Andrea O’Sullivan and Christian McGuire for the Mercatus Center: Facebook has faced plenty of complaints about its handling of hot-button issues in the last year, including the company’s handling of political disinformation, hate speech, ideological bias, and consumer privacy. It’s not surprising, then, that Facebook now faces renewed whispers of federal regulation.
… Policymakers should pause before rushing to regulate. Data privacy legislation could be far from a lump of coal for the controversial company. On the contrary, it could be the best Christmas present Mark Zuckerberg could ask for.
Large firms like Facebook are the best positioned to cope with the costs of expansive regulation, as Adam Thierer has pointed out. They, therefore, benefit from reduced competition. At the same time, large firms would rather not suffer the compliance headache, even though they ultimately benefit. So they will often champion an alternative regulation that imposes fewer costs on them (while perhaps still handicapping the competition). …
There are a number of ways that legislation, a regulation or regulatory agency can be “captured.” Companies like Facebook can lobby for favorable laws in Congress, where legislators and their staff are often forced to rely on industry experts for their technical knowledge. Further, once regulatory fervor dies down, the regulated companies are often the most important actors that still care to push for certain rule changes.
Artificial Intelligence marketing is scary
Joseph Turow for New America: Conversational marketing with biometrics will be today’s discriminatory world on steroids. If the assistant gauges that a shopper’s voice is nervous in the aisle, it may offer that shopper a specific discount because doing so has worked in the past with that same level of anxiety. Another person might get offered less or more, depending on the emotion in their voice as tied to purchase history. All this will take place behind a veil. The customer will have little understanding of the profiles created through the use of deep data using real-time analytics. Marketers, though, will have increasingly asymmetrical knowledge and leverage in their relationship with customers.
Artificial Intelligence marketing technologies would be troubling even if they just stayed in the advertising and selling domains. They would push us further toward a society in which people know they are treated differently but can’t quite figure out when or why. The public spheres that people use most — the online, app, and physical shopping arenas — will become places of personal and social tension as people realize they are getting different ads than others, seeing different products, and paying different prices based on databases they cannot see and analytical profiles they might not want.
But it gets worse. There is virtually no chance that the technology developed for marketing will stay in marketing. Sophisticated AI has the potential to be applied to populations for all purposes, including for governmental leverage and control. When it comes to data flows about populations, the boundaries between business and government are blurry, and the potential of artificial intelligence will make them blurrier.
Yemen resolution is a step in the right direction
Thanassis Cambanis for the Century Foundation: The Senate vote to allow debate on ending U.S. military involvement in Yemen marked the crossing of a significant threshold, and not just because the resolution will create political pressure to reverse the tide of atrocities against Yemeni civilians.
Over the long term, the Senate’s decision to invoke the War Powers Resolution might prove even more consequential in the political struggle now belatedly underway to roll back America’s ever-metastasizing and endless “war on terror.”
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America has militarized every aspect of its foreign policy, and has subordinated its most important core values — civil liberties, due process, universal rights — to a blinkered obsession with counterterrorism. Long-standing tensions between values and interests tilted abruptly in favor of an extreme counter-terror approach.
U.S. policymakers have chased the mirage of zero-risk security while undermining basic bulwarks of the American system, most importantly our criminal justice system and our diplomatic corps. All the while, even some critics of America’s security obsessions feared that electoral politics made it impossible to stand against the endless war and the counterterrorism juggernaut, believing voters wouldn’t tolerate any politician who wanted to limit the war on terror.
The victory of the proposed joint resolution could begin the long overdue process of bringing sunshine to a dark chapter in American history.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from research by the various think tanks.
