Facebook faces the tragedy of the commons – Financial Times – Medium
▻https://medium.com/financial-times/facebook-faces-the-tragedy-of-the-commons-4124e774f5f4
Même si l’article se méprend sur ce que sont les communs (il y a une co-gouvernance par les acteurs), il pointe du doigt un problème sur la tragédie du domaine public.
Et si la réelle solution venait de la construction d’un commun des médias sociaux, dans lequel les usagers seraient responsabilisés sur leurs propres usages ? Mais cela voudrait dire aussi en finir avec la pub qui ne profite qu’à la plateforme. Nouvelle quadrature à résoudre... par la socialisation des plateformes, en créant un « index indépendant du web » comme le demande Olivier Ertzscheid.
Ou d’autres solutions de contrôle collectif à imaginer.
Au fait, a-t-on besoin d’une plateforme de 2 milliards d’utilisateurs pour simplement connecter quelques centaines d’ami·e·s ?
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.
A better way to think of Russian political ads, extremist videos, fake news and all the rest is as the polluters of common resources, albeit ones that are privately owned. The term for this is the tragedy of the commons. Open ecosystems that are openly shared by entire communities tend to get despoiled.
Every time a scandal occurs, they have to reinforce their editorial defences and come closer to the kind of content monitoring that would change their nature
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.
Hardin was a pessimist about commons, arguing that there was no technical solution and that the only remedy was “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority”. The equivalent for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would be to become much more like publishers, imposing tight rules about entry and behaviour rather than their current openness.
They resist this partly because it would bring stricter legal liability and partly because they want to remain as commons. But every time a scandal occurs, they have to reinforce their editorial defences and come closer to the kind of content monitoring that would change their nature.
It would cross the dividing line if they reviewed everything before allowing it to be published, rather than removing offensive material when alerted.
More than 75 per cent of extremist videos taken down by YouTube are identified by algorithms, while Facebook now finds automatically 99 per cent of the Isis and al-Qaeda material it removes. It is like having an automated fence around a territory to sort exploiters from legitimate entrants.
