Glenn Harlan Reynolds

This week is Sunshine Week, and lots of people are writing about government transparency, which is very important. From federal agencies stiff-arming Freedom of Information Act requests, to government agencies punishing whistleblowers, to the Obama Administration’s new record in withholding public information, there’s a lot to talk about.

But it’s not just the government that matters. Plenty of private companies that deal with the public could do better with transparency than they do, and they’d be a lot more trusted if they did. The question is whether they care more about being trusted, or about what they can get away with. At the moment, it’s looking as if they’re more concerned with the latter.

Twitter, for example, recently launched an “anti-harassment” campaign featuring, as Ed Morrissey described it, the rather Orwellian-sounding Trust & Safety Council. Almost immediately thereafter, Twitter banned — without much of an explanation — Robert Stacy McCain, a prominent critic of one of the council’s members, Anita Sarkeesian. Shortly before that, Twitter had also de-verified gay conservative Milo Yiannopoulos, also a Sarkeesian critic. (The blue “verified” check mark is supposed to simply demonstrate that celebrity tweeters are the real thing, not to connote any sort of official endorsement, but, without explanation, Twitter took away Yiannopoulos’s, though he remains, in fact, the real Milo Yiannopoulos.)

As Reason’s Robby Soave notes, it looks suspicious:

"Twitter is a private company, of course, and if it wants to outlaw strong language, it can. In fact, it’s well within its rights to have one set of rules for Robert Stacy McCain, and another set of rules for everyone else. It’s allowed to ban McCain for no reason other than its bosses don’t like him. If Twitter wants to take a side in the online culture war, it can. It can confiscate Milo Yiannopoulos’s blue checkmark. This is not about the First Amendment."

Soave continues, "But if that’s what Twitter is doing, it’s certainly not being honest about it — and its many, many customers who value the ethos of free speech would certainly object. In constructing its Trust and Safety Council, the social media platform explicitly claimed it was trying to strike a balance between allowing free speech and prohibiting harassment and abuse. But its selections for this committee were entirely one-sided — there’s not a single uncompromising anti-censorship figure or group on the list. It looks like Twitter gave control of its harassment policy to a bunch of ideologues, and now their enemies are being excluded from the platform."

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Well, it looks like that because, basically, that’s what’s happening. Meanwhile, Twitter’s also moving toward the sort of “algorithmic timeline” — in which what you see depends on what it wants you to see, not just what’s been posted in chronological order — similar to what Facebook has been using for a while.

Meanwhile, Facebook hasadmitted that it manipulated user timelines in order to affect their emotions. Forbes reported, “As first noted by The New Scientist and Animal New York, Facebook’s data scientists manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users, removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to see how it affected their moods. If there was a week in January 2012 where you were only seeing photos of dead dogs or incredibly cute babies, you may have been part of the study.”

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I don’t want somebody’s algorithm showing me what they think I want to see — or, more ominously, what they want me to see for their own purposes.

Facebook has claimed, somewhat implausibly, that its terms of service (you know, the click-through thing that nobody reads) constituted “informed consent” for purposes of experimenting on its users. But those legalities aside, social media users — and regulators, and in particular investors — need to be aware of the potential for abuse (and potentially, liability) that this sort of behavior raises.

We demand honesty and transparency from the government. We should expect the same from people we deal with in the free market.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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