To Make Big Tech Better, Make It Smaller

Decreasing the salience of tech’s errors is as important as reducing its prevalence

Back in 2018, Frank Pasquale published “Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem,” in which he proposed a taxonomy of tech reformers: Some of us are “Jeffersonians” and others are “Hamiltonians.” (In 2018, this was a very* zeitgeisty taxonomy!)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3197292

Here are their positions:

• Hamiltonian: “improving the regulation of leading firms rather than breaking them up”
• Jeffersonian: “The very concentration (of power, patents, and profits) in megafirms” is itself a problem, making them both unaccountable and dangerous.

In a new article for EFF, I make the case for Jeffersonian theories of content moderation, or, as the title has it: “To Make Social Media Work Better, Make It Fail Better.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/make-social-media-work-better-make-it-fail-better-0

Let me start by saying that Big Tech platforms suck at moderation and do a lot of things wrong. We helped develop the Santa Clara Principles, which lay out concrete steps that platforms could and should take to improve their moderation: