As Mike has already chronicled, Meta has managed to alienate itself from reasonable people by first suppressing links to an independent Kansas journalism outlet, then links to others reporting on the suppression, and eventually entire accounts discussing the episode. I tend to be of the view that what happened was an error caught in a system that may have some design flaws, where the error was able to snowball in the enormity of its effect without there being adequate checks, more than I tend to think it was a deliberate choice by Meta. At the same time, large platform providers like Meta do need powerful systems in order to be able to take any sort of meaningful stand against actual abuse. And even if, rather than an error, the suppression was a conscious editorial decision by Meta, it would have and should have been a perfectly legal choice for it to make, albeit a really stupid one.
But it sort of doesn’t matter whether the suppression was deliberate or accidental: Meta suppressed voices, including voices practicing journalism, and, as a result, public discourse took a hit. Which is what prompts this post, because with things like the JCPA and link taxes and other such programs proposed in the US and abroad, what regulators are demanding is that this sort of thing happen all the time. These are laws that are all designed to force platforms to suppress links to journalistic expression because they essentially impose a penalty when the platforms do not.
Now, that may not be what regulators have in mind. They simply want platforms to share their money with any linked-to sites. But forcing anyone to share their money when they do something is a pretty significant deterrent against doing that something. And here that something is having platforms be vibrant forums for sharing links to journalistic voices. The outrage resulting from this particular link suppression episode is the outrage that results from when platforms are NOT being vibrant forums for sharing links to journalistic voices. We obviously want them to continue to be those forums, so how could we possibly support law that would deter them from providing us that service?
We have argued over and over again that these laws will only harm something we actually want social media to be good at, and harm in particular the independent journalistic voices that depend on social media being good at it to make sure those voices can be widely heard. And here is evidence for why we are right, because when Meta stopped being good at it, those voices got hurt. It is therefore dumb for anyone to support any sort of law that would only make them hurt those voices more.
