Information Accountability – Cost – Ownership

Those who control information tend to wield an outsized portion of power.

The prolific 20th century author, Tom Clancy, probably said it best.

“The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.”

Yet, despite vast technological moves assumed to have democratized the dissemination of information, challenges to healthy democracy, to necessary civil discourse have never been greater. There is no doubt information moves more freely, through fewer gatekeepers, today than it did a decade ago, but those advancements also brought unforeseen manipulation that has drained public trust.

Turns out ease of access also meant ease of manipulation.

Average consumers of information struggle to vet the information that sways public opinion, particularly through social media platforms that have become ubiquitous in modern life. Meanwhile, the power over that flow of information has been consolidated to a small number of tech companies whose motives and values aren’t always clear. Worse, their relatively hands-off approach to information that appears on platforms allowed the proliferation of vast misinformation and disinformation.

Three key areas of our information infrastructure must improve to ensure the health of our civic discourse: accountability, cost and ownership.

Platform accountability:

Law-norms

The erosion of public trust in the information disseminated and consumed through modern platforms was swift and pronounced. Platform owners and operators — although they likely couldn’t have predicted the adverse uses for their technologies — must be held to account for how their tech is employed for nefarious deeds.

This is a difficult balance, because abrasive laws and norms likely would stifle innovation. 

A combination of legal reforms to allow platforms to be exposed to at least some liability for what is published on their platforms — similar to structures in place governing publishers — seems not only appropriate, but necessary at this juncture. The threat of potential litigation likely would compel more active and careful self-regulation by platform operators — a move that likely would trigger more robust efforts to verify content and ensure user accountability.

Further, the continued erosion of public trust in material published on social platforms already has begun a shift toward user distrust. Some platforms have launched efforts to counter the loss of trust in content published through their sites, but there likely will be a continued slide/revelations of manipulation before social norms build enough momentum to force more accountability.

Code-market

There is a substantial financial opportunity for a disruptor to enter the social platform/information dissemination space as existing operators continue to take hits in accountability scandals. Glancing efforts have been made to install bottom-up accountability by verifying users’ identity. A new platform (or innovation on an existing one) that verifies the identity of every user, disallowing manipulation of discourse through disinformation by bots and anonymous users and therefore generating credibility for the information published would have far-reaching positive social impacts. There are scenarios where the removal of anonymity could be damaging (namely in countries where governments or entities would retaliate against individuals who publish information that challenges authority) but there also are plenty of platforms that already address that type of threat.

Information cost

Norms-market-code

Social norms already are shifting in favor of financially supporting news gathering and information dissemination mechanisms, but there still are far too many news and information consumers in the U.S. who do not pay a share of the costs of collecting, vetting and disseminating that information. 

It is likely within the next few years many of the nation’s most prolific and trusted news organizations — if they haven’t already done so — will place paywalls in front of their articles in an effort to generate enough revenue to support their news gathering efforts. 

The shift will have a number of positive net effects on the sustainability of credible, professional information gathering and dissemination organizations. Prices for access and mechanisms for obtaining subscriptions no doubt will evolve as more readers become accustomed to viewing such information as carrying inherent value.

This evolution does, however, pose one substantial drawback. There likely will become a time when the cost of access to information will make it a luxury, therefore, diminishing its positive impacts on society.

In a paywalled digital world, there is no equivalent to bygone eras when several people could read a single copy of a purchased newspaper.

Ownership

Legal-code

For some time aggregation and unauthorized republication of copyrighted materials, particularly via social media platforms, has been a problem. The practice has allowed some platforms to siphon revenue away from original sources, creating a disincentive for investment in labor-intensive information gathering ventures.

A combination of revisions to copyright laws to address this modern problem and code innovations that could track and verify the ownership of materials seems like a viable solution. Similar to cartographers’ techniques of marking maps they create to protect their investment of expertise and time, a code solution could install simple tracking measures to ensure those using such information help foot the bill for its creation.

Norms

In addition to legal and code efforts, a campaign similar to ones undertaken by the music and film industries to call out information misappropriation likely would have important effects. Equating reading clearly aggregated articles to theft the same way the aforementioned industries did with digital piracy could help shift public opinions and diminish patronage to those who make their living appropriating, not producing valuable information.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *