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Know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas? Money. Money allows for buying advertisements, essentially allowing you to buy a platform to spread your ide

Know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas? Money. Money allows for buying advertisements, essentially allowing you to buy a platform to spread your ideas. Having money typically has a pretty clear bias: protecting the money of those who have it. This comes at the expense, many times, of those who do not. That typically equates to conservative policies. I'm not convinced that the market distortion caused by supposed bias in social media moderation is even close to the distortion created by allowing money in politics. In fact in many (not all) cases of purported bias, the true impetus for action was due to hateful or otherwise harmful speech. Nor do I agree that if we disagree with state censorship, we should disagree with Facebook censorship. Being thrown into the legal system with threat of monetary penalty, jailtime, etc. is worthy of much more scrutiny than speech that gets you banned from a social network.

buboard 7y ago
You know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas? Guns. Monetary incentives are a lot more voluntary in comparison
- disintegore 7y ago
  Just go ahead and say it
brlewis 7y ago
This is mentioned in the last half of the last paragraph in the article.
FussyZeus 7y ago
This was a big part of why I enjoyed Jack Dorsey's comments on Twitter removing political advertising. The Internet was supposed to be a democratizing force, and it was, for awhile. To an extent it still is, but as the convergence of content continues to pull people into the various Platforms™, all of which are supported by advertiser dollars, the content itself is diluted. Some not so much, some so much it's not recognizable, others so much that it's no longer there. YouTube is a great example of this. Once a monument to the power of democratized content, it's slowly but surely pushing out real creators in favor of advertising companies producing advertiser-friendly and oh-so-clickable content, much of which is complete and utter trash. It's not just marketing companies though, a new breed of creator has spawned since roughly 2010, determined to soak as many advertising dollars out of the platform as they can with as much vapid and soulless content as it will suffer. And all of this is sponsored in turn by equally vapid and soulless corporate advertisers, determined to make sure their precious brands are not associated with anything as uncouth as an opinion or a real person. Hell, there's a great argument to be made of how the "pivot to video" and the resulting catacombs full of gutted and destroyed media websites can be laid at the feet of corporate marketers who wanted video ads. Nay it was not any Internet citizen who claimed the future was video, we didn't ask for it, and we certainly didn't like it. The whole thing is gross, and far from isolated to YouTube, it has plagued them all, save perhaps for Twitter and I think the only thing saving Twitter is that it's just not as easily monetized. But, Twitter has a different problem, which I believe Jack is trying to solve; the influx of automated bots, bought and paid for by other marketers, more often trying to sell politics than products. But it's just a different kind of feces from the same anus and indicative of the same core problem: advertisers suck, at everything. And they have more power than ever on the Internet, and so the Internet sucks more than ever.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  We need to think about why advertising is winning. A big reason is that advertising is a tax deduction. If I fund my content with advertising, the advertiser gets to deduct the money they spend from their income tax. If I sell content to users, the users don't get to do that. Between the employer and employee halves of FICA, federal withholding and state income tax, that's typically more than half the money. To make it even we would either need a tax deduction for purchasing content or to get rid of the one for buying advertising. Then you have companies like Apple taking a 30% cut of the creator's revenue. The customer has to pay $1.43 in order for the creator to get $1. That's obviously making direct purchases less competitive against advertising -- and it multiplies with the tax treatment. If you're paying 50% in tax and then 30% to Apple, the customer needs to earn ~$2.86 for every $1 they want the creator to get. If two content creators start with $1 and use it buy each other's content, by the time the money goes to the other person and back one time, what's left is only ~$0.12. It would be a lot easier to sell content if the creators actually got the lion's share of the customer's money.
repolfx 7y ago
I think it's a difference of additive vs subtractive distortions. Censorship deletes things: it reduces the size of the marketplace of ideas. Money adds things: if I spend money tomorrow to buy some ads it doesn't affect you unless either (a) you're also spending money and trying to buy the same ad slots or (b) your views are very weakly held and you become convinced to change sides by my witty advert. The "get money out of politics" position is based on an unstated assumption that if you buy, say, 1 million adverts, then it's practically guaranteed that (say) 5% of those adverts will successfully change people's minds regardless of how bad your arguments are, and so if you keep spending more and more then you can eventually buy whatever outcome you want. But is that assumption true? I don't think it is. There have been studies of this which showed political advertising is pretty ineffective in general, beyond informing people that there's an election and who the party candidates are. And there have been two high profile cases in 2016 of votes that were won by the side that spent by far the least (Trump and Brexit). If money was so powerful they should have had no chance, but it didn't work. Additionally if this really worked, you should see taxes always fall as rich people buy ads supporting politicians who support lower taxes, which in turn frees up more money to buy ads, ad infinitum (ho ho ho). But this isn't what we see: ignoring occasional spikes to levels so high they were totally ineffective at being collected, the tax burden and size of government has gone up over time rather than down. Rich people seem to be doing pretty badly at buying the sort of policies they're supposed to want. On the other hand, if people don't know a position, idea or possibility exists at all they can't possibly support it. You can ignore voices you disagree with but you can't pay agree with voices that don't exist anymore.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Money adds things No. What money does is redistribute limited attention. Information may (or may not) be freee, and nonrivalrous. But its complements, attention, distribution, discoverability, access, reach, are all rivalrous. Time is the ultimate rival good: a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, lifetime, spent on one thing is that interval not spent on all else. "Money doesn't talk, it swears." Bob Dylan. Money is an amplifier, or at least, provides access to amplification. It can also be an eraser, a gate, a gate keeper, which determines who shall and shall not pass. The more I read on the nature of monopoly, the more I'm convinced that the critical element of it is not prices or "consumer welfare", but of role as gatekeeper. The monopolist (or monopsonist) faces a constant queue of approaching supplicants. Each supplicant has the best alternative of ... no service. Or at best, extraordinarily reduced service (fewer capabilities, higher costs, most often both). The monopolist, particularly if already at or near capacity, though even at levels of service far beneath that, need only consider the next supplicant. What people miss out on with money is scale. The typical US household would be hard pressed to meet an emergency expense of $500. When Facebook purchased Instagram for $19 billion in cash and stock, it expressed a liquidity of nearly 40 million such households -- about the population of California. That is, a single corporate entity, and more significantly, the single individual effectively controlling that corporation, Mark Zuckerberg, has a greater effective voice than the entire rest of the state. In a land dedicated to the principles of liberal democracy, that seems inimical to its very foundations. As to the touted ineffectiveness of political advertising, the arguments would ring far truer if 1) the parties claiming such reflected the belief in their actions and 2) would not protest so loudly efforts to either curtail or 3) clearly identify those doing the advertising and spending.

buboard 7y ago

You know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas? Guns. Monetary incentives are a lot more voluntary in comparison

disintegore 7y ago
Just go ahead and say it

brlewis 7y ago

This is mentioned in the last half of the last paragraph in the article.

FussyZeus 7y ago

This was a big part of why I enjoyed Jack Dorsey's comments on Twitter removing political advertising. The Internet was supposed to be a democratizing force, and it was, for awhile. To an extent it still is, but as the convergence of content continues to pull people into the various Platforms™, all of which are supported by advertiser dollars, the content itself is diluted. Some not so much, some so much it's not recognizable, others so much that it's no longer there. YouTube is a great example of this. Once a monument to the power of democratized content, it's slowly but surely pushing out real creators in favor of advertising companies producing advertiser-friendly and oh-so-clickable content, much of which is complete and utter trash. It's not just marketing companies though, a new breed of creator has spawned since roughly 2010, determined to soak as many advertising dollars out of the platform as they can with as much vapid and soulless content as it will suffer. And all of this is sponsored in turn by equally vapid and soulless corporate advertisers, determined to make sure their precious brands are not associated with anything as uncouth as an opinion or a real person. Hell, there's a great argument to be made of how the "pivot to video" and the resulting catacombs full of gutted and destroyed media websites can be laid at the feet of corporate marketers who wanted video ads. Nay it was not any Internet citizen who claimed the future was video, we didn't ask for it, and we certainly didn't like it. The whole thing is gross, and far from isolated to YouTube, it has plagued them all, save perhaps for Twitter and I think the only thing saving Twitter is that it's just not as easily monetized. But, Twitter has a different problem, which I believe Jack is trying to solve; the influx of automated bots, bought and paid for by other marketers, more often trying to sell politics than products. But it's just a different kind of feces from the same anus and indicative of the same core problem: advertisers suck, at everything. And they have more power than ever on the Internet, and so the Internet sucks more than ever.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
We need to think about why advertising is winning. A big reason is that advertising is a tax deduction. If I fund my content with advertising, the advertiser gets to deduct the money they spend from their income tax. If I sell content to users, the users don't get to do that. Between the employer and employee halves of FICA, federal withholding and state income tax, that's typically more than half the money. To make it even we would either need a tax deduction for purchasing content or to get rid of the one for buying advertising. Then you have companies like Apple taking a 30% cut of the creator's revenue. The customer has to pay $1.43 in order for the creator to get $1. That's obviously making direct purchases less competitive against advertising -- and it multiplies with the tax treatment. If you're paying 50% in tax and then 30% to Apple, the customer needs to earn ~$2.86 for every $1 they want the creator to get. If two content creators start with $1 and use it buy each other's content, by the time the money goes to the other person and back one time, what's left is only ~$0.12. It would be a lot easier to sell content if the creators actually got the lion's share of the customer's money.

repolfx 7y ago

I think it's a difference of additive vs subtractive distortions. Censorship deletes things: it reduces the size of the marketplace of ideas. Money adds things: if I spend money tomorrow to buy some ads it doesn't affect you unless either (a) you're also spending money and trying to buy the same ad slots or (b) your views are very weakly held and you become convinced to change sides by my witty advert. The "get money out of politics" position is based on an unstated assumption that if you buy, say, 1 million adverts, then it's practically guaranteed that (say) 5% of those adverts will successfully change people's minds regardless of how bad your arguments are, and so if you keep spending more and more then you can eventually buy whatever outcome you want. But is that assumption true? I don't think it is. There have been studies of this which showed political advertising is pretty ineffective in general, beyond informing people that there's an election and who the party candidates are. And there have been two high profile cases in 2016 of votes that were won by the side that spent by far the least (Trump and Brexit). If money was so powerful they should have had no chance, but it didn't work. Additionally if this really worked, you should see taxes always fall as rich people buy ads supporting politicians who support lower taxes, which in turn frees up more money to buy ads, ad infinitum (ho ho ho). But this isn't what we see: ignoring occasional spikes to levels so high they were totally ineffective at being collected, the tax burden and size of government has gone up over time rather than down. Rich people seem to be doing pretty badly at buying the sort of policies they're supposed to want. On the other hand, if people don't know a position, idea or possibility exists at all they can't possibly support it. You can ignore voices you disagree with but you can't pay agree with voices that don't exist anymore.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Money adds things No. What money does is redistribute limited attention. Information may (or may not) be freee, and nonrivalrous. But its complements, attention, distribution, discoverability, access, reach, are all rivalrous. Time is the ultimate rival good: a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, lifetime, spent on one thing is that interval not spent on all else. "Money doesn't talk, it swears." Bob Dylan. Money is an amplifier, or at least, provides access to amplification. It can also be an eraser, a gate, a gate keeper, which determines who shall and shall not pass. The more I read on the nature of monopoly, the more I'm convinced that the critical element of it is not prices or "consumer welfare", but of role as gatekeeper. The monopolist (or monopsonist) faces a constant queue of approaching supplicants. Each supplicant has the best alternative of ... no service. Or at best, extraordinarily reduced service (fewer capabilities, higher costs, most often both). The monopolist, particularly if already at or near capacity, though even at levels of service far beneath that, need only consider the next supplicant. What people miss out on with money is scale. The typical US household would be hard pressed to meet an emergency expense of $500. When Facebook purchased Instagram for $19 billion in cash and stock, it expressed a liquidity of nearly 40 million such households -- about the population of California. That is, a single corporate entity, and more significantly, the single individual effectively controlling that corporation, Mark Zuckerberg, has a greater effective voice than the entire rest of the state. In a land dedicated to the principles of liberal democracy, that seems inimical to its very foundations. As to the touted ineffectiveness of political advertising, the arguments would ring far truer if 1) the parties claiming such reflected the belief in their actions and 2) would not protest so loudly efforts to either curtail or 3) clearly identify those doing the advertising and spending.