Sign of the times: goodbye to the Wild Wild Web
In its place, a new culture is taking shape, one that is more accountable and self-aware
IT FELT like a dam breaking, or the changing of a guard. Within 48 hours last week, many of the world’s internet giants took steps that would have been unthinkable for them months earlier.
Reddit, which spent most of its life as a lawless free-for-all, banned thousands of forums for hate speech, including the largest pro-trump forum on the internet.
Twitch, an Amazon-owned video-gaming platform, suspended President Donald Trump’s account for “hateful conduct”, while Youtube purged a handful of notorious racists and punished a popular creator with a history of problematic videos. Facebook, under pressure from a growing advertiser boycott, took down a network of violent antigovernment insurrectionists.
Arriving all at once, the changes felt like something much bigger: a sign that the Wild Wild Web – the tech industry’s decade-long experiment in unregulated growth and laissez-faire platform governance – is coming to an end.
In its place, a new culture is taking shape that is more accountable, more self-aware and less wilfully naïve than the one that came before it.
You can glimpse this shift in the words of technologists like Steve Huffman, the chief executive of Reddit. He said he rejected one of the Wild Wild Web’s core values – the idea that private internet platforms exist to provide a forum for all ideas, no matter how toxic.
“When we started Reddit 15 years ago, we didn’t ban things,” Huffman said last week. “And it was easy, as it is for many young people, to make statements like that because, one, I had more rigid political beliefs and, two, I lacked perspective and realworld experience.”
Huffman says he understands that some speech – hate, harassment, bullying – prevents others from speaking, and that a no-limits platform culture often empowers those least committed to civil conversation. It’s a position that reflects a more mature understanding of the dynamics of online communities, and the many ways a powerful platform’s inaction can be weaponised.
The world is changing, and the tech industry is being forced to change along with it. A tech monoculture that once celebrated its recklessness and irreverence is being pushed aside by a younger and more politically conscious generation of tech workers who want their companies’ products to reflect their values. Lawmakers and activists have realised the tech industry’s influence, and they are finding points of leverage to force much-needed reforms. Users are savvier, too, and a generation of young people who grew up on the Wild Wild Web are demanding new rules and more attentive referees.
There are some stubborn holdouts. (Facebook, in particular, appears attached to the narrative that social media reflects offline society, rather than driving it.) But among the public, there is no more mistaking Goliaths for Davids. The secret of the tech industry’s influence is out, and the critics who have been begging tech leaders to take more responsibility for their creations are finally being heard.
Joan Donovan, a research director at Harvard Kennedy
School’s Shorenstein Center, wrote in Wired that the coronavirus pandemic had helped platform leaders locate their spines by raising the stakes of inaction.
“Before the pandemic hit, each platform would tend to its specific user base, keeping up with a triple bottom line by balancing profits with social and environmental impact,” Donovan wrote.
“Now, having witnessed the terrifying results of unchecked medical misinformation, the same companies understand the importance of ensuring access to timely, local, and relevant facts.”
The nationwide Black Lives
Matter protests, and the calls for racial justice they have inspired, also helped empower rank-and-file tech employees to demand more from their bosses.
Other motivations may be more practical. Regulators and lawmakers, especially Democrats, are eager to cut Silicon Valley down to size, and some US tech companies may be hedging their bets in case Trump loses his re-election bid in November.
We all live online, and it’s long past time for the world on our screens to be managed as thoughtfully, and with as much accountability, as our roads and schools and hospitals. The Wild Wild Web may be over, but the building has just begun.