If tech CEOs are mayors then why do we expected so much from them?
I was reading an article from the newsletter called the Diff. Which the author gave the analogy that a tech CEO is an overworked mayor. Running a platform is like running a city. As your not just setting a price for your product. But deciding how your platform should be governed.
The newsletter argues:
Moreover, the problems Facebook has to solve are not the cosmic, inspiring ones. They’re pretty trivial, technocratic issues, mostly dealing with competing interest groups rather than competing ideologies. Zuckerberg isn’t an emperor, or even a prime minister; he’s the world’s most competent and most overworked mayor. The question of how much data an advertiser should be able to collect and use, and how they should be able to use it, isn’t a question with the same scope as a treaty or a labor law; it’s a lot more like deciding where a sewage treatment plant goes or choosing which bus route to cut.
This is understandable, platform businesses are more about choosing regulations and how to implement them. But Facebook or Twitter are not signing treaties or bills on these rules. But simply juggling between interest groups over an decision. Reminds me of the YouTube situation. In which YouTube must manage the interests of creators and the advertisers.
With other important interest groups like corporate entertainment and news companies. These interest groups bring YouTube money with adverting. So YouTube tends to give this group preferential treatment. Which YouTube creators deem unfair. Deciding when to notify when somebody uploads looks more like how the bin service should run.
Deciding to send a notification for a new upload. Looks closer to people arguing how bin service should be run. With different neighbourhoods lobbying for better service. Than the drafting of the Maastricht treaty.
Many of the social media problems are strictly practical matters. How do you regulate hate speech? What practices should you adopt to judge content? In twitter’s case do you have enough tools to even deal with the problem?
I'm starting to learn that a platform/marketplace business is a double-edged sword. Yes, you run the casino. So, you get the biggest profits out of the rest of the tech companies. But you have a lot of responsibility. With people expecting you to do magic with limited resources. Or in Facebook’s case make decisions with no good trade-offs.
Do you think going to congress is fun, while both sides are yelling at you are not doing enough? While the congresspeople have no clue what they are talking about.
Jack Dorsey made a joke about this in the recent hearings. On Twitter he made a poll with a simple question mark. With the answer yes and no. A clear jab at the type of questions the congresspeople was asking.
The termination of the ex-president was a hard decision to make. Where the tech leaders had to take into account their progressive employees, the legal liability of a person spouting falsehoods or even violence. Also considering the advertisers paying the platforms. And the fans of the former president.
When you have so many interest groups, some people are bound to lose out. In many companies, your stakeholders can be the shareholders, employees and customers. Some public companies only need to worry about the shareholders.
The article touches on this subject:
GM needs to balance the interests of drivers, dealers, employees, suppliers, and shareholders, but basically all of those groups either want to get more money or spend less money, so GM has the comparatively simple option of building a really good product. But if Facebook builds a really good product for spreading news, they’ve built an exceptional product for sharing fake news; if Google has a good way to surface information, it’s also a good way to surface misinformation.
Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg only get the final say because these decisions are very hard. Facebook is forced to follow local government instructions to remove material from its website. This can be normal stuff like abuse or explicit material. Or political sensitive stuff like removing opposition leaders of the local government, political groups etc.
One example I read on ProPublica was Facebook was removing some Kurdish material with advice from the Turkish government. What was interesting was the internal emails of the thinking. Which tried their best not remove the content. But once it became clear that a ban was imminent. Then opted for a geo-block of the page. Twitter did something similar with the Indian farmers. Geo-blocking best of the bad options when it comes to censorship. As the affected country can’t see the content but everybody else can. Also people with VPNs can still access it.
Removing content that does not cause harm is not something they want to do. As they are American companies with culture of free speech. But governments are an important interest groups that can’t be ignored. If not, they will be shut out of dozens of countries. And miss out on millions of users.
The decision to geoblock content rather than remove the material outright is like working out how to enforce the law in a city. Some people want a no-mercy style approach others to want a selected approach where only serious crime is prosecuted. Your job as the mayor is to take all of these interests and approaches into account. And make an optimal decision using given knowledge.
[use another example]
America tends to take a pretty relaxed approach to regulation. In China tech companies are always under the scrutiny of the government. In an article from the Protocol[insert link], a worker from ByteDance explained that the company had to follow directives from the government. Which called to censor certain words and topics.
It was up to ByteDance to implement the directives:
During livestreaming shows, every audio clip would be automatically transcribed into text, allowing algorithms to compare the notes with a long and constantly-updated list of sensitive words, dates and names, as well as Natural Language Processing models. Algorithms would then analyze whether the content was risky enough to require individual monitoring.
To follow the rules there is a lot of work done behind the scenes to make it possible. Just like a mayor will need to make new housing developments follow building regulations. Bytedance needs to find a way to follow the rules or the government will take action.
Being emperor of Facebook or Twitter does not seem fun does it?
The author notes:
This is the problem of platforms: they build a place, rather than a business, so they can’t enapsulate complexity by making everything transactional. The upside to this model is that it leads to long-term, high-margin growth. Building a platform means homesteading a new economic frontier, and then running it as an idealized government that taxes at the Laffer maximum and most lets participants alone.
Being a tech CEO is hard. Because your not just selling weights. But dealing with numerous people with competing interests. People will always have problems. So tech companies always in a cycle of dealing with demands.
From the newsletter:
Unfortunately, new property rights require an immense and tedious investment in codification. When you’ve solved product, sales, marketing, and operations, the only thing left is politics, and by its nature, politics doesn’t get solved.