Henry Farrell: belief

Transcript context

…But we can’t regulate 8chan very well either, right? They post the very nastiest stuff you can imagine. They’re presumably a small company. They don’t have any kind of dominant position. I’ve never even wanted to visit, but I read about what’s on there, and we can’t stop them either, so it doesn’t seem the problem is Facebook or the structure of the economy. Isn’t it just the case we now have technologies where everything that can be said will be said, and we’re not going to stop that? Well, I guess the question for me is — and again, this is a wide open question because we simply don’t have enough good empirical research — but what is the relationship and the broader ecology between companies like 8chan and companies like Facebook? I suspect that companies like 8chan will be far, far less successful if there weren’t much bigger platforms like Facebook that they could effectively grow upon. So here are the arguments, something as follows. If you think about 8chan, and if you think about 4chan before it, they were basically meme factories. They were basically these places where these bored individuals hung out. You also created these memes in a kind of process of frenzied Darwinian evolution, where you desperately want to make sure that whatever you had said was on the front page because otherwise it would disappear forever. So you’ve got this survival-of-the-fittest thing, where incredibly valuable or incredibly effective memes go out and begin to populate the entire space. But you need two things for that to work. First of all, you need a process of generation, and secondly, you need some kind of process of dissemination. You need other platforms which have far greater reach, which can then allow for these memes to propagate through the atmosphere. I suspect that if we were in a world in which everything was at the scale of 8chan, rather than having a mixture of companies at the scale of 8chan and companies at the scale of Facebook, that the likelihood of this stuff spreading and becoming epidemic across the entire community of internet users would be far, far less. Obviously, we would have other problems then. But I think that the problems that we would face would be a very, very different set of problems from the problems that we face in the current environment. Right now, WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, and it’s either very hard or impossible to crack that. Should the law insist on a back door in the United States?…

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