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Profiting from Pandemic

headshots of Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler

During the last week of March, it was widely reported that members of Congress used information from their privileged briefings on COVID-19 to adjust their holdings in the stock market before the information was made public. Politicians including Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, and California Senator Diane Feinstein all sold suspicious amounts of their holdings around the time of briefings about the oncoming epidemic. It would be illegal if these allegations turn out to be true: financially benefiting based on actions performed based on non-public information is against the law for members of Congress. However, it is legal for members of Congress to hold stocks, and buying and selling financial material or benefiting financially from holdings while a member of Congress is fine legally. This makes evaluating the activity of Congress people difficult, as the legality of their behavior depends on the grounds for their activity.

That we need to determine the mental state of the actor in order to determine the legality of the behavior is not unique to these circumstances. Indeed, it is common in the law for behavior to only be considered criminal if someone performs an action intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently – all states of mind. Courts and lawyers are adept at creating standards for testing what would qualify as the relevant mental state (or mens rea) for particular crimes, and investigations are underway.

In these circumstances, the possibility that members of Congress may have financially benefited from privileged information is troubling for further reasons. The particular briefings the public servants received concerned the oncoming epidemic that would have dramatic impact not only on the economy but on public health and safety. Their estimates of the impact of this epidemic would be what led to the alleged adjustments in their investments, and therefore they would have been informed and concerned about the epidemic weeks or months before taking any action to mitigate the oncoming national crisis.

The lack of action seems straightforwardly unethical, especially in light of the continued lack of support and action on the part of the federal government as the national crisis escalates and shows all signs of continuing to escalate. The federal government has not intervened sufficiently. After passing a one-time $2 trillion dollar stimulus package, the Senate is no longer in session.

Regarding their use of the information for personal gain: Is it reasonable to expect those with privileged information that they could greatly benefit from to avoid taking steps to act on that information? How about if it was reasonably certain they wouldn’t get caught? Folks with privilege and power frequently don’t get caught, and when they do, the penalties for their malfeasance can be much less onerous than the benefits they received by skirting the moral and legal demands that constrain the actions of us all. Some views of human nature are explicitly predicated on the assumption that we are self-interested, so the “rational” action in such cases would be to benefit from the information they had. This line of reasoning supports a ban on those who have such privileged information from advantaging themselves from it, and using it as a privilege over those who don’t have access to it. Some members of Congress who are currently accused of insider trading in fact support such bans.

Owning a Monopoly on Knowledge Production

photograph of Monopoly game board

With Elizabeth Warren’s call to break up companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, there has been increasing attention to the role that large corporations play on the internet. The matter of limited competition within different markets has become an important area of focus, however much of the debate tends to focus on the economic and legal factors involved (such as whether there should be greater antitrust enforcement). However, the philosophical and moral issues have not received as much attention. If a select few corporations are responsible for the kinds of information we get to see, they are capable of exerting a significant influence on our epistemic standards, practices, and conclusions. This also makes the issue a moral one.

Last year Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes surprised many with his call for Facebook to be broken up. Referencing America’s history of breaking up monopolies such as Standard Oil and AT&T, Hughes charged that Facebook dominates social networking and faces no market-based accountability. Earlier, Elizabeth Warren had also called for large companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon to be broken apart, claiming that they have bulldozed competition and are using private information for profit. Much of the focus on the issue has been on the mergers of companies like Facebook and Instagram or Google and Nest. The argument holds that these mergers are anti-competitive and are creating economics problems. According to lawyer and professor Tim Wu, “If you took a hard look at the acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, the argument that the effect of those acquisitions have been anticompetitive would be easy to prove for a number of reasons.” For one, he cites the significant effect that such mergers have had on innovation.

Still, others have argued that breaking up such companies would be a bad idea. They will note that a concept like social networking is not clearly defined, and thus it is difficult to say that a company like Facebook constitutes a monopoly in its market. Also, unlike Standard Oil, companies like Facebook or Instagram are not essential services for the economy which undermines potential legal justifications for breaking these companies up. Most of these corporations also offer their services for free which means that the typical concerns about monopolies and anticompetitive practices regarding prices and rising costs of services do not apply. Those who argue this tend to suggest that the problem lies with the capitalist system or that there is a lack of proper regulation of these industries.

Most of the proponents and opponents focus on the legal and economic factors involved. However, there are epistemic factors at stake as well. Social epistemologists study matters relating to questions like “how do groups come to know things?” or “how can communities of inquirers affect what individuals come to accept as knowledge?” In recent years, philosophers like Kevin Zollman have provided accounts of how individual knowers are affected by communication within their network of fellow knowers. Some of these studies have demonstrated that different communication structures within an epistemic network in terms of the beliefs, evidence, and testimonies that are shared can affect what conclusions an epistemic community will settle on. The way that evidence, beliefs, and testimony of other knowers within the network is shared will affect what other people in the network believe is rational.

Once we factor the ways that a handful of corporations are able to influence the communication of information in epistemic communities on the internet, a real concern emerges. Google and Facebook are responsible for roughly 70% of referral traffic on the internet. For different categories of articles the number changes. Facebook is responsible for referring 87% of “lifestyle” content. Google is responsible for 84% of referrals of job postings. Facebook and Google together are responsible for 79% of referral traffic regarding the world economy. Internet searching is a common way of getting knowledge and information and Google controls almost 90% of this field.

What this means is that a few companies are responsible for the communication of the incredibly large amounts of information, beliefs, and testimony that is shared by knowers all over the world. If we think about a global epistemic community or even smaller sub-communities learning and eventually knowing things through referral of services like Google or Facebook, this means that few large corporations are capable of affecting what we are capable of knowing and will call knowledge. As Hughes noted in his criticism of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg can alone decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feed, what messages get delivered, and what constitutes violent and incendiary speech. What this means is that if a person comes to adopt many or most of their beliefs because of what they are exposed to on Facebook, then Zuckerberg alone can significantly determine what that person can know.

A specific example of this kind of dominance is YouTube. When it comes to the online video hosting platform marketplace, YouTube holds a significantly larger share than competitors like Vimeo or Dailymotion. Content creators know this all too well YouTube’s policies on content and monetization have led many on the platform to lament the lack of competition. YouTube creators are often confused by why certain videos get demonetized, what is and is not acceptable content, and what standards should be followed. In recent weeks demonetization of history focused channels has been particularly interesting. For example, a channel devoted to the history of the First World War had over 200 videos demonetized. Many of these channels have had to begin censoring themselves based on what they think is not allowed. So, history channels have started censoring words that would be totally acceptable on network television.

The problem isn’t merely one of monetization either. If a video is demonetized, it will no longer be promoted and recommended by YouTube’s algorithm. Thus, if you wish to learn something about history on YouTube, Google is going to play a large role in terms of who gets to learn what. This can affect the ways that people evaluate information on these (sometimes controversial) topics and thus what epistemic communities will call knowledge. Some of these content creators have begun looking for alternatives to YouTube because of these issues, however it remains to be seen whether they will offer a real source of competition. In the meantime, however, much of the information that gets referred to us comes from a select few companies. These voices have significant influence (intentionally or not) over what we as an epistemic community come to know or believe.

This makes the issue of competition an epistemic issue, but it also inherently is a moral one. This is because as a global society we are capable of regulating in one way or another the ways in which corporations are capable of impacting our lives. This raises an important moral question: is it morally acceptable for a select few companies to determine what constitutes knowledge? Having information being referred by corporations provides the opportunity for some to benefit over others, and we as a global society will have to determine whether we are okay with the significant influence they wield.

On Labeling Over-the-Counter Homeopathy

Homeopathy, the medical philosophy that “like cures like,” is big business. According to the latest estimates from the Centers for Disease Control, $2.9 billion were spent in out-of-pocket costs by adults in the United States for homeopathic medicine in 2007. The medical philosophy of homeopathy, developed in Germany over 200 years ago, posits that any substance that produces certain symptoms in a healthy person can also be used to cure those symptoms in a sick person. Homeopathic cures introduce one of these substances to cure a person of their symptoms.

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