from the open-source-to-the-rescue dept
Over the last decade, a small handful of large platforms have become de facto arbiters of how people communicate and share information with one another. As concerns about that concentrated power and those platforms’ decisions have piled up, so too have calls for greater competition and choice in social media and other services for communication and sharing. While some of the debate has focused on making it easier for people to leave behind large, incumbent services, it’s also turned to how to ensure people have somewhere to go – that is, a vibrant ecosystem of alternative services that can reflect different and distinct community norms and practices. The growth of decentralized services like Bluesky and Mastodon is one manifestation of this trend.
For that sort of ecosystem to function, it’s critical to make it easier for new services to implement and enforce those different and distinct community norms and practices. More effective, openly available tooling for trust and safety practices – as well as more accessible best practices for development of such tools – could lower barriers to the development of and competition among a diversity of services, making it so that each organization does not have to reinvent the wheel.
We recently had the opportunity to speak with experts from across the Internet ecosystem and learn from their experience building, scaling and leading trust and safety inside organizations large and small. Every company that allows people to find, communicate, create, or share information needs to think about trust and safety (T&S). And every single one of the experts we spoke to underscored the fact that effective decision-making about content and conduct online depends on the development of rules, but also tools. T&S is as much a logistics challenge as a policy challenge – a matter of facilitating effective decision-making about content and conduct, undergirded by technology.
Building that tooling has been a bit like reinventing the wheel at every organization over the past two decades. In recent years a number of vendors – some start-ups, some larger enterprises – have emerged to provide tooling solutions to T&S problems. While these companies signal the emergence of market solutions for tooling needs, T&S professionals that we interviewed voiced concerns about dependence on a limited set of firms, particularly as start-up vendors have tended to eventually be acquired and brought in-house by larger companies. It is still the case that many organizations need to build in-house tooling solutions as well.
Open source tools, or otherwise openly available tools that anyone can deploy, could help. To some extent, they already do – for instance, it’s easy to find and deploy high-quality, open source tools for matching exact and near-exact copies of content, which helps services ensure that content they’ve previously removed does not reappear.
But there are many other opportunities for open tools to change the landscape for the better, many of which are detailed in the report we published as part of the Atlantic Council’s Taskforce on a Trustworthy Future Web. But our work led us to conclude that the big opportunity is to stand up an organization that will steward open source tools as well as the community of developers and professionals around them. Philanthropy and companies could jointly invest in such an effort, just as they invest in other efforts to address common technical challenges.
Policymakers, too, ought to think about this as they consider the interaction between competition and safety regulation. As more and more online safety regulations are passed, smaller services and start-ups will face higher barriers to entry. If we want to see more competition and choice in social media, then it’s essential to make trust and safety tooling more easily accessible and available.
While making robust open tools widely available will take significant money and resources, our study found both practitioners and companies eager to get involved. For example, Discord wants to release an open-source version of its in-house rules engine (which help services with automated processing of content), but hopes that a steward can be identified to maintain and support the tool to assist other organizations that choose to deploy it.
The question isn’t whether robust open tooling is possible, but rather how to catalyze investment and action to make it more of a reality. We hope people will build on the evidence base in this report to do just that.
Betsy Masiello and Derek Slater run Proteus Strategies, a tech policy strategy firm.
Filed Under: open source, tooling, trust and safety
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