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Now we've published the final part, describing how social media platforms hold audiences hostage, charging media companies to reach the subscribers who asked to see what they have to say. And, as with the previous installments, we set out a proposal for forcing tech companies to end this practice, putting more money in the pockets of news producers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

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To Save the News, We Need an End-to-End Web

This is part five of an ongoing, five-part series. Part one, the introduction, is here. Part two, about breaking up ad-tech companies, is here. Part three, about banning surveillance ads, is here. Part four, about opening up app stores, is here.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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Users pile in and lock themselves in, through the "#CollectiveActionProblem" - the difficulty of convincing all your friends to leave, and to agree on where to go:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Then Facebook turns on the surveillance they promised they'd never engage in, and also begins to promise media companies that it will nonsensually cram their posts down readers' eyeballs, luring in both advertisers and publishers.

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Facebook’s Secret War on Switching Costs

Update, October 1, 2021: The original version of this essay incorrectly stated that Metcalfe's Law dictated that the number of connections in a network doubled with each new user; that has been corrected, below.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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The solution to this is to enshrine "end-to-end" delivery for social media: to make social media platforms' first duty to deliver data from willing senders to willing recipients, as efficiently and reliably as possible:

https://locusmag.com/2023/03/commentary-cory-doctorow-end-to-end/

As a policy, end-to-end has a lot going for it. First, it is easy to administer.

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Commentary: Cory Doctorow: End to End

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell’s company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switch­boards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system bro…

^{Locus Online}

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Bad actors can (and do) exploit ambiguity to engage in conduct that *almost* rises to the level of harassment, and which is *experienced* as harassment, but which doesn't qualify as harassment:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Then there's the problem of figuring out whether platforms' failures to block harassment are reasonable or negligent, a question that can literally take *years* to resolve, and then only by deposing the engineers who build and maintain the systems involved.

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Como Is Infosec - Cory Doctorow - Medium

Content moderation is a security problem.. “Como Is Infosec” is published by Cory Doctorow.

^{Cory Doctorow (Medium)}

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Complicated platform regulations can have the perverse effect of being so expensive to comply with that only the largest - and worst, and most harmful - platforms can afford to follow the rule. That means that smaller platforms - including nonprofits, co-ops, and small businesses - are snuffed out by compliance costs, trapping users and business customers in giant, abusive walled gardens, forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

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As Platforms Decay, Let’s Put Users First

The net’s long decline into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four” isn’t a mystery. Nor was it by any means a forgone conclusion.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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* Saving the News From Big Tech

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

* To Save the News, We Must Shatter Ad-Tech

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

* To Save the News, We Must Ban Surveillance Advertising

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

* To Save the News, We Must Open Up App Stores

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

* To Save the News, We Need an End-to-End Web

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

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Image:
EFF
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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Saving the News From Big Tech

Media is in crisis: newsrooms all over the world are shuttering and the very profession of journalism is under sustained ideological and physical assault.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}