Public Policy exigencies
for
Platform
Economy & Social Media regulation
Is Politics underhandedly
mining Social Networks?
Public Lecture - RL Vol XII No CCCIX,
MMXVIII
Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD
Professor
of Public Policy & Sustainable Institutional Reforms
Abstract
Social media, through its
heavy reliance on memes, is reshaping
human language via unprecedented mixing of idioms, dialects, and
alphabets. What long-term effects will it have on the way we speak, write and
listen? Relative anonymity in social media is a double-edged sword: while users
can express their ideas more freely, the space is also crowded by false alarms
and an even newer player in the field — clandestine influencers who are
learning the lexicon of new media. How
do we balance anonymity with veracity? Netscape founder wrote a widely
read essay in 2011 entitled, ‘Why software is eating the world’, but this was
not taken seriously believing this was a metaphor. Now, the world faces the
challenge of extracting the world from the jaws of Internet (Mcnamee, 2018).
The platform economy is
economic and social activity facilitated by platforms. Such platforms are
typically online matchmakers or technology frameworks. By far the most common
type are ‘transaction platforms’, also known as ‘digital matchmakers’. A second
type is the ‘innovation platform’, which provides a common technology framework
upon which others can build, such as the many independent developers who work
on Microsoft's platform. Forerunners to contemporary digital economic platforms
can be found throughout history, especially in the second half of the 20th
century. Yet it was only in the year 2000 that the ‘platform’ metaphor started
to be widely used to describe digital matchmakers and innovation platforms.
Especially after the financial crises of 2008, companies operating with the new
‘platform business model’ have swiftly came to control an increasing share of
the world's overall economic activity, many times by disrupting traditional
business.
The conflict, the
desire to speak publicly and the fear of the consequences of this act or the
burden of responsibility derives from the fact that the right to freedom of
expression of the thoughts and feelings is the natural human right. Public policy on social media regulation is a
legal, ethical and moral dispensation by the executive branch of government,
curved out of constitutional, legislative and administrative laws, vis-à-vis a
class of issues in a manner consistent with law and institutional customs. Social
media must be regulated without hampering the bill of rights on freedom of
expression but, for pundits it may suggests itself and seems within
reach, only to elude; appears readily practicable only to resist realisation.
Key words: public
policy, regulatory environment, platform economy, social media, innovation
platform, ’
See paper here or https://www.academia.edu/36943048/Public_Policy_exigencies_for_Platform_Economy_and_Social_Media_regulation_Is_Politics_underhandedly_mining_Social_Networks_RL_Vol_XII_No_CCCIX_MMXV
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