What is our right to communicate?

I wrote this post in Feb. 2021, but didn’t publish it at the time

The web allowed everyone to speak to each other, and to as many people as would listen. When everyone can speak, who should we listen to?

I feel like there’s a a question underlying many of the issues that we’re facing these days, and that is: what is our right to communicate with one another?

Regardless of how you feel about the outcome of the 2016 US election, that event and the subsequent four years, including this COVID pandemic, have brought to the forefront several important issues. These issues include questions about the nature and role of disinformation, the impact that social media and businesses based on advertising business models might have on us, and how all these elements interplay with our notions of democratic society.

The movie The Social Dilemma (2020) tries to touch on some of the problematic aspects of social networks based on advertising revenues, and how in using these products our attention becomes the primary commodity those social networks sell, along with precise data that might help advertisers more precisely decide who to communicate with, and how to specifically change their mind about something: whether they’re looking to convince us to buy their product, or to change our beliefs about a particular issue.

And in this way, the lines between advertising and communication are blurred. Whenever you communicate with anyone, to some extent, you’re each shaping each other’s beliefs and mental states. If it’s a one-way communication, as in often the case of advertising, then you don’t get to also shift the beliefs of the advertiser in that moment. Advertising is just a form of communication, where an advertiser is able to pay a service to broadcast their message to a larger audience of people on that service.

And the problematic aspects that The Social Dilemma raises about paid communication (i.e. advertising), likely go beyond just communication that is paid for. I think the issues we’re going to have to think through go beyond setting guidelines for advertising. There’s a deeper question about what is our right to communicate with one another, and in turn what is our right to change each other’s minds? What are our rights and protections when it comes to each other’s time and attention?

I keep coming back to this overarching question, that for me contains in it a ton of nuanced sub-questions, perhaps because in asking “what is our right to communicate with each other?” We’re really asking something about how it is to co-exist.

Here are a few of these subquestions, and though I frame them as questions about rights, they may be better framed as questions of what our norms ought to be (since what are rights except norms we’ve chosen to enforce?):

• What is my right to not be shown ads? Why is it ok for there to be billboards on the side of the road that try to capture my attention and show me particular messages?

• What is my right to pick up the phone and call you at an unexpected time, and to try to change your mind about some topic when you were busy doing something completely different and not even thinking about what I wanted to discuss?

• What is my right to shift your mood by saying something that might upset you?

• What are my rights to reach out to a stranger on the internet? And conversely, what is my right to opt out of being contacted?

• What is the difference between advertising, and helping someone find something they were looking for, or reaching out to let them know that you have a solution to some problem they have or something they want? How ought our norms govern these differing situations?

• What is my right to uncensored communication? And to whom am I allowed to speak in this uncensored way?

• Are there types of communication that we ought to censor, and if so, who ought to be the arbiter of what communication is censored?

• What is my right to private communication with others?

• What are the rights of individuals as opposed to organizations in these respects? Ought they to have different rights?

• What is my right to opt out of communication with other people in my society, or with the government of the nation I reside in?

• What are the rights of politicians, organizations, and advertisers to use psychological techniques known to be effective in changing people’s beliefs? What if they use these techniques of “effective communication” to shift beliefs in a direction you don’t feel good about?

• What is our obligation to communicate only things we believe to be true, and what is our responsibility to attempt to inform ourselves about the truth of statements that we’re making prior to communicating those statements to others?

• Conversely, what consequences ought we to face when putting out dis-information?

• What is the relationship between disinformation, and imagination?

These questions have always been around, but the advances of the Internet over the last 20 years have heightened them to an entirely new level.

Let’s think about it first on the personal level: I can now at any time reach into my pocket, and make a phone call to any of my friends, interrupting whatever they’re doing unless they’ve put their phone on do-not-disturb. Over time, I now end up having more and more people that I could contact. Even when I move to another city, changing my geography doesn’t mean losing the opportunity for staying in touch with someone.

Discussing this with a friend he was saying that the experience of being able to contact anyone ends up for him as feeling bad that you’re not contacting all these people who you could be contacting that are just a phone call away.

I can hop on to Twitter, or Facebook, or Clubhouse, and start to consume the ideas and beliefs of all the people who are communicating there, some of whom are paid to communicate some message (e.g. Influencers), along with consuming other communications clearly marked as advertising.

Overall, the lived experience for me just feels like I’m being communicated with a whole lot more than I was before.

Even in you reading this essay, I’m now communicating with you and having to ask myself, what is my responsibility in this communication to you? What is my intent? Is this worthwhile, or am I being a poor custodian of your time and beliefs, and my time and beliefs.

If you were communicating with me, and you started to say things that I disagree with, that I think might be harmful to others, what is my responsibility to compassionately communicate with you and to try to change your mind?

I think these questions are going to become particularly salient as we head into this next chapter.

Consider just the last few months:

• The United States Capitol was stormed by people, some of whom believed in conspiracy theories put out by QAnon.

• Sites like Parler that provided a platform where some of those people were communicating ended up getting their services taken down by most of their providers including Amazon.

• Donald Trump, the sitting President of the United States was banned from social media platforms, substantially diminishing his ability to broadcast messages, due to concerns that his use of those platforms would incite violence. These events have raised questions about censorship in the United States, and more broadly.

• The Chinese government has had to grapple with international condemnation of their treatment of Uighirs, which Canada for example has condemned as a genocide. They’ve also been criticized at times over censorship of information pertaining to the management of the early stages of the COVID outbreak,

• At the same time as all of this is happening, we’re seeing ever rapid adoption of blockchains technologies and organizations, that are promising decentralized, censorship-free systems for communication and exchange. In line with this, we’re also seeing discussions about whether uncensored communication on the internet is even desirable, or in what instances its desirable, and we’re also seeing related questions about the ability to interact anonymously. Related to this, consider that in the early days of the COVID outbreak, netizens of China posted to the Blockchain as a way to circumvent Chinese censorship: Chinese Netizens Use Ethereum To Avoid China’s COVID-19 Censorship

• Using advances in artificial intelligence, people are able to easily create deepfake videos of public figures that have them say whatever they want, and that are increasingly convincing, and hard to distinguish from a genuine video. Deepfake videos of Tom Cruise show the technology’s threat to society is very real

At its root, the Internet is about communication. It is about the ability to scale up, speed up, and broaden access to communication, and with communication, the ability to change beliefs. It has amplified our communication to such a magnitude that it brings into sharper resolution some of the questions about what norms we ought to establish for how we communicate with one another.

What types of rights and norms ought we to strive for in our communication with one another? How ought we to collectively form our beliefs, and what do we mean when we say “collective”, and “collective beliefs”?

Related to these questions, something that comes up for me, is thinking what about how we communicate compassionately, and how compassionate communication is related to building trust, mutual understanding, and in-turn compassionate coexistence, so that we ease the problematic nature of some of the questions above. Prepare yourselves for some compassionate advertising :).

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Extras

At a deeper level, it is also interesting how advances in technology itself will dictate what options we might have available to us in terms of privacy and censorship of communication.

It is interesting that the resolution of fundamental questions in computational complexity theory, and cryptography, will have a bearing on what types of privacy and censorship are possible. A while back I learned about Impagliazzo’s Five Worlds, which is a paper where the author, Russell Impagliazzo, describes how depending on the outcome of certain unsolved questions in complexity theory, there are five possible worlds we might end up where we have differing degrees of ability to communicate privately (and also to solve computationally hard problems) Computational Complexity: Impagliazzo’s Five Worlds.

On a different thread, another interesting threads around disinformation, and our ability to decipher the “truthfulness” or “reliability” of some information, is Brandolini’s law (Brandolini’s law - Wikipedia): “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.”