From Noxious to Public? Tracing Ethical Dynamics of Social Media Platform Conversions

Abstract

Sometimes, some social media marketplaces turn from noxious to public. Why do such conversions happen, what do they reveal about a platform’s definition of “public,” and when should they happen? Drawing on contemporary examples, this article examines some of the empirical and normative dimensions of platform conversions.

When do social media platforms become public platforms—and what do such conversions have to teach us about the ethics of sociotechnical power? An emerging set of software platforms that enable peer-to-peer exchanges outside of traditional marketplaces—often problematically grouped under the misnomer “sharing economy”—is entering a new phase of sophistication and uncertainty. Periodically, unexpectedly, and temporarily, they convert from “noxious markets” to public platforms. My aim here is to sketch how this happens, and why it matters.

Consider these examples:

• During a 2014 hostage crisis in downtown Sydney, Uber initially charged riders a minimum of $100 and four times the standard mileage rate to escape from the crisis area; after a social media outcry, they offered to refund these charges and give free rides to people fleeing the region (Ries & Ryall, 2014).

• In advance of what was expected to be a severe snow storm in 2015, Uber capped its New York City surge pricing to 2.8 times the normal rate stating that “all Uber proceeds will be donated to the American Red Cross to support relief efforts” (Mondalek & Saitto, 2015).

• After AirBnB hosts began offering free or low-cost accommodation to New Yorkers displaced after Hurricane Sandy, AirBnB instituted a “disaster response” program in which hosts in affected areas are prompted to offer listings for free, and AirBnB booking fees are waived; and AirBnB has begun working with the cities of San Francisco and Portland to identify people “who will commit to opening their doors to displaced persons and disaster service workers when an emergency occurs” (Napier, 2014) and make it easier for them to join AirBnB.

• Soon after the 2013 Boston Bombing and during the search for suspects, the Boston Globe, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal all suspended or reconfigured their paywalls to make their professionally produced and user-curated content available for free (Beaujon, 2013).

In these moments, some subset of the code, norms, policies, people, and languages that defined these platforms (Gillespie, 2010) as marketplaces were radically transformed. A transportation business became a subsidized ride-sharing service in response to public pressure and in anticipation of a public emergency; a housing marketplace turned into a short-term, public shelter match-making service and a government partner in disaster planning; and professional news organizations judged their stories and user-curated content too valuable to withhold from non-paying audiences trying to make sense of public safety crises. In each instance, the platform became a little less like a lightly regulated, privately managed marketplace of social media fueled contracting; it began to look like a public service. But what was so special about these moments? Where did these platforms’ definitions of “public” come from—and how do they emerge from each platform’s unique combination of people, code, norms, and economic assumptions?

Two types of scholarship can help unpack these questions. First, as philosopher and economic ethicist Debra Satz suggests, some things should simply not be for sale. Human body parts, child labor, toxic waste, sex, and life-saving medicines, she argues, are all beyond the moral limits of markets. Attempts to commodify and exchange these goods often create what she calls “noxious markets,” characterized by vulnerability (“people are so poor or so desperate that they accept any terms of exchange”), weak agency (“parties have poor information about the goods they are exchanging”), extremely harmful outcomes for individuals (markets in which people “become destitute or in which their most basic interests are undermined”), and extremely harmful outcomes for society (undermining “the framework needed for a society of equals, supporting relations of humiliating subordination or unaccountable power”) (Satz, 2010, p. 9) While she acknowledges that banning some of these markets may simply push their noxious dynamics further out of regulators’ reach, Satz rejects the idea that we simply need better market mechanisms for trading such goods and services: Some “markets need to be blocked altogether; there is sufficient reason to draw some bottom lines” (p. 10).

Second, as Ed Baker (2002) argues, communication products are special types of commodities. News and information are public goods not only because of their non-rivalrous and non-excludable nature but also because of their powerful externalities, unique funding structures, and people’s varied motivations for participating in their marketplaces. My consumption of a news story doesn’t prevent you from reading it; we benefit from—and are harmed by—living among people who are or aren’t motivated to read news; and such motivations range from enlightenment and entertainment to commerce and politics. Furthermore, most of a news market’s value derives not from the news stories themselves, but from their potential to connect audiences of consumers to advertisers of other, non-public goods. News markets might become noxious not because information itself should not be for sale, but because a news market’s patterns of circulation facilitate vulnerability, weak agency, and harmful outcomes for individuals and society. Noxiousness derives from how media markets work, not what media markets sell.

Similarly, perhaps we can explain why a peer-to-peer market platform becomes noxious by examining when it changes how it sells.

When Uber, AirBnB, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal quickly redesigned their platforms, were they doing so because they found themselves to be running “noxious platforms?” Did exogenous shocks to their networks and operating environments put them suddenly in the business of producing unacceptable vulnerabilities, weak agencies, and harmful outcomes for individuals and societies—necessitating rapid redesigns in response to actual and anticipated ethical dilemmas? Although these moments can be cynically seen as the strategic avoidance of (or recovery from) public relations failures, they might also suggest the discovery of moral limits to social media markets. Such moments might give us insight into two related questions: what are noxious markets, and why are they significant?

First, empirically, what forces temporarily convert social media fueled platforms from noxious to public? Which exogenous shocks register as significant, and which are ignored? When are goods discounted or offered for free, when are platform owners versus users expected to absorb costs, and what arguments convince platform users to behave in non-noxious ways? How is the power to spur a redesign distributed among sociotechnical actors with varying forms of knowledge and influence: social media critics observing a platform’s response, platform users searching for a more ethical form of membership, public relations officials concerned about a platform’s brand, technologists reconfiguring a platform’s algorithms and data structures, attendant software implicated in a redesign but beyond a platform’s control, financial backers protecting a platform’s business model, and government officials managing public policy initiatives intersecting with social media platforms. What clues do these constellations of actors leave about what they think constitutes a shared, public crisis—and when do they decide that a public crisis has expired and revert their platforms to earlier, privately motivated configurations?

Second, normatively, when should platforms be classified as noxious and converted to public platforms? Should it depend upon which goods or services are in question—for example, how should the potential noxiousness of a peer-to-peer food marketplace platform like “Josephine” (Wall, 2014) compare to that of a transportation (Uber), housing (AirBnB), or labor platform (Mechanical Turk)? Should noxiousness depend upon who a platform’s users are—for example, should workers using TaskRabbit as their primary source of income be exempt from platform conversions that discount their labor and make them more expensive than competitors with other income who are able to volunteer for free in moments of crisis? Should AirBnB users displaced by natural disasters have to show evidence of income hardship before taking advantage of discounted listings or fee waivers intended for “genuinely” destitute displaced persons? Should different parts of a platform’s network have different obligations—for example, if a platform spans regions with more or less public sector or civil society support, should it have different thresholds of, and responses to, noxiousness? Most broadly, how should responsibility for imagining and governing such scenarios—for creating tests and remedies of public need—be distributed among technologists, users, regulators, and algorithms?

Evidence suggests that sometimes, some platforms convert from noxious to public. They shift from being marketplaces facilitating supply–demand dynamics to platforms cognizant of the ethics of what they are supplying and why demand exists. With regard to social media fueled marketplace platforms, we seem to be at a moment of “interpretive flexibility” (Pinch & Bijker, 1984): The set of people, rhetoric, technologies, and norms constituting these platforms is currently debating its core meanings, debating which problems are relevant, what kinds of noxiousness spur redesigns, and who has the power to force such conversions.

Just as the ethics of peer-to-peer labor platforms are being critically examined (Scholz, 2014), so too might the sociotechnical dynamics of platform conversions. To understand and influence a platform’s power to make public-minded interventions into peer-to-peer marketplaces, we must understand exactly what a platform means by “public”—and publics need from platforms.