Speaker 1: Pushkin. I'm Mave Higgins and this is Solvable Interviews with
Speaker 1: the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the world's
Speaker 1: biggest problems. So our guest today is David Kay, the
Speaker 1: United Nations leading voice on freedom of expression. He is
Speaker 1: talking to Jacob Weisberg about one of the more polarizing
Speaker 1: issues of today. So my solvable is democratizing the Internet,
Speaker 1: reclaiming public principles for online speech over the next three
Speaker 1: to five years. Now, being online has never been perfect.
Speaker 1: Even in the early days of the Internet, there were
Speaker 1: some trolls and even some danger, but we used to
Speaker 1: see the Internet as this potential utopia. Today, with so
Speaker 1: many of us living out so much of our lives online,
Speaker 1: and the explosion of disinformation and hate speech and even
Speaker 1: terrorist propaganda, the internet can be a horrible place to
Speaker 1: spend time. Basically, we don't know how to regulate speech
Speaker 1: on the Internet. Here in the US, we hold tight
Speaker 1: to our First Amendment, but we agree that some things
Speaker 1: should be censored, but which things? Right now, we're leaving
Speaker 1: it up to the platforms and the social media companies
Speaker 1: that serve it up. This past decade has seen three
Speaker 1: giant American companies Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which owns YouTube,
Speaker 1: become the way that most of the world experiences the
Speaker 1: Internet and the conveyors of much of its disturbing and
Speaker 1: dangerous material. So how should online speech be governed? What
Speaker 1: law should apply to global companies? Should companies make the
Speaker 1: rules or should governments step in to regulate? Also consider this.
Speaker 1: Freedom in the World is an annual global report on
Speaker 1: political rights and civil liberties, and they reported that last
Speaker 1: year was the eighth consectut it a year of global
Speaker 1: Internet freedom decline. Seventeen governments have approved or proposed new
Speaker 1: laws restricting online media in the name of fighting fake news,
Speaker 1: and eighteen countries have increased surveillance, often skipping any independent
Speaker 1: oversight and pushing to weaken encryption that protects privacy. This
Speaker 1: is nobody's dream Internet. David Kay is working on that.
Speaker 1: For the past five years, he's been the United Nations
Speaker 1: Special Rapporteur of the Promotion and Protection of the Right
Speaker 1: to Freedom of opinion and expression. He has traveled the
Speaker 1: world talking to victims of takedowns and to government censors
Speaker 1: and to platform policymakers. He works to promote human rights law,
Speaker 1: believing that that provides an authoritative global standard for protecting
Speaker 1: freedom of expression online. This is an absorbing conversation on
Speaker 1: a topic that can seem too fraught to tackle, So
Speaker 1: have a listen, David. I wanted to start by asking
Speaker 1: you about your public role. I was delighted when I
Speaker 1: first heard some time ago that the UN had a
Speaker 1: special Rapporteur for freedom of expression. How do you get
Speaker 1: that job and what is it? So the Human Rights Council,
Speaker 1: which is the central body for human rights in the
Speaker 1: UN system, it's a part of the General Assembly. Over
Speaker 1: the last fifty years, basically they've increasingly developed these mechanisms
Speaker 1: of independent experts who monitor different human rights around the world,
Speaker 1: and now it's up to about fifty individuals and a
Speaker 1: few working groups. Some of them handle issues like arbitrary
Speaker 1: detention or summary executions. So mine focuses on freedom of
Speaker 1: expression and I monitor free speech issues around the world.
Speaker 1: You think the internet was better before? Maybe there was
Speaker 1: a kind of golden age or healthy on early days
Speaker 1: when expression with free or people felt more empowered, it
Speaker 1: with more democratic. Is that right? I think that's right,
Speaker 1: although I don't want to overstate it, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: there has always been not only a potential, but a
Speaker 1: reality of harassment online. If you go back to online
Speaker 1: bulletin boards of the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, there
Speaker 1: was always some sense of a bro culture, a culture
Speaker 1: that excluded women in particular, excluded minorities, that was harassing.
Speaker 1: So that's always been there. Now, back in the old
Speaker 1: days of the internet, this sort of pre social media age,
Speaker 1: we had the blogosphere. So if you had a blog,
Speaker 1: you would write up your blog. You might have let's say,
Speaker 1: fifteen hyperlinks in it, two different people that you also
Speaker 1: like to read, or articles that you've seen, and as
Speaker 1: a reader, you had control of your information environment. You
Speaker 1: would go to a blog and you'd go from one
Speaker 1: link to another to another, till suddenly you won't share
Speaker 1: how you got there, but you had this kind of
Speaker 1: glorious experience of exploration that you've had. It's changed, and
Speaker 1: social media has been a major driver of the change,
Speaker 1: in particular Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or if you think about
Speaker 1: China and Russia, there versions and now we have a
Speaker 1: centralization of the information environment, and that's a problem. It's
Speaker 1: a problem because the companies which have grown to such
Speaker 1: enormous extent, they have control over the information environment. But
Speaker 1: it also gives repressive governments in particular a kind of
Speaker 1: one stop shopping opportunity to impose restrictions on speech. Right.
Speaker 1: So in repressive countries it makes censorship easy. But in
Speaker 1: countries like ours that don't have censorship, why don't you
Speaker 1: have the same sense of freedom. You have these big
Speaker 1: dominant platforms, obviously, and they're filtering things in certain ways,
Speaker 1: maybe to give you more of what you agree with
Speaker 1: and less of what you disagree with. And those are
Speaker 1: all issues, But is censorship per se an issue? So,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you're hitting on a really important point,
Speaker 1: which is the companies are global and there's extraordinary variation
Speaker 1: among the places where they operate. So in the United States,
Speaker 1: it's not that I'm concerned about sense ship per se.
Speaker 1: I suppose the way I would put it is in
Speaker 1: democratic societies, I'm more concerned about the rhetoric of harm
Speaker 1: on the internet and the sense that these are spaces
Speaker 1: that need to be protected and in which people need
Speaker 1: to be protected from online harms. And think about it
Speaker 1: in terms of speech harms that increasingly narrows the amount
Speaker 1: of information that we're able to get. It increases, or
Speaker 1: let's say it limits our ability to grapple with ideas perhaps,
Speaker 1: and over time it could get worse and worse, And
Speaker 1: that's to my mind, that's the direction things are heading.
Speaker 1: But that is very different from repressive societies, which are
Speaker 1: in a place like Egypt, for example, or Turkey. They
Speaker 1: might look to Twitter or to Facebook and say to
Speaker 1: the company, your terms of service provide this, They provide
Speaker 1: that there can be no hate speech on your platform. Well,
Speaker 1: we think that this criticism of this minister is hate speech.
Speaker 1: Take it down. So the kind of pressure that's put
Speaker 1: on companies by the repressive societies is very different from
Speaker 1: the kind of pressure we see in the democratic societies.
Speaker 1: But they have changed even in the democratic societies. Like
Speaker 1: a lot of journalists, I'm mainly on Twitter, that's my
Speaker 1: social media platform of choice. And I remember maybe ten
Speaker 1: years ago Dick Costello, who was the CEO of Twitter.
Speaker 1: I remember him saying, he said it a lot publicly.
Speaker 1: Twitter is the free speech wing of the free speech Party, right.
Speaker 1: He meant that Twitter was a place for almost absolute
Speaker 1: freedom of expression short of things that would actually be
Speaker 1: illegal in the United States, protected by the First Amendment.
Speaker 1: They've been under a lot of pressure to not be
Speaker 1: so accommodating a free speech or not to prioritize the
Speaker 1: value of free speech so highly above other values, including
Speaker 1: the important value of not being harassed and not being abused.
Speaker 1: So what's happened on Twitter and other platforms to the
Speaker 1: free speech which they used to at least defend more resoundingly.
Speaker 1: So I would frame it in a way, as you know,
Speaker 1: these were companies that were founded basically fifteen years ago,
Speaker 1: and they were founded by people and then managed at
Speaker 1: sort of the legal and policy level by people who
Speaker 1: were marinated in a First Amendment culture. Right, So they
Speaker 1: came at these issues from the perspective that we need
Speaker 1: robust debate, and think about it also from the business perspective,
Speaker 1: the more content the better, Right, The more content we have,
Speaker 1: the more robust the debate, the better we have an
Speaker 1: opportunity to capture the attention of an audience, which in
Speaker 1: turn translates into more individual users for advertising dollars. So
Speaker 1: there was kind of an alignment of the business model
Speaker 1: with these ideas of free speech. The problem is that
Speaker 1: I mean a couple of things. One is, they were
Speaker 1: extremely slow to recognize that their platforms could also be
Speaker 1: used even in a free sp each environment to exclude voices.
Speaker 1: So there are too many examples to note around journalists
Speaker 1: or celebrities or others with not a great platform being
Speaker 1: harassed off the platform. Basically, that's an exclusion that we
Speaker 1: might not think of in the public square, like if
Speaker 1: you went to a corner in central Park to speak.
Speaker 1: That's not necessary, that's not going to happen, and government
Speaker 1: can't do anything about it. But if the platforms really
Speaker 1: did genuinely want to create space for debate, the availability
Speaker 1: of harassment or the enabling of harassment actually undermine that.
Speaker 1: I think that commitment to a First Amendment culture was
Speaker 1: part of that, and it was very different from the
Speaker 1: way people around the world sought these issues. Which around
Speaker 1: the world and now Facebook's eighty five percent of its
Speaker 1: users are overseas. They don't come from that same environment,
Speaker 1: even in the human rights respecting countries. They just have
Speaker 1: a different vocabulary for thinking about these problems, and their
Speaker 1: vocabulary allows them to deal with some of those harms
Speaker 1: in a way that also creates space for speech. So
Speaker 1: if you're schooled in anti trust and anti monopoly thinking,
Speaker 1: you kind of think, well, the problem here is these
Speaker 1: companies are too big, and they have too much power,
Speaker 1: and there's a movement now either to break them up
Speaker 1: or regulate them big platforms, but there's a voice in
Speaker 1: the back of my head saying, I'm not sure that's
Speaker 1: going to help. Would if we had five pieces of
Speaker 1: Facebook instead of one Facebook, would we be better off
Speaker 1: on this issue? Would those smaller companies be making better
Speaker 1: decisions than no one of them would have as much power.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, when someone comes up with
Speaker 1: a good solution, you don't just have to give in
Speaker 1: Facebook to do it. You'd have to convince lots of
Speaker 1: companies to do it. So, you know, one of the
Speaker 1: questions I have is whether there are ways to think
Speaker 1: about the platforms not just in terms of breaking them up,
Speaker 1: but in terms of breaking them down. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: how do we bring them closer to the users around
Speaker 1: the world who really need to have access to the companies,
Speaker 1: who need to have access to the rules, who need
Speaker 1: to understand the rulemaking. And then the second part that
Speaker 1: we really need, and this is where I think competition
Speaker 1: is useful, is to have a zone in which you
Speaker 1: could have access to different platforms. Some might be more
Speaker 1: restrictive on speech, some might allow more robust speech. But
Speaker 1: if there's more of a choice and they're somehow interoperable,
Speaker 1: so you can choose, but you can also communicate across platforms.
Speaker 1: That's an approach that actually I think diminishes in some
Speaker 1: respects some of the concerns, because people right now feel
Speaker 1: like if they are harassed off the platform, they don't
Speaker 1: really have anywhere to go. If you're harassed on Twitter
Speaker 1: and Facebook, you're probably not going to go to YouTube
Speaker 1: to be a video creator, But where else do you
Speaker 1: go to have an audience and a voice. That's a
Speaker 1: real problem, maybe less so in the United States than
Speaker 1: in places where the platforms really dominate public space. In
Speaker 1: democratic theory, it's recognized that certain decisions need to be
Speaker 1: insulated from politics. Right you don't want a plebiscite to
Speaker 1: decide what interest rates should be. In fact, you don't
Speaker 1: even want the president or the Treasury Department to decide
Speaker 1: what it interest rates should be. That's why we have
Speaker 1: the FED, you know, It's why we have a system
Speaker 1: of laws and courts to decide guilt or innocence and
Speaker 1: legal questions. We don't want those to be political questions
Speaker 1: at these platforms now, pretty much everything is a political
Speaker 1: question in the sense that they're thinking about public relations,
Speaker 1: about what's going to happen in Congress. Are they going
Speaker 1: to be attacked? Is there a way to insulate some
Speaker 1: of these dish decisions, to create a judicial body to
Speaker 1: decide at the end of the day, what you should
Speaker 1: be allowed to post or not post on YouTube or Facebook.
Speaker 1: I think this is a really important part of the
Speaker 1: debate that is not being discussed very often. Governments have
Speaker 1: been increasingly seeking to reclaim this space, not in the
Speaker 1: United States. This is one of the oddities about the
Speaker 1: moment because Washington is basically dysfunctional. The debate hasn't really
Speaker 1: matured in the way that we've seen it in Europe,
Speaker 1: and so what Europe has been doing is really thinking
Speaker 1: about moving towards a regulatory regime that would require the
Speaker 1: companies to apply their rules. Unfortunately, they're not doing the
Speaker 1: insulation that you're talking about. So, for example, there's a
Speaker 1: relatively recent law in Germany that's called nets DG. They
Speaker 1: basically say to the companies, and it's to the biggest companies,
Speaker 1: you need to regulate your space according to German law.
Speaker 1: But they don't involve public institutions in deciding what is
Speaker 1: and is not German law. They basically say to the companies,
Speaker 1: you're now the adjudicators of German law. That is anti
Speaker 1: democratic at the end of the day, and then the
Speaker 1: companies are subject to the political pressures, whether it's in
Speaker 1: Germany or elsewhere in Europe that don't insulate them from
Speaker 1: the ability to actually perform their job in a neutral way.
Speaker 1: So that's fundamental problem, and I think there are ways
Speaker 1: to move forward and to move away from that, to
Speaker 1: move into a space that we in a way depoliticize
Speaker 1: some of these issues. Where do you see examples of
Speaker 1: that happening. Unfortunately, there aren't too many really good examples
Speaker 1: right now. So we've seen some, i would say problematic
Speaker 1: examples in democratic space. We've seen, for example, the UK
Speaker 1: has something called a white Paper which is kind of
Speaker 1: a plan for legislation in the future, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: distinguish between illegal harm and offenses like things that would
Speaker 1: just be offensive online but are not illegal, and so
Speaker 1: it seems to be leading towards requiring the companies to
Speaker 1: make those decisions, which again is not particularly democratic and
Speaker 1: will move them towards highly political decision making. There is
Speaker 1: an example, a current one, but it hasn't materialized yet.
Speaker 1: It is a task force in France that was commissioned
Speaker 1: by Emmanuel McCrone that actually is thinking, I think, in
Speaker 1: very helpful ways about how to use public institutions to
Speaker 1: deal with these kinds of problems. So, for example, could
Speaker 1: you use public law in order to require the companies
Speaker 1: to be more transparent about their decision making? Because right now,
Speaker 1: as you are suggesting, we look at the companies and
Speaker 1: it seems like they're making their decisions on an ad
Speaker 1: hoc basis. But if we had more access to their
Speaker 1: decision making, almost like a case law of their decisions,
Speaker 1: we at least would be on the same information level.
Speaker 1: We know what they took down and why they took
Speaker 1: it down. Yeah, and in some cases they do publish
Speaker 1: that data, don't they. I know, Twitter makes the point
Speaker 1: of doing that in countries that have censorship laws exactly,
Speaker 1: so they do that, although not at the granular level
Speaker 1: that I'm thinking about. But they do publish transparency reports
Speaker 1: about government demands for takedowns, but they publish very little.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're moving in the direction of publishing more,
Speaker 1: but it's still at an aggregate level, and it's hard
Speaker 1: for researchers to understand the specifics of the case law.
Speaker 1: Let's say they publish little about their own terms of service,
Speaker 1: their own regulation of their own space. If you were
Speaker 1: in charge of this at Facebook, instead of being in
Speaker 1: charge of yelling at Facebook for the UN, what standards
Speaker 1: would you fundamentally apply? These companies are not bound by
Speaker 1: the First Amendment. They're private companies, and there are many
Speaker 1: cases in which I don't think people would argue that
Speaker 1: a First Amendment standard would be appropriate. They don't allow nunity.
Speaker 1: They don't even allow naked breasts on any of these platforms, right,
Speaker 1: and people are pretty comfortable with that. But around political
Speaker 1: decisions around hate speech, everything is highly contested. What are
Speaker 1: the rules which you think should be incumbent to bond them?
Speaker 1: Maybe not legally but ethically. So there's actually been a
Speaker 1: move in the UN and internationally over the last twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five years to impose more responsibilities on businesses. It
Speaker 1: actually developed out of the extractive industries in West Africa
Speaker 1: during the wars of the eighties and nineties. There is
Speaker 1: part of this move. The UN's Human Rights Council actually
Speaker 1: adopted a set of what are called guiding principles on
Speaker 1: business and human rights, and it actually provides some very
Speaker 1: good guidance for the companies. So one measure, for example,
Speaker 1: would be for the companies to conduct something like a
Speaker 1: human rights impact assessment. The companies should do an evaluation
Speaker 1: what does it mean for this country. Let's say a
Speaker 1: country like Ethiopia on which significant press restrictions have been
Speaker 1: lifted and that so there's been a kind of robust
Speaker 1: new debate that started just over the last year, which
Speaker 1: also includes threats of ethnic violence. So going into that environment,
Speaker 1: Facebook or YouTube or Twitter could evaluate if our product
Speaker 1: is available to people in Ethiopia, are the risks of that,
Speaker 1: what are the kind of harms that we could expect,
Speaker 1: and what are the ways that we should mitigate those harms.
Speaker 1: They don't do anything like that right now. They have
Speaker 1: no playbook. If they rooted their rules around human rights standards,
Speaker 1: I think they could better articulate to Ethiopians, for example,
Speaker 1: but also to the world about why their platform should
Speaker 1: be accessible to people in this kind of newly vibrant environment,
Speaker 1: but that it will take steps in order to deal
Speaker 1: with the problems that are naturally going to take place.
Speaker 1: But Facebook just congenitally seems to believe that the solution
Speaker 1: to all the problems caused by Facebook is more Facebook.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you say they should do a kind
Speaker 1: of social impact statement to weigh the pros and cons
Speaker 1: that seems to me what they're totally incapable of doing,
Speaker 1: because they're sort of incapable of seeing how much harm
Speaker 1: they cause, and that on balance, a lot of people
Speaker 1: and a lot of places might be better without it
Speaker 1: than with it. I think what you're articulating in many
Speaker 1: ways is a need for public oversight. So because the
Speaker 1: companies are multinational, and because these are non binding norms
Speaker 1: that I'm describing, there may be a need for government
Speaker 1: to step in and to regulate these kinds of assessments
Speaker 1: actually require them. I actually think that having government regulate
Speaker 1: the content, like having government say to the companies, you
Speaker 1: should allow this kind of speech or disallow this speech.
Speaker 1: To my mind, that's problematic because that will almost always
Speaker 1: move towards repression. However, if there is requirements on the
Speaker 1: companies that are more neutrally oriented, right they're more focused
Speaker 1: on process and on providing information to the public, I
Speaker 1: think that at least pushes the companies to articulate their
Speaker 1: role and to observe their own impact in these countries
Speaker 1: in a way that clearly interferes with their business model.
Speaker 1: But I don't really care about that. I mean, they're
Speaker 1: making enough money as it is they can afford to
Speaker 1: do some of this, and I think they have a
Speaker 1: responsibility to the people and the places that they're engaging. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, India rejected Facebook's Free Basics plan, which is
Speaker 1: a way of providing kind of a minimal Internet i e.
Speaker 1: Facebook only or mostly Facebook only to developing countries where
Speaker 1: most people can't otherwise afford access, and the Indian regulatory
Speaker 1: bology whatever that was, said, no, you can't, you can't
Speaker 1: do it here. It's anti competitive or I forget what
Speaker 1: the exact reasoning was. And that's not only fine, that's
Speaker 1: that might have been a really good move. I mean,
Speaker 1: Facebook is still really quite dominant, especially what's app in India.
Speaker 1: But if you think about Facebook Basics and its use
Speaker 1: in Myanmar, right, So Facebook became the Internet, but it
Speaker 1: was much more than I think. Saying Facebook is the
Speaker 1: Internet understates the role of Facebook. So Facebook was the
Speaker 1: only platform that was available to people basically and everybody
Speaker 1: online was on Facebook, and they were on Facebook Basics.
Speaker 1: But it was also at a moment when the lid
Speaker 1: had come off of the repression of the past, the
Speaker 1: military rule in Myanmar, and the Facebook Basics program became
Speaker 1: the only way people accessed information at all. It became
Speaker 1: the public space, and so in that environment, Facebook had
Speaker 1: an enormous responsibility to deal with the kind of not
Speaker 1: just hate speech in some vague way, but the actual
Speaker 1: incitement to ethnic violence against the Rohinga that the government
Speaker 1: itself was participating in, and they did nothing even when
Speaker 1: they knew about it. So I think imposing some responsibility,
Speaker 1: accountability and framing it around human rights standards, I think
Speaker 1: actually allows us to assess their roles in a fuller
Speaker 1: way and also allows us to measure their ability and
Speaker 1: their willingness to meet these obligations and to protect people
Speaker 1: in the places where they're operating. David, different generations think
Speaker 1: about social media and the Internet really differently. Right, someone
Speaker 1: my age and my mid fifties versus someone in their
Speaker 1: teens to twenties. Absolutely, I mean, I think this is
Speaker 1: one of the points that we need to be thinking about.
Speaker 1: In the sense that social media is dynamic. Right now,
Speaker 1: what we think of as the place for social media
Speaker 1: for social discourse today, which might be Facebook or or
Speaker 1: what's app, it might vary five years from now. So
Speaker 1: I do think that as we think about what principles
Speaker 1: we want to apply, because the principles of what's available
Speaker 1: to people online should be constant, right, they should be
Speaker 1: rooted in freedom of expression values, and if we can
Speaker 1: think of those in a way that allows them to
Speaker 1: transfer as the Internet develops, I mean, that's what we
Speaker 1: need to be aiming towards. Because it's true, it's not
Speaker 1: just the current generations that are using the Internet differently,
Speaker 1: but as time moves on, we're going to see issues,
Speaker 1: We're going to see frameworks, We're going to see platforms
Speaker 1: that we probably can't even envision at the moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the regulators tend to be old and the innovators
Speaker 1: tend to be young. It's very hard to keep up
Speaker 1: with the pace of innovation in this space. Absolutely. I
Speaker 1: mean this is an argument for technologists and for others
Speaker 1: who are really well versed in the technology and in
Speaker 1: the policy around the technology, to be an important part
Speaker 1: of the policy discussion. I mean, they should be involved
Speaker 1: in educating legislators where we've seen time and again, and
Speaker 1: I mentioned a situation in Kenya where a lawyer said
Speaker 1: to me, really accomplished internet lawyer said, it's very hard
Speaker 1: to have these discussions in the Kenyon legislature because the
Speaker 1: legislators don't really understand the technology or the social uses
Speaker 1: of the technology. So we need to have ways for
Speaker 1: those people who understand it to be a part of
Speaker 1: not just the legislature and the legislative process, but also
Speaker 1: the judicial process, because people at the judicial level are
Speaker 1: making decisions. They're having a huge impact on speech online.
Speaker 1: Your solvable references this sense of greater autonomy that people
Speaker 1: had at an earlier stage of the Internet, and I
Speaker 1: know you have some optimism about this getting better rather
Speaker 1: than worse. What else has to happen. I think our
Speaker 1: goals should be realistic. So there are some people who
Speaker 1: say platforms need to eradicate hate speech, for example, or
Speaker 1: eradicate disinformation. I think that's a goal that is not
Speaker 1: particularly achievable, and so I mean I think in terms
Speaker 1: of the way forward, some of the ideas I think
Speaker 1: have to be focused on how do the companies get
Speaker 1: more access to the communities in which they're operating, or
Speaker 1: really put another way, how do the activists, users, individuals,
Speaker 1: civil society and countries where these companies operate. How do
Speaker 1: they get more ownership, like small ownership of the platforms.
Speaker 1: How do they get ownership of the public space. That's
Speaker 1: tricky to do because you don't want to do that
Speaker 1: in a way that gives the government the power to
Speaker 1: capture that process. So I mean, I think that the companies,
Speaker 1: with a significant nudge by governments, should be essentially creating
Speaker 1: non governmental oversight that would be a cross industry that
Speaker 1: would allow evaluation of what they're doing, that would allow criticism,
Speaker 1: and that would allow remedy where they screw it up.
Speaker 1: It's so easy to feel hopeless in face of these
Speaker 1: trends and the gigantism of these platforms. And I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you, what are some things individuals can do,
Speaker 1: not just to say, protect themselves from harassment, but to
Speaker 1: foster a more democratically healthy internet. Well, I think that
Speaker 1: there are several things that individuals can do in this space,
Speaker 1: although it's very difficult to imagine some of them just
Speaker 1: because the powers seem so great. So one is, in
Speaker 1: terms of thinking about public responses. I think individuals should
Speaker 1: be really considering on their own what they think, and
Speaker 1: so part of this is educating themselves about what they
Speaker 1: think would be the proper role of government in terms
Speaker 1: of its evaluation of the right place to insert the
Speaker 1: public into these tough questions. And once they've decided, Once
Speaker 1: each individual has decided, you know, connect with your legislator,
Speaker 1: whether it's in the United States or anywhere around the world,
Speaker 1: and articulate your viewpoint. I think that's one way to
Speaker 1: kind of claim a sense that we have public ownership,
Speaker 1: that there's some democratic control over these platforms. I think
Speaker 1: another thing that everybody should be doing is really trying
Speaker 1: to consider the information that they're sharing. Right when you
Speaker 1: see information that ends up in your news feed, I
Speaker 1: think it's important not to simply look at the click
Speaker 1: baity headline and just share it. Really you do your best,
Speaker 1: but do your best to understand where that information is
Speaker 1: coming from. Do you think that that information is accurate.
Speaker 1: If you do, you share a way, and you share
Speaker 1: with the sense of your own responsibility. But if you
Speaker 1: have concerns about it, or if you think that this
Speaker 1: might be a part of an incitement to violence, for example,
Speaker 1: you know, forbear, you know, don't share, and and we're
Speaker 1: necessary report to the companies what you think is the problem.
Speaker 1: But those kinds of things, it's not that we are
Speaker 1: disempowered at all. I mean we need to be retaking control.
Speaker 1: I think the third thing I would say is that
Speaker 1: individual Jules particularly let me say Americans, should really understand
Speaker 1: that these are global companies now, and so part of
Speaker 1: that means that our solutions for the US space might
Speaker 1: not work everywhere, and we need to be more mindful
Speaker 1: of the fact that a rhetoric around this, which is
Speaker 1: again rooted in a kind of First Amendment culture, might
Speaker 1: not work everywhere in the world, and that the way
Speaker 1: others want to solve these problems might be fully legitimate
Speaker 1: within even their own democratic space. And until we're able
Speaker 1: to get to that point, and this is particularly true
Speaker 1: for legislators and the companies, I think that we're going
Speaker 1: to continue to face these major problems that the companies
Speaker 1: themselves are going to find very difficult to solve at
Speaker 1: the global scale that they operate. Do you think opting
Speaker 1: out is part of the solution. In the United States,
Speaker 1: it might not be a problem, or in Europe it
Speaker 1: might not be a problem to say I'm just leaving
Speaker 1: Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. I'm going to actually have
Speaker 1: human relationships again. You know, that's totally doable, but outside
Speaker 1: of these environments, it's not exactly possible. So in the book,
Speaker 1: I tell this very brief story of meeting a guy
Speaker 1: in Cambodia who had like, very sophisticated views about government
Speaker 1: repression and I was curious how he had that information
Speaker 1: because the government essentially controls state media in Cambodia, and
Speaker 1: without missing a beat, he set Facebook. So for somebody
Speaker 1: in that environment, he doesn't really have another place to
Speaker 1: go for potentially truthful, potentially disinforming information, but it's essential
Speaker 1: to his understanding of his own civic space. So for him,
Speaker 1: delete Facebook is not really an option. And I think
Speaker 1: we just need to be mindful that it's probably not
Speaker 1: the global solution to this. Yeah, and that's the potential
Speaker 1: that made us optimistic about these platforms in the early days,
Speaker 1: right that it was going to break through censorship walls
Speaker 1: in certain countries that didn't have independent media. Absolutely, And
Speaker 1: I mean that goes back to the very crux of
Speaker 1: what we're talking about the beginning and what the book
Speaker 1: is about. And that is we need to find ways
Speaker 1: to deal with the harms that are caused by all
Speaker 1: the platforms and that we are participating in causing, if
Speaker 1: we're honest with ourselves, without undermining all of the good
Speaker 1: things that the Internet has offered. The optimism that I
Speaker 1: have is that the Internet still provides a place for
Speaker 1: groups that have an affinity for one another, so it
Speaker 1: could be LGBT groups or minority groups, and the risk
Speaker 1: of overdoing the confronting of hate speech and disinformation is
Speaker 1: that we will make it harder for those people to
Speaker 1: find each other. So we want to figure out a
Speaker 1: way to protect those people while dealing with the harms.
Speaker 1: It's not an easy problem to solve, but I do
Speaker 1: think that steps of transparency, public control, human rights principles
Speaker 1: that actually could lead us in the right direction. Optimism
Speaker 1: about the Internet's future. That's how you know you're listening
Speaker 1: to solvable. I was so intrigued here David's argument for it,
Speaker 1: and it was cool to hear too about that person
Speaker 1: he met in Cambodia who needed Facebook to figure out
Speaker 1: what was actually going on in his country. And while
Speaker 1: I myself I don't use Facebook, but I would be
Speaker 1: so lost without WhatsApp and Instagram. I don't know. I'm
Speaker 1: scared of the insanity brought on by the spread of
Speaker 1: fraudulent news and terrorism, but i don't want to go
Speaker 1: without the Internet, so I'm glad to hear of a
Speaker 1: possible way towards a safe and fun online world. Once
Speaker 1: More Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and the
Speaker 1: Rockefella Foundation, with production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant, Laura Sheeter,
Speaker 1: and Ruth Barnes from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer
Speaker 1: is Neil LaBelle, Research by Sheer, Vincent, engineering by Jason
Speaker 1: Gambrel and the great folks at GSI Studios. Original music
Speaker 1: composed by Pascal Wise and special thanks to Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Heather Fine, Julia Barton, Carly Mgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You can learn more about solving today's biggest problems at
Speaker 1: Rockefeller Foundation dot org slash solvable. I'm Mave Higgins, now
Speaker 1: got solve it.