argue that even if states had the capacity,

0:34 ending private ownership generates enormous risks of political capture,

0:38 and that's the motion, to be clear, not ending the private

0:39 ownership of very large social media platforms,

0:41 ending the private ownership of social media, period.

0:44 Second, that concerns about who owns the platform are a red herring,

0:47 and the real problem is centralized power.

0:49 And third, if our goal is, and should be, to decentralize power,

0:52 then maintaining a private competitive ecosystem

0:54 is actually our only viable pathway forward.

0:57 So, to understand why this would be problematic,

0:59 I want to tell a story about the New York taxi system.

1:01 In the 1930s, the government decided to do

1:03 something about the fact that streets were crowded,

1:05 that the public wanted to regulate private

1:07 taxi drivers to ensure quality and safety.

1:09 So, the government took control.

1:11 They created a limited number of medallions, licenses to drive,

1:14 fewer in number than the amount of taxi drivers that existed.

1:17 But what happened when the state took control of that market?

1:19 It was captured.

1:20 Because the government capped the number of licenses,

1:22 those medallions became incredibly valuable,

1:25 at one point costing a million dollars each.

1:27 This didn't make the cars cleaner or the drivers better.

1:29 The opposite happened.

1:30 Riders faced a waiting tax because there were never enough cabs.

1:34 Service decayed because drivers had no reason

1:37 to be polite or keep their cars running well.

1:38 If you're the only ride in town, the customer has no choice but to get in.

1:42 The owners didn't spend their time innovating and improving the product,

1:45 they spent their time rent-seeking,

1:46 lobbying the government to never issue a single

1:48 new license so their monopoly stayed protected.

1:51 Okay, apply this logic to social media.

1:54 We might have the best of intentions and the most laudable of goals,

1:57 but if we end private ownership and create

1:59 something like a national social media agency,

2:01 getting rid of power, we're creating a digital medallion.

2:05 We're creating a system where the insiders and political party in power,

2:08 or the most well-funded lobbyists,

2:10 will fight to capture the algorithm and prevent anyone from changing it.

2:13 And the risks of capture here are far

2:14 more dangerous than a badly run taxi system.

2:17 On day one of publicly administering platforms,

2:20 we're going to have to answer some difficult questions,

2:22 like the ones Julie raised.

2:23 What counts as harmful enough to ban?

2:25 What is misinformation?

2:26 What is hate speech?

2:27 The answer to these questions are not defined,

2:29 or won't be defined by the best arguments,

2:31 they'll be defined by majoritarian whims, or people with the deepest pockets,

2:35 people who have vested interest in the algorithm

2:36 serving their political and economic goals.

2:39 Take a second to imagine if your political

2:40 opponents could access the power to decide these questions.

2:44 For those of you on the left,

2:45 imagine a future government that views your organizing as civil unrest,

2:48 or your advocacy for marginalized groups as divisive misinformation.

2:52 For those of you on the right,

2:53 imagine a government that labels your traditional values

2:55 or skepticism of state power as harmful extremism.

2:58 If the state owns the town square, these kinds of dissent aren't just unpopular,

3:02 they're antisocial behavior that can be censored in the name of public safety.

3:05 And if you think it's hard to change an algorithm now,

3:09 imagine trying to change one when it's protected

3:11 by a government bureaucracy with ideologically self-serving politicians.

3:14 They're not the only ones that are ideologically self-serving.

3:17 Um, a private company has a fear you're leaving for another competitor, sure.

3:20 They'd morally and legally owe it to their shareholders

3:22 to explain why people are leaving and make serious changes.

3:25 By contrast, a government utility just has to wait for you

3:28 to pay your taxes and take you for a ride, like the New York taxis of the 1930s.

3:33 The real enemy here isn't the owner, it's centralized power.

3:37 Whether it's a CEO's profit-maximizing

3:39 algorithm or a lobbyist's state-approved filter,

3:41 both rely on monopolies of discretion over what you see and say.

3:44 And in a state-owned system, there's no escape.

3:47 If a nationalized platform becomes a naked authoritarian

3:49 tool for political power, where do you go?

3:52 You're probably thinking here,

3:54 but it isn't easy to exit the private giants today, either.

3:57 I agree.

3:57 The solution isn't to change the landlord, it's to build an exit.

4:01 We need interoperability, like one of our speakers already said.

4:04 Think of it like email, Gmail.

4:06 So, Gmail, Outlook, and Apple are

4:07 all different systems for viewing your messages,

4:09 but they all speak the same language.

4:12 If you hate Gmail's interface, you leave for Outlook.

4:15 Uh, you don't lose your emails or contacts.

4:17 And this is what we need for social media.

4:18 We need to stop thinking about it as one god algorithm

4:21 and start thinking of it as a potential marketplace of algorithms.

4:24 Imagine a world where you don't have to accept

4:25 what a billionaire or a bureaucrat wants you to see.

4:28 Instead, you choose your own filter.

4:30 If you want a feed focused on fact checks and rigorous news, you choose that.

4:32 If you want sports, politics, or cat videos, you choose that.

4:36 The point is that we need to disperse power from the center

4:39 and move it to the edge, to you, the user.

4:41 Why is this good?

4:42 Well, it makes it harder for a billionaire, the government,

4:45 or your political opponents to wield power over you by controlling what you see,

4:48 say, and who you associate with.

4:50 Why would you want to give anyone that kind of power?

4:54 The philosopher Judith Shklar,

4:55 and I have to mention a philosopher as I'm a philosopher,

4:57 called this approach the liberalism of fear.

5:00 This is the idea that free society should aim

5:02 primarily at limiting the power of individuals and the state,

5:06 not because we don't want them to do good,

5:08 but because of our fear of their potential to do evil.

5:11 And the highest evil is that of being subject to the arbitrary

5:14 and absolute will of a tyrant or group of tyrants,

5:16 whether it's the technocrats or the tech bros.

5:19 Now, we're safer, correspondingly, on this view,

5:23 when we're scattered than when we're synchronized.

5:25 When a single nationalized platform makes a mistake,

5:27 it's a catastrophic systemic failure that misleads an entire nation.

5:31 But when a private platform in a scattered ecosystem makes a mistake,

5:34 it's a local error that the rest of the network can correct.

5:37 So, look, if the motion is implicitly asking who should own the platform,

5:41 my answer is no one should.

5:43 But the paradox of our time is that ending

5:45 private ownership is the surest way to ensure that someone,

5:48 the state, owns us forever.

5:50 Publicly owned platforms, just like the government more generally,

5:53 have the least incentive to diminish their own power over others.

5:56 Only a competitive private ecosystem has people willing to fight

5:59 for your attention and disrupt the power of the biggest platforms.

6:02 This is because the underdogs, innovators, and the startups, like Hannah, um,

6:08 they they don't win by being like the giants,

6:11 they win by stealing the giants' users.

6:13 They don't require a political census or a permit

6:15 from a government committee to innovate, they build.

6:17 And if the giants can't handle that, then the giants will be forced to change.

6:21 As James Madison put it,

6:22 things go best when ambition is made to counteract ambition.

6:26 Force private companies to compete to see who can create

6:28 the most attractive way for individuals to control their own lives.

6:32 I want to leave you with this thought.

6:35 The motion before us today is just asking us to swap one master for another.

6:39 But the real revolution isn't a change in ownership,

6:41 it's a change in platform architecture.

6:43 And as I've shown, only the pressure of private competition can

6:45 provide the incentive to build the exits that states would never create.

6:50 This is not to say there's no role for the state to play.

6:52 What the state ought to do is break

6:53 up the monopolies and not become the monopolies themselves.

6:56 As such, I urge you, don't vote to nationalize the monopoly,

6:59 vote to break it, and vote against the motion.

7:01 Thank you.

7:04 [applause]