Online, equity trumps equality
Creating healthy communities means laying down rules about what can be said.
Buzzfeed’s inside history of Twitter abuse is full of juicy detail:
Inside the meeting, attended by Costolo, Stricker, Gadde, and product head Kevin Weil (now Instagram’s product lead) and first reported by BuzzFeed News, tensions rose as Costolo’s desire to build a more palatable network that was marketable and ultimately attractive to new users clashed with Stricker and Gadde’s desire for radically free expression.
This is a common thread on the internet: that the most empowering thing to do is give everyone an equal voice. And in the early days of the web, it may even have been true.
It reminds me of this illustration of the difference between equity and equality:
By giving equality to all voices, we inadvertently disempower the people whose voices are already at a disadvantage — and bake in a systemic advantage for people who are already disproportionately heard.
There is certainly an inherent danger to providing community culture as a service: you run the risk of pruning content according to the values of the people who run the community. The truth is, though, that this already happens. Software is built by people, who unconsciously (or sometimes consciously) build in their own biases and assumptions about the world.
By making community norms explicit — that is, by saying “these are the rules”, and enforcing them — we aid freedom of speech by ensuring everyone plays by the same rules. When rules are secret or unknowable, and arbitrarily implemented, the result can only be inequality. It becomes one rule for some people and another rule for others, by definition. This is true of all communities, from real-world clubs, through online forums, to entire markets.
At this point in the internet’s development, being able to share online with a mass audience isn’t special in itself. That’s what the internet has become. The differential is in what kind of a community you create, and which norms you choose to enforce. Do you allow vulnerable voices to be abused in the name of “free speech”, or do you protect their ability to be heard?
In the old days, we used to have a utopian vision of what the web would be. We now know that this was short of the mark. In order to create healthier communities with more vibrant ecosystems, we have to actively protect their most vulnerable participants.
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