Rethink social media’s pass from responsibility

“Let (Truth) and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

John Milton, 17th century poet and polemicist, wrote that in a 1644 address to the British Parliament opposing government censorship of expression.

Milton, meet Michael G. Flynn, 21st century political provocateur and conscienceless Twitter, who wrote: “Until Pizzagate is proven to be false, it’ll remain a story.”

Flynn, son of Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser, is, like his father, an intense social media circulator of outrageous conspiracy theories, including Pizzagate. Both Flynns posted the bizarre claim that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign manager, John Podesta, ran a child-sex ring at Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washingon, D.C. No, really.

With Milton and his ideals long buried and people like the Flynns having zero regard for truth, Americans need to be asking these questions:

▪  How has our society reached the point that Flynn can say with arrogant assurance that victims of a wholly fabricated accusation are required to prove a negative or let the lie live on as faux truth by default?

▪  Who do we see about this problem? Our society and politics are destabilized and imperiled by the global dissemination of lies at a volume and level of virulence unprecedented in our history and heretofore unimaginable in our darkest moments.

The answers lie in the internet world that at its conception promised to be a source of enlightenment and personal independence but, as with many of the works of human imagination, has been corrupted by greed, immaturity, ignorance and the allure of confirmation bias.

As unmediated sources of information multiply exponentially (more than one billion websites), the digital environment becomes for many Americans not liberating but intellectually suffocating; not an enriching environment for open minds to grow but a dark, bottomless bog where closed minds can find confirmation of any bias they hold, reinforcement for any preconception they value. No critical thinking required, only a modem.

That’s how we reached this point. So who do we see about it?

Start with the lords of social media, the billionaire geniuses behind Facebook and Twitter and such whose proprietary algorithms reshape every millisecond of an informational environment where nothing lasts for long but everything stays forever. Theirs is a business plan based on the reality that the warehousing of data attracts eyeballs, which attract advertising dollars. The revenue stream is dependent upon volume and transience: more data, more clicks, more page visits.

Their vehicle transports lies and truth indiscriminately, and the lords of the realm insist they are not responsible for the content that enriches them. They are not, they insist, publishers of truths or lies, just carriers of bits and bytes. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was shocked – shocked! – at the suggestion social media noise had any influence on the election.

In 1996, there were no internet billionaires, only bright, mostly government-connected people exploring a promising communications idea that Congress wanted to encourage, so it declared that providers of internet service are not publishers and, therefore, not liable for what they distribute, no matter its content.

But that was pre-Facebook, et al, which cultivate content, solicit contributors, reserve the right to omit material and people, and sell advertising around the content. It’s time to rethink that “non-publisher” free pass from responsibility.

This story was originally published December 13, 2016 at 5:02 AM with the headline "Rethink social media’s pass from responsibility."