Social Media as a Common Carrier

There has been a great deal of conversation regarding Social Media, but none thus far as best I can see as to how it is classified as a business and as such how it would be considered to be treated under the law. We will argue that Social Media has many characteristics of Common Carriage, and specifically Common Carriage over the wireline, in this case we extend wireline to include the Internet in its broadest scope.

Let us first return to the old concept of bailment. Namely the idea that if I give someone one of my possessions, that person takes it from me and transports it to another at perhaps some distant location. The old bailment concept had some issue. Then came common carriage, an idea that extended bailment under Elizabeth I and made it the basis for England's dominance in trade. A common carrier takes your possession, moves it to another and unlike bailment which may have unlimited liability, the common carrier is at best liable for what you paid them for the transport. If you want more in the event of a loss then get insurance, thus Lloyd's of London.

The elements are simple. A person wishes to take something they own, perhaps in the broadest sense, agree to pay the carrier to move it across some distance, and deliver it to another. The sender agrees to pay the carrier in some manner. The sender takes all the risk of loss, the carrier just "transports" at some fee.

Now how does this apply to social media. Let us say I am the sender. I send some item of interest that I want to get to some destination. Thus I may have a Facebook page, which I do not for obvious reasons, but let us assume I do. I want to "send" a  "possession" to Facebook to carry to my "page" and thus to my selected "destinations" who will "read" my page. I "pay" Facebook with the right to use my delivery system to advertise stuff for which they receive revenue from third parties. I have agreed to "give" Facebook my identity and that of my destinations associates in return for "sending" my message. Facebook then monetizes my identity and destination identities to place ads and the like. A slightly different model from the telephone company or post office, but not that far off.

Thus if Social Media can be considered as a common carrier then can they be regulated as such. There is a wealth of common carriage regulation. Simply, a carrier must carry anyone, a carrier must not interfere with what is in the package they carry, a carrier has a very limited liability, and customers have remedies under the law.

Perhaps we need an FCC like entity to regulate these types of common carriers. Just a thought.

Social Media

Back in the 60s and 70s, especially when I was working on Treaty negotiations and meetings one would have access to profiles of the parties on the other side of the table. My view was that these profiles were poor at best and confusing and counter-productive at worst. The Intel agencies had managed to assemble these from snippets of information gathered from a variety of sources. Most of them poor.

In today's world people, like me in this blog, freely provide information which can result in improved profiles, personal and psychological. I suspect an adversary could get a pretty good profile from what is written herein. However, and this is critical, I separately seek out my own information from the NY Times to RT and Sputnik, to The Guardian, and the Jerusalem Post, Arab News and so forth. I am aware that each has a position to push. Some are subtle and some are blatant. The NY Times in my opinion is the worst, the really dislike the current President. But welcome to American media.

Now as to the Social Media efforts. This is unlike what we do herein. I do not attach any news stories, I may quote from them and then give an opinion, but it is my opinion, and the mast head says so. But the social media in question monetizes their pages by first attaching "news" and then by selling the users interactions with the news and others. In effect social media can actively psychoanalyze the users. Not so much the case here since I take no comments nor do I have ads for anything. Just my comments and so far I have managed to attract a small cadres from time to time.

The power is in the profiling of the users from interactive stimulants and their actions related thereto, and then to actively troll them to change or mold their opinions. That is the power of social media as propaganda. A century ago propaganda worked by more gross techniques. Namely a fishing magazine knew its readers liked to fish and then the ads were focused to that segment.

The power of social media is nano-segmenting and then targeted opinion crafting. Now is this something the Russians mastered? Doubtful that only they saw this. Silicon Valley aggressively attacked this opportunity for their financial advantage and in a country protected by free speech and having adults using social media as if it were harmless, you had a perfect storm of adverse use and unprepared users.

For example, if an entity wanted to promote certain issues, then by using the profiling capabilities on the individual level one  could profile what motivates each separate person and each segment of the related issues. Then one could test that hypothesis on that person with certain "ads" and determine their response. Then one could provide a specific and targeted set of "ads" that would promote the issue in question. For example, sophisticated neural network systems allow for this very effectively. It is a process of; pre-targeting, target affirmation, target enhancement, and target persuasion and promotion. The entity facilitating the targeting mechanism does not even have to participate, the very nature of an open Internet facilitates that all by itself. Moreover this is not limited to Social Media, it can be done even with new feeds! Simply I one knows what a target has interest in, and then feeds that target controlled elements based upon those interests, thus in a subtle manner crafting information with a strong element of propaganda! The irony is that the intended targets are actively participating in this process.

The solution to this should be simple; education and informing them of the issue. Yet the very system being bastardized in this manner cane be turned against any rational approach to remediate. Government is not the answer. It must be an educated user class. Yet our core educational systems lack this basic tool set. The very constructs of "microaggression" embody in people's mind that very barriers to a broad understanding of this threat to democracy. So what is the answer? Stay tuned.