Digital Shrapnel in the War of Unintended Consequences

The likelihood of unintended consequences grows exponentially with incremental increases in the complexity of society. This is twice as true when the Internet is involved.

Unintended consequences can be as beneficial or destructive as intended consequences. Their gravity does not change as a result of their cause. Impact  is impact and damage is damage. The difference is, unintended consequences are not the result of  malicious or benevolent motivation. As such, progenitors cannot be indicted or praised the same way you would if the outcome was intentional..

That doesn't mean there is no responsibility for unintended consequences.

Intended consequence may attract praise or blame, but unintended consequences only endow burden.

If something good has happened accidentally, you want to understand why and you want to repeat it. If something unfortunate has happened, whoever is responsible for the trigger action, needs to prevent a re-occurrence and help mitigate any damage.

I am, of course, talking about problems faced by every company, especially online. There isn't a single successful website that hasn't had some unforeseen problems. In cases of security gaps or other programming issues, the problem is relatively straight forward. When it comes to the unintended repercussions of policy decisions, nothing is easy or clear.

Online companies in general, and social media especially, operate on the foundational concepts of the First Amendment. More speech is better; good speech and motives will win out over bad speech and bad motives. We are not there yet, but perhaps someday soon that will be true.

Today, we have a problem.

The desire to leave the majority of Internet content as unfettered as possible, for whatever reasons, has created a dark corner in the marketplace of ideas.

Videos, articles, books, websites, propaganda and stories, which on their own are simply offensive, objectionable, false or distasteful, but not overtly hateful, have accumulated. These covertly hateful collections have been allowed to amass in the name of free speech. This material is now being used to create self-validating narratives against Jews, Muslims, Blacks. Latinos, LGBT and a myriad of other groups whenever it is convenient.

It is easy to say that the Internet, the companies or their owners are biased. However, none of that is true.

The truth is worse. The endemic hate we now experience  is an unintended consequence of  lofty and good ideas. Unfortunately, we hesitate to attribute bad results to good ideas.

Now we need to address the problem.

Although the genesis of the problem was aided by the Internet companies, the hate itself was created by people. No doubt the companies have a role to play in setting things right. To lay the entire responsibility for the problem at the door of the industry is unfair and unrealistic. Equally, companies expecting users to to solve the problem without industry support is also skewed.

The best and worst things about the  Internet are like a landscape painted by countless companies and people. Repairing the damage will not be easy or simple, especially if we intend to get it right.