Why does the criminal justice system feel so unfair to those who interact with it? Why does Internet governance often feel so arbitrary? Legal scholars Tracey Meares and Tom Tyler believe that we need justice systems made up of fair processes designed first and foremost to help us trust that justice. This week on Reimagining, we’re joined by the two cofounders of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School.
Transcript
Ethan Zuckerman:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to Reimagining the Internet. I remain Ethan Zuckerman, your host over at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I am thrilled to have with me Professor Tracey Meares, who is the Walton Hale Hamilton professor of law at Yale Law School. She is the founding co-director of the Justice Collaboratory. She’s an expert on policing in urban communities, focused on understanding how the public understands the relationship with police, prosecutors and judges.
I’m also here with Professor Tom Tyler, who is the Macklin Fleming professor of law and professor of psychology at Yale Law School, the other founding director of the Justice Collaboratory, a leading expert on procedural justice and trust in the law.
You may be wondering why we have these incredibly smart people who know a ton about policing procedural justice are with us, and the answer is they are co-authors on an absolutely fantastic paper that came out recently called, Procedural Justice and Self-Governance on Twitter. I think they are two of the smartest people out there thinking about how communities generate trust and how structures and online architectures could generate trust. Professors, it’s so great to have you here.
Tom Tyler:
Thank you.
Tracey Meares:
We are so happy to be here. This is going to be so fun.
Ethan Zuckerman:
It should be a good time. Tracey, let me start with you because I know that Tom sometimes introduces the two of you by saying that Tracey is the lawyer and Tom is the psychologist. But let me put the first question sort of with a legal spin to you, Tracey, what is procedural justice and how did it come about?
Tracey Meares:
So, procedural justice is a social psychological framework that researchers have found has been a very important factor in explaining how people come to conclusions about the legitimacy of legal authorities and just authorities as a general matter. So, let me back up and talk a little bit about legitimacy first.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Please.
Tracey Meares:
And then say a little bit more about procedural justice. So, when you think about what’s important about legitimacy, it’s that it’s a framework that explains why people do things for internal motivations.
So, in the law, especially in the criminal law context, we care a lot about people obeying rules and laws. In one way, we could get people to obey laws and rules is to say, “Well, if you don’t obey this law, we’ll give you a consequence. We will punish you.” If a person obeys the law because of that externalized reason, a fear of punishment, then you wouldn’t say that the person has internalized the value of obeying the law.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Right. They’re just fearing the consequences acting account.
Tracey Meares:
They’re just hearing the consequences of doing it. So, if someone obeys a rule because they think the rule is legitimate or the person who has asked them to do something is legitimate, then we would call that motivation an internalized one.
And so, the research that social psychologists have done over time is to show that when you’re looking at legitimacy as a basis for compliance, turns out that in so many studies, procedural justice is one of the most important reasons why people will confer legitimacy on a rule or on a legal authority.
So, what is procedural justice, which was your first question. Again, the research shows that people key in on some four factors when coming to conclusions, as I was saying before, about the legitimacy of rules and legal authorities. And they are these. First, voice or an opportunity to tell their perspective or give their perspective on a situation or on the rule.
Second, whether they’re treated with dignity, respect, concern for their rights, listen to, being taken seriously, which of course is sort of the flip side of voice. Third, people are looking for indiciation of fair decision making. That is, are there factors that show them that the decision maker is coming to decisions on the basis of facts? Are those decisions transparent? Is the decision maker free from bias and so on?
And then last, people are looking for indiciation of trustworthiness. They want to be able to expect that a decision maker is going to treat them benevolently in the future. One way of thinking about that last factor is something like, and this is what we’ve seen in the context of the criminal legal space, in their interactions with an authority, people want to believe that the authority they’re dealing with believes that they count, and they make that judgment based on the ways that that authority is treating them.
And so, those four factors can be distinguished in the research. There’s overlap of course and they’re distinct from one another. And those are the factors that we found. And the research over decades actually are the ones that people really care about. And then that body of research procedural justice then leads to perceptions of legitimacy.
Ethan Zuckerman:
And so, the goal here is to increase the legitimacy of institutions. I would assume also increase the trust in institutions, which seems absolutely critical at a moment where we know that trust in most American institutions is dropping, trust in the criminal justice system is dropping, particularly within communities of color. Tom, what are some sort of real world successful examples of bringing procedural justice to work? And have we seen demonstrable changes in legitimacy and trusts sort of coming from this?
Tom Tyler:
Sure. Well, our work began in the arena of criminal law. And so, we can first think about people’s relationship to authorities like the police. And what we’ve shown in a number of studies is that if people think that they are fairly treated when they deal with the police or if they’re in a community where they think the police generally treat people in procedurally just ways, as Tracey said, they think the police are more legitimate, they’re more trusting in the police, and we see three really important consequences in terms of their behavior.
One consequence is that they are more likely to obey the law, follow rules. And as Tracey mentioned, it’s not just that they follow the rules more, but they do it because of a sense of responsibility and obligation to do it. So, they’re doing it, but they’re doing it in a different way for a different motivation. And that’s really important to us when you get to what else are they doing. So, cooperation. If people feel that the authorities like the police are legitimate, they’re more likely to cooperate. So, they’re more likely to report crimes, report criminals testify in court beyond a jury.
And then for us, the most important perhaps long-term consequence is people engage in communities where they believe that the authorities are legitimate, where they see the authorities treating people in procedurally just ways. So, one of the big benefits of this approach is that it helps you to build stronger communities because people engage more, they identify more, you get stronger economic development, you get stronger social cohesion, you get more political involvement.
So, it’s a strategy for building stronger communities at the same time that you’re preventing immediate rule break behavior, that’s a big game. And you can see when we talk about the platforms that we’ve studied, that we see exactly the same point in those platforms, that we have a strategy for platforms that we think is effective in building people’s motivation to follow rules.
But corresponding to what we’re saying about communities also motivates people to want to make a more positive, constructive and civil workspace online, space to deal with communities, coworkers, whomever is on the platform with them. So, those are examples of tangible gains.
Tracey Meares:
And can I add just a really quick addendum to that?
Ethan Zuckerman:
Yeah.
Tracey Meares:
So, I actually think it’s really useful to point out that last word that Tom mentioned, engagement, before we start talking about platforms for online interaction. Because I think sometimes, there, the metric is just more participation, like how many people are on the platform doing something.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Which is not a nuanced metric.
Tracey Meares:
Right. Where engagement is more of a back and forth. We use pro-social as a goal that we’re trying to get to. And that’s much more about community building than simply someone being there doing a thing.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So, before we pivot to the online spaces, which of course is in many ways where I’m more comfortable and more familiar with the work, who’s doing this work in the criminal justice system in offline spaces? Are there DA’s offices, are there courts, are there police departments that have explicitly taken on a procedural justice framework, and how has that worked?
Tom Tyler:
Well, we can give examples for each.
Tracey Meares:
So, let me start with police and then maybe Tom can talk a little bit about prosecutors. So, Tom and I have been working on this model for well over a decade, I would say, in the policing space. And part of the reason why we did is because police officers are the state agent, the legal authority that ordinary people have the most contact with, probably other than a public school teacher or maybe a social security office.
Ethan Zuckerman:
I heard the term recently street level bureaucrats.
Tracey Meares:
Correct.
Ethan Zuckerman:
And it’s incredibly helpful to think about what are those points of interface where we’re interfacing with these large systems.
Tracey Meares:
Exactly. And we started working on it at a time in which police were pretty much obsessed with bringing crime rates down and they were operating with a model that was heavily focused on deterrence and assuming that people would obey the law because they feared the consequences of failing to do so. So, we wanted to offer a different approach that accounted for that concern, but also addressed concerns that other people in heavily police communities had about the ways in which they were treated by these authorities and the distrust and so on that Tom mentioned.
And so, we developed along with people in the field, strategies for training police to pay more attention to procedural justice. We’ve had lots of conversations with law enforcement leaders about this approach. And I actually think it’s fair to say that in our work over the last decade, we’ve actually changed the conversation on policing in this country.
So, whereas get tough on crime was pretty much the only thing police agencies, officers and leadership ever talked about. Today, that’s not the case. And not to say that we’ve been completely successful and everything is great because it’s obviously not, but would definitely open up this space where this approach is a serious rival to, and in some cases more prominent than a typical sort of get tough on crime approach. So, that’s police.
Tom Tyler:
So, prosecutors. What has been true in the past is true in the police as Tracey said, is that traditionally prosecutors just thought about what’s the appropriate sentence. What’s the right outcome for the crime that somebody has committed? They didn’t really think much about how defendants experienced the whole process of going through a decision about what’s going to happen to me.
And the consequence of that is that there have been very high recidivism rates, because people come out of that system being very cynical, not really trusting the system, not doing it as legitimate.
And as we’ve already said, those factors all drive people to higher rates of committing crimes in the future. So, what we have done is we’ve tried to develop a program through which we work with prosecutors’ offices to get the prosecutors to think about how they treat people as they go through this process. We’ve most recently been cooperating with the American Prosecutors’ Association. We have demonstration programs in three American cities where we’re working with the offices, retraining procedures for the personnel reorganization of the way they deal with cases.
And the point is just to give one example, a very common practice for prosecutors is to load up a whole bunch of charges and then threaten the defendant. We know defendants experience this as being a very unfair kind of bullying kind of procedure that makes them feel like the way that they came to an outcome was procedurally unjust.
So, we’re helping prosecutors to understand that one of the consequences of those kind of procedures is you’re increasing the sense that the system is not legitimate, which is feeding into something you don’t really want, which is recidivism. So, that’s an example for prosecutors. Oh, I can also talk about courts if you want me to.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Well, I want to jump in just for a moment on prosecutors, and this is where personal experience comes in. My father was a legal aid criminal defense attorney for my childhood. And so, this is very much a world that I grew up in. Two things that our listeners may not know, the first is that the vast majority of criminal cases plead out. It’s very, very rare that people go to jury trials. And so, this process of the plea bargain where the prosecutor is putting forward a set of charges and perhaps as broad as possible has become almost an essential part of our legal system.
The other piece of this is that our criminal legal system in almost every venue is massively, massively understaffed, massively, massively overloaded. And I would think that that also has to be an obstacle to procedural justice. If the prosecutors are figuring out essentially how to clear their dockets. Are you finding willingness or are you often finding DA’s offices essentially saying, “Look, we’re just doing this as quickly as we can.”
Tom Tyler:
Well, I think it’s telling that the National Organization of Prosecutors, the American Prosecutors Association basically approached us about having a nationwide demonstration project with the idea that there are many prosecutors offices that want the kind of information that we’re trying to provide them with. So, that’s certainly not all, with police departments, not all police departments, but it’s an indicator that on some national level, there’s a recognition for a need for change. And it’s true that one issue we have to deal with is the idea that I don’t have time to do this.
So, one of the things that we emphasize when we train prosecutors in a new approach is this really doesn’t have to take a lot of time. There’s a whole bunch of things that prosecutors don’t do now that are pretty straightforward doing, like knowing the defendant’s name, addressing them in a respectful manner, sitting across a table with them instead of looking down on some height at them, things that are human dignity and that show a respect for the person that even though you may have committed a crime, I’m not saying you’re an awful person.
The other thing we do emphasize a lot, because I think it’s very important, is if that five minutes that you spend or 10 minutes that you spend prevents you from having to deal with this person again in two years because they commit another crime, actually in the long run, you’re saving a lot of time. You’re spending a little time now to spend a lot less time in the future and drive your caseload down over time.
Tracey Meares:
Okay. Another amendment. I didn’t think about it until you mentioned your dad’s experience, Ethan, but just connecting the dots, and I’m sure this will come up in our conversation about the platforms, is what we found in our research on police for sure, and the research on prosecutors as more nascent, is that when police were taught about the principles of procedural justice and encouraged to treat the members of the public in that way, they felt better about themselves and their jobs.
And so, it’s a sort of better quality of life situation for them in a context in which the job is very stressful. And I imagine we don’t know yet, but I imagine that that’s going to be true for the prosecutors. And then of course, as your dad knows, prosecutors are often working in courtrooms with another group and agency of people who are defenders, most typically public defenders who are the repeat players, but not always.
And so, those kinds of changes actually have effects for everybody in a relevant workplace. And we know this to be true in the policing context. We have some, not hard line, but sort of anecdotal information about the operation of procedural justice in social media companies. This is a general theory because it’s social psychology. So, it applies to humans. If you’re human, it will matter for you.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So, I’m going to steer away from the question that I want to ask, which is how do the justices react when you tell them about procedural justice. I have to guess that a lot of them sort of say, “What the hell do you think I do every day here?” But let’s pivot for that for a moment. So, the two of you are contributing something incredibly valuable, which is an alternative paradigm for particularly how an institution like the police might work.
When we look at questions of police training, a lot of police training right now is essentially military training. It’s training to go out and have an adversarial relationship with the people that you’re facing on the street. Training law enforcement with dignity as one of the primary criteria for your interactions and hearing the voice of the people that you’re listening to and making sure that they’re being treated fairly. This is enormous, and it’s incredibly encouraging to discover that you’re finding evidence that it’s transformative for the communities where it’s in.
Given the incredible importance of that work, what made you decide to bring this over to the world of online spaces, which in some ways seems less consequential, but also as someone who lives in these spaces, seems possibly even harder to change than policing the DA’s office and the court system?
Tracey Meares:
So, I guess I should start with the answer to that because the entree into that world I think came through me and a colleague of mine that I’ve known for a couple of decades, Sudhir Venkatesh. He was working at Facebook at the time. I don’t even know how many years ago it is now, maybe six. It’s definitely pre-pandemic.
And he was working on, I guess it was called trust and safety then. A lot of these companies have different names for the different spaces in which this is operating. And then at one point, it transformed into the health space. And he was asking, he called me up and asked me some questions about how I thought that theories would apply in that space. And I thought, wow, I’ve never even really thought about this.
We had a conversation and that conversation led to Tom and I collaborating with a group of other scholars on the Facebook DTAG report, DTAG Data Transparency Advisory Group, where we spent a lot of time talking about the relevance of procedural justice to how Facebook was reporting its content moderation efforts and how they might do more. And we just became really interested in the relevance of our approach to the space that is important to so many people.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So, let’s just pause for a moment and mention, so Sudhir Venkatesh is an utterly brilliant social scientist, who has a tendency to go very, very deep into the topics that he studies, has written about gang life in Chicago and spent a huge amount of time with people involved in the drug trade, sort of understand that. Went into Facebook, I think both with the hopes of transforming how that company was doing trust and safety, and also understanding from the inside out how companies like this end up working.
So, a really extraordinary figure to sort of reach out and look for the two of you. You’ve recently published this paper, not on Facebook, but on Twitter and a summary, and if I get it wrong, you’ll tell me that I got it wrong. But as I understand the paper, you were able to survey a large number of people on Twitter who had broken Twitter’s rules in one fashion or another and had faced some sort of consequence. It might have been a brief account suspension or some other effect.
And you ran a survey on people involved with this to ask them about the procedural fairness that they experienced. And you found something very encouraging, which was that people who felt like the procedures were fair were less likely to reoffend. How did you end up setting up that study that strikes me as phenomenally hard to get that sort of cooperation from Twitter?
Tom Tyler:
Well, we should say that that’s actually the second of two studies on, you described it perfectly, but the first one was Facebook. So, we did manage to do a study in Facebook. Then subsequently, we did essentially a similar study in Twitter. And you’re right that in both cases, the basic point is that if users experience the process of having their messages, their tweets, whatever you want to call them, taken down as fairer, they are more likely not to break the rules in the future. So, it’s essentially a replication of our basic criminal law model in online platforms.
So, in both cases, we did exactly what you said, we did correlational research and showed in surveys that those people who felt more fairly treated recidivated less controlling for their prior behavior. But the reason I mentioned the Facebook study in particular, in addition to Twitter, is in the Facebook study, we were also able to do an experimental study where we presented users with images in their ongoing series of messages that emphasized the fairness of the platform used by Facebook to manage their defense allegations.
So, essentially, we replicated the survey approach with an experimental approach. And we also showed that if you send people messages emphasizing that the platform uses a fair procedure, that will similarly reduce future offending after they’ve been sanctioned for doing something wrong. So, both their perception of fairness and then an experiment manipulation of fairness.
So, together, we think that’s a very strong support for the idea that we can create this alternative structure for enforcing rules, for content moderation that relies more on people’s belief that the platform is legitimate, that they ought to follow its rules. So, it’s a translation from criminal law onto the platform.
Tracey Meares:
But you know, Ethan, I heard you say sort of how did we get to do this? And again, I think it’s useful to go back to the Facebook thing. So, we’re there, we spent, I don’t know, well over a year, and this was pre-COVID. So, we’re going to California, we’re having endless Zoom meetings, actually learning how, really learning about the company, learning how it’s organized, learning what the people do from the policy, people who are mostly lawyers, to the design people, the product people who are designers, the engineers, we talk to everybody and talking about our approach.
And so, I think part of the reason why we were able to do it, I would emphasize two things. First, that we were willing to go and listen and learn about them and take them seriously, and make clear that we were really trying to understand what they were doing, that that was really our primary goal.
Second, I think, and this might be a little bit self-congratulatory, but we offered them something. We offered them this perspective that they hadn’t thought about, that they could see was useful to them. And in that sense, if I’m right about the second one, it’s an example that we’ve seen again and again.
You might think that the police wouldn’t really welcome this approach because they’re used to being the authoritarians and want to tell everybody what to do or order people, but then offer them this perspective. And they think, wow, not only am I glad to hear it because I think it will help me better achieve my goals, but actually I want to be treated that way too. And so, we see it again and again.
And with Twitter, we basically repeated this process. We go to Twitter. We need the people. We learn all of the things. And I think because we went in with an attitude of trying to learn and help as opposed to an attitude of we have a study we want to do, they were both more willing to welcome us in and listen to us and also were happier. I don’t know if I can say happy, happier to support their research. You think that’s fair?
Tom Tyler:
I think, Ethan, that a lot of people resort to sanctions, threats and so on because they can’t think of anything else to do. They say, like police, how am I going to get people to follow my orders? Well, I’ll threaten. But if you offer them an alternative where you could also gain cooperation and people wouldn’t hate you, they wouldn’t mistrust you, they wouldn’t be angry at you and you would feel better about yourself because you would feel that you’re treating people the way you’d like to be treated, people see that that’s, well, actually a better alternative.
And so, then our goal is to show them, and there’s a lot of evidence that it will actually work, which I think is why we’re emphasizing the research is we’re not just saying do it because it’s a good idea. We think it is a good idea, but we also are very clear in showing you and it will achieve the goals that you want to achieve with these additional benefits.
Ethan Zuckerman:
There’s a wonderful sort of pair of layers in this conversation that I just want to call out, which is that I actually spend a lot of my time doing adversarial research on these platforms. So, I’m often collecting public facing data. I’m trying to demonstrate things about the platforms that are not always flattering to the platforms.
I’m out in Scientific America in this month, along with some other researchers essentially saying, we need much more access to these platforms, not necessarily with their cooperation. Your experiments are actually a great example of some of the work that you can only do through cooperative research.
So, I find myself not only thinking about the lessons that you’ve found about procedural justice, but also an interesting lesson about what’s possible when you’re able to cooperate with the platforms, which is extraordinary. Quick question. I don’t know if you can say this, but to what extent did you find people thought the platforms treated them fairly? Was that a majority position or a minority position?
Tom Tyler:
I would say that there was a lot of room for improvement in people about whether they were getting treated fairly.
Ethan Zuckerman:
But not so much that you had difficulty finding data on people who thought they were treated fairly and you didn’t have to resort to statistical traits. You had a statistically significant number of people who thought they were treated fairly.
Tom Tyler:
Right. And you’ve got to remember also in the studies we did, if we own the platforms, if I was Musk and I could do whatever I wanted online, we could make even more powerful manipulations. I mean, the platforms weren’t doing a lot of things with the intention of creating fair procedures so we could make more powerful procedures and have an even bigger effect, I think.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Well, let’s talk about that, because this is a wonderful time to be talking about this. We’re recording this on Election Day 2022. We are, I think roughly 10 days into Elon Musk ownership of Twitter. It has been a lively 10 days to say the least. My friends at the Stanford Internet Observatory have released something like five podcast updates on just what’s happening at Twitter.
One of the things going on is an exodus from the platform onto new platforms like Mastodon, which while they’ve thought a great deal about their technical architecture, have not thought very much about moderation. I’m willing to guarantee that as smart as the people behind Mastodon are have not thought about procedural justice. What’s sort of guidance would you give for people who are just starting to run their own communities to think about how they might be influenced by a procedural justice framework as they are building and launching those new services?
Tracey Meares:
I think we both have a few different things to say. So, I’m going to start first because Tom might have some very specific recommendations based on some of our other research with Nextdoor. So, at a really high general level, Ethan, one thing we know that we’ve seen in the platforms that we’ve worked with, so there’s the ones that we’ve done papers with, and then there’s the ones that we’ve had conversations with about this stuff. And there are a lot of them.
And they’re not just, depends on what you think social media is, I mean, dating apps, travel apps, the whole spectrum we’ve had conversations with. What we know is that when it comes to content moderation, these platforms tend to try to address those problems with rules and policies articulated by lawyers that emphasize what we’ve been talking about, a kind of deterrence strategy to the point where recently a lot of the platforms didn’t even publicize the rules that they expected people to obey.
So, when we first started working with Facebook, for example, their rules, the rules that they expected people to obey weren’t even published. So, that there’s no sense in which people could possibly be notified of the law that-
Ethan Zuckerman:
Right, they can’t be procedurally fair because there’s no way of knowing what the laws are.
Tracey Meares:
There’s no way of knowing it. You wouldn’t be notified when you violated and you were kicked off the platform for 12 hours or whatever it was. So, in the work that we’ve done, what we’ve noticed is that the product itself turns out to be a much more important space for encouraging the kinds of interactions that people want to see with respect to content moderation than the rules that will potentially be violated.
That means if it’s the product, then it’s the designers that really matter more so than the lawyers. And in order for the designers to get this done, they need to have engineer time. And the engineers, of course, they’re also operating with this sort of pop deterrence kind of, they’ll build the thing based on these rules of about force and consequence rather than procedural justice, trust ideas.
And so, once those kinds of things, it’s kind of thinking about, I’ve used this analogy, a car. If car is the thing that people are worried about, the standard content moderation will be car bad, get car off road, period. Ban car. Whereas the design approach would say, “Well, cars can be bad, cars can be good. They help people, but they also can kill people.”
So, what we should do is design the space in which the car is operating so that it does its best, lights on the highway, rumble strips, four-lane highways rather than two-lane highways and so forth. And so, with that metaphor, we’ve found some ideas that we know or we seem to know can encourage better interactions, like the group thing, I think. Yeah.
Tom Tyler:
Well, and I think the second part of this that goes along with what Tracey said is many platforms have also been very legal in being reactive. Like the studies that we did were after people broke a rule, but why would you wait until after people break a rule to do things, help them to be better.
So, we have a whole series of things that you could imagine you could do, like when people join a platform. You could imagine a process of talking to them about what civility might mean. Think about all these principles of respect for the other people and your wellbeing. You want other people to feel as safe and secure as you feel. How can you do that?
And then both periodic messaging were like we did in Facebook, but much more effective, like ongoing messaging. And the kind of guardrails that Tracey mentioned where some people are already doing this research, like SIREN is doing this research on when people are veering in the direction of saying something that might be bad, they get a message. Like, do you really want to save that or think about what this might mean. How would people feel about this?
So, all of that can be proactive. And ideally, if we did all those things in the design of the platform, you would then not see so many problems come downstream. And the example Tracey mentions about Nextdoor is when people join a group telling them, here’s some rules for civil discussion. Here’s some principles that people use to keep their conversations positive. Use those rules, like treat people with respect or listen, don’t argue, things like that.
Ethan Zuckerman:
And you have a terrific new paper called Promoting Online Civility Through Platform Architecture, where Jisu Kim is the lead author on that. And that’s looking at experiments within Nextdoor, which is a notoriously troubled and troublesome community at times. It can be a very divisive space. It has a track record of a lot of racial profiling.
But you were able to demonstrate a much better behavior in these consciously created groups that are reminding people of the roles of the road rather than in the less moderated spaces. It also echoes some things we’re seeing in other research. We’ve seen, I’m starting to get a terrible echo here, so I’m a little worried about that, Mike, but I hope that’ll work out. We’re seeing this in research from Nate Matias over at Cornell University, who’s been doing experiments on the Reddit platform, helping moderators on Reddit figure out what guidelines are best for their communities based on experiments.
I just joined a community that Nathan is helping organize and it’s on a platform called Discourse. And I was pleased but unsurprised to see that before I posted my first comment, I had to read through a screen of the rules of the road. Do you think, given the success you’ve had with this research, do you think platform companies are getting this message? Do you think we might see a wave of architectures that are working on increasing civility?
Tom Tyler:
You’re going to do this one.
Tracey Meares:
I know. So, if people could see us in the podcast, they would see sort of squinched up eyes. I mean, I think a couple of things. What we’ve heard and noticed is that there is interest in the procedural justice model. People don’t, which was also true in the policing context, don’t know what it means exactly.
So, for a lot of them, it just meant transparency. We’re just going to tell you a lot about what we’re doing with respect to content moderation. I think maybe some of that came from our work on the DTAG report because that was a tangible product of that research.
And transparency is just one thing in the policing context, what the police keyed on was treating people with dignity and respect. So, they just thought, we can do everything we were doing before, as long as we’re polite to them. And it turns out in both cases that procedural justice has four factors. And so, I think some platforms get it. I think some platforms don’t. So, that’s point one.
Point two, I think it’s going to depend on the extent to which the people driving this are the policy people or the product people. So, the policy people, I think, are much more likely to drive a transparency approach and then be concerned about just what they’re giving out. The product people, if they have access to it, find it very attractive, which is why I think we had some of the success, at least with the experiment that we did in Nextdoor and the places that we’ve been able to speak to.
And then the last factor we just became a little bit more aware of recently at the Stanford conference, which is there’s all this litigation out there with the new state law models and the GDPR, where platforms are really concerned about how they’re going to comply with that. And it’s not clear the extent to which that approach reflects our approach. And so, again, the lawyers are going to be really concerned about that, which makes it more difficult for the product people to find space and then engineering time. I hope that wasn’t too technical.
Ethan Zuckerman:
I thought it was great. And editorializing just for half a second here, I think you’re right. I think the product people are the people that actually have to be aware that there’s another way to do things. The policy people inherently are coming from a legal point of view. They’re thinking about compliance. They’re thinking about ensuring that the product is within the law. The law is about to get massively more complicated about these things.
The theme of this podcast in general is this idea that other internets are possible. In fact, other internets exist in parallel with this one. When we start looking not as the European commission is now calling them the VLOPs laps, the very large online platforms. But the VSOPs, the very small online platforms, you’re often seeing different forms of governance, different forms of moderation, sometimes much closer to where this goes.
What I find so exciting about having both of you here is that you have incredibly valuable set of ideas and design principles, both for this online space and also frankly for an incredibly important offline space, which is the space of criminal justice. So inspired by what I’ve read of your work and so grateful for the two of you being willing to spend some time with us.
Tom Tyler:
Thank you.
Tracey Meares:
So happy to do it.
Tom Tyler:
Yes, thank you.