The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

Podcaster Madeline shared her concerns about social media being a wormhole that she doesn’t want to get sucked into. Simultaneously, she feels a need to stay updated about what’s going on amongst GenZers, so she forces herself to go on a bit. She also gets “ambient news” from her mom listening to WNYC in the background, as well as notifications from her school’s subscription to the NYTimes. Overall, she feels news and information is circulating in so many different ways today that you don’t get it from one spot but from a larger swirl.

Olivia asked about whether one group or party would be more negatively affected than others by media policy decisions. Robyn noted that the implications are much more equal than people tend to think. If you look at the top media that’s shared on FB, it always tends to be conservative. Robyn and colleagues studied demonetization across a range of genres and found it happening at every single level of the ecosystem.

Media analyst Robyn Caplan talked about how politicians are engaging in debate as to whether platforms will follow rules and norms of the US or elsewhere, given that they operate globally. There’s concerns about whether this could lead to tech companies playing to the lowest common denominators rather than American values—for ex, Europe has more of an investment in freedom FROM speech than we do and, since the First Amendment is not a protected right for private companies, conservative politicians have expressed concerns about free speech being undercut.

Robyn Caplan notes that she has every belief that Facebook will change its political ad policy before the election. She agreed that it could definitely backfire. There are Concerns that essential voter information won’t be able to get out in a timely fashion, and that grassroots false information could dominate the platforms w/o campaigns being able to contradict misinformation. The intention is to mirror media blackouts in different countries, but that’s very different than blacking out political ads. There’s research that political ads actually do little to change voters’ intentions that close to an election, but they DO help get necessary information out to the public.

Robyn Caplan discussed the distinction btw mediation and moderation as strategies used by platforms to increase trustworthiness of information online. Users tend to engage in moderation but a lot of platforms use a system of mediation to determine what is a trustworthy source and to then highlight that and bring it to the top. She noted that one isn’t necessarily better than the other—both need to be critiqued and examined, as do all media decisions, from what they publish to the composition of the team making the decisions

Robyn Caplan underscored the importance of policies that prioritize a protected class. She explained the distinction between freedom from speech and freedom of speech. In the U.S., they are collapsed and freedom TO speak is prioritized over freedom from speech.

Robyn Caplan contextualized that the U.S., unlike many other countries, doesn’t have the notion of protected class. As such, a lot of platforms have policies against hate speech that don’t take power relationships into account and instead paint with a broad brush.

Robyn Caplan shared that since 2016, tech companies that had once been heralded as models of innovation and where the American economy needed to be headed, have been much more critiqued, both as monopolies and for the impact of their dominance on that election and on so many facets of life. In response, companies are taking on a lot of different strategies to try to change the narrative about the impact they’re having. But they are trying to deal with a problem that’s constantly unfolding. In come cases, they’re making different policy choices now, but we won’t know the impact of those choices for years to come.

Media analyst Robyn Caplan shared how fundamentally her psych degree informs how she makes sense of social media (as it should for all of us...)

Robyn Caplan started off pursuing psychology but sort of “fell into” writing about the business of media because she was seeing a lot of fascinating things behind the scenes. Early in her career she looked at things like how l metrics influence the things that get published and how different audiences—“old” media and new media—come into conflict with each other. Through this, she started doing global media policy because there were a lot of questions coming up that she became interested in—for ex, jurisdictional issues around cloud storage and how you hold people responsible based on where information is stored vs where it’s accessed. Before she knew it, she was a media analyst and writer and she hasn’t looked back