Facebook faces the tragedy of the commons
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It is hard to keep up with the stream of scandals, big and small, involving social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. From unwittingly aiding Russian efforts to subvert elections to finding themselves exploited by extremists and pornographers, they are constantly in trouble.
The latest is YouTube failing to stop videos of children being commented on by paedophiles, while letting advertisements appear alongside them. Only months after Alphabet’s video platform faced an advertiser boycott over extremist videos and had to apologise humbly, companies such as Diageo and Mars are again removing ads.
Each scandal produces fresh calls for networks to be treated like publishers of news, who are responsible for everything that appears under their names. Each one forces them further to tighten their “community standards” and hire more content checkers. By next year, Facebook intends to employ 20,000 people in “community operations”, its censorship division.
Tempting as it is for publications that have lost much of their digital advertising to internet giants to believe they should be treated as exact equivalents, it is flawed: Facebook is not just a newspaper with 2.1bn readers. But being a platform does not absolve them of responsibility. The opposite, in fact — it makes their burden heavier.
Here lies the threat to social networks. They set themselves up as commons, offering open access to hundreds of millions to publish “user-generated content” and share photos with others. That in turn produced a network effect: people needed to use Facebook or others to communicate.
But they attract bad actors as well — people and organisations who exploit free resources for money or perverted motives. These are polluters of the digital commons and with them come over-grazers: people guilty of lesser sins such as shouting loudly to gain attention or attacking others.
As Hardin noted, this is inevitable. The digital commons fosters great communal benefits that go beyond being a publisher in the traditional sense. The fact that YouTube is open and free allows all kinds of creativity to flourish in ways that are not enabled by the entertainment industry. The tragedy is that it also empowers pornographers and propagandists for terror.
#Médias_sociaux #Facebook #Fake_news #Communs #Tragédie_des_communs