On Account Ownership
I have been thinking a lot about the infrastructure and institutions that help protect and foster a free environment for speech and publications. These days, it seems like we can’t go a day without Donald Trump announcing some new SLAPP suit against some newspaper, or threatening operations on Main Street unless his least favorite comedian gets fired. These constant assaults from the Over-Privileged are overwhelming, and I keep finding myself day thinking on ways to impede these anti-democratic practices.
One of the ways that I was thinking about recently takes some inspiration from the way Elon Musk inserted himself into Alex Jones’s defamation suit and the recent InfoWars bankruptcy.
Alex Jones lost a Defamation Lawsuit from the survivors of the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting. The judgment against Jones and Infowars is about USD 1.5 billion.
To cover this debt, Jones is being forced to auction InforWars and its assets, one of which is the Official InfoWars Twitter Account. When the winning bid for Jones’s right-wing media company came from the Onion, a left-leaning satirical news outlet, the sale of the InfoWars Twitter account was contested by the Last Scion of Apartheid, Elon Musk.
Musk argues that the Onion has no claim to the InfoWars Twitter account because the Bankruptcy court cannot include the InfoWars Twitter account in the collection of auctioned assets. After all, all Twitter Accounts and their Content, including InfoWars’ Twitter Account, are owned by Twitter and not owned by the people or companies that use them.
According to CNN at the time, Musk and his team argued that X’s “...terms of service make it clear that accounts cannot be sold, and are ultimately owned by X.”
The argument that Musk and his attorneys made gave voice to a long-accepted but oft-neglected article in those long, byzantine Terms and Conditions that we all sign whenever creating an account for any online platform. Online Platforms lay claim to any content posted on their platforms, as well as each of our User Accounts.
An article from CNN goes on to report that this arrangement is “not unusual for a social media platform’s terms of service”.They share the following from Eric Goldman, an associate dean and professor of tech law at Santa Clara University School of Law:
“Social media services approach this topic gingerly because they want to encourage their users to invest heavily in their accounts,” Goldman said. “If users fear that the services can moot those investments by taking back or exercising control over the handle, power users will be reluctant to make the desired investments.”
This has long been the accepted practice in Silicon Valley, and many of these companies shy away from public court cases because it is not in their best interest to loudly proclaim from the rooftops that your DM Chats with your Girlfriend are owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by a bunch of software bros that can use it for anything they want.
I thought that was a neat trick.
So let’s use what we’ve just learned and let’s run this through a Hypothetical Situation.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you are a small newspaper in Nebraska.
You could create a new corporate entity, for only a couple of hundred bucks, and then use that Company to host a Mastodon Server. And Boom! You’ve started your very own independent Social Media Company.
You create a User Account for your public newspaper company and post your content and articles on your new Social Media Company. Suddenly, all of your published content, ad revenue, and backlog of content are “owned” by the Social Media Company, since we all hand over everything we post when we accept those Terms and Conditions.
So, when Donald Trump inevitably sues you for 10 trillion dollars, you can declare bankruptcy, just like Infowars, but you get to keep your Social Media and related content, because all of that is owned by your Social Media company.
With a pretty straightforward process, people could essentially shield their content and copyrightable articles from bankruptcy.
