WEEKLY

INSIGHTS
Digital Innovation, Content Moderation and Regulation:
Striking the Right Balance
Not a few musicians have reeled out songs with titles like “Things will never be the same,”
implying that change is constant. Even the farmer who plants seeds of corn does not expect
the planted seeds to stay small and pristine because he soon would expect to see a crop
shooting out of the soil with a lot more corn cobs for a harvest. Just like farming,
innovation goes through a cultivation process. It involves starting small, sometimes starting
as ideas from one person or a few people, later sprouting to become a unique dynamic
system that impacts hundreds and thousands of people in extraordinary ways for their
benefit or sometimes to their detriment.

Today, thanks to innovation and the advancement of the digital age, company officials do
not have to travel thousands of miles for business meetings because discussions now
happen in real-time over the Internet. It’s now a matter of getting a device to connect to
the Internet, download an application, and voila—you are connected! The impact that the
Otuya Okecha Internet has on our lives and how we do business did not just happen. . It sprouted from
IT Advisor, ACIOE Associates years of experimental and innovative work. Recall ARPANET in the 1960s, an agency funded

by the United States Department of Defense (DoD). ARPANET started to work on large Mainframe computers, long before the advent of
networked computers that saw the world progress through various innovative and evolutionary stages to the 1990s Web 2.0 technologies
era. Web 2.0 technologies firmly established the platform for the social networking media players like Twitter and Facebook to step in. In an
evening interview at Georgetown University, Vinton Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, said, “we have invented technologies
whose social impact we haven’t fully understood.” Riding on Cerf’s statement, one might infer that the digital world is now boxed into a
corner to seek social moderation control mechanisms by learning from the side effects of digital innovation. A further quest for answers leads
us to ask critical questions about social media platforms. Who is responsible for the ethical and social behavior of users on these platforms? Is
it the platform owner or the government regulator? The content platform owner should moderate abuse on social media platforms leaving
the regulator to provide the guidelines for the operations of content platform owners. The onus, however, is on the government to ensure
that regulators develop these guidelines painstakingly, with public stakeholder input, and such guidelines for media technology players must
accommodate freedom of speech, freedom of information, and the protection of citizen’s data in a way that safeguards privacy.

It would be fair to state that there would be no regulation without innovation. When we consider the invention of cars and the construction
of roads that they ply, we are grateful for the traffic lights invented to save us from accidents. Traffic lights keep the movement of vehicles
free-flowing and orderly, and they keep the balance at T-junctions, guiding drivers to avoid bumping into each other. Traffic lights are the
effective regulator of vehicular movements. Keeping this in perspective, how then do we regulate Internet content and traffic in our dynamic
digital world? Internet traffic moves much faster than cars. It goes beyond borders, flowing through subsea cables to nodes, servers, and
devices. There is so much Internet network traffic flowing in our digital world today. We witness and process multimedia interactions that
occur via voice, text, and video on media platforms. The ability of over three billion users of the Internet today to freely create and upload
content to such Internet-driven media platforms should give any cause for concern when we consider the harmful effects of some of the
uploaded Internet content. And this is an issue not to be taken lightly. It is right to suggest that it would pay the digital world to embrace a
traffic light system, a regulatory one that does not stifle innovation and one that allows for a balance of good in a smooth, free-flowing and
orderly manner. This approach would imply developing ethical regulatory mechanisms that impact society according to the unique customs of
various geographically dispersed localities linked to the Internet. This era of convergence technologies has resulted in IoT and AI, etc. And
despite this convergence, many countries still regulate technology via multiple agencies that operate in silos, just like having many traffic
poles functioning at a T-road junction. Considering digital technological advancements and regulatory balance, the 2020 U.K Ofcom model of
regulation, which went through a consultative reform process in response to the online harms white paper, appears ideally suited for its
environment. The success of regulating digital technological advancements should involve the upskilling of regulator teams to stop them from
acting like the legendary fictional Rip Van Winkle, who slept and woke up in another time to find the new times and methods strange.
Governments must envisage and keep their regulatory bodies forward-thinking, along the lines of convergence and evolutionary measures,
equipped with the skill sets and resources to stay proactive, toeing the line of digital innovation to strike the right balance.

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