Minimising the harm from online hate

HeathG Gaming & Technology

Whilst ignoring racist behaviour online won’t automatically make it go away, those trying to quash it through legal threats should recognise their actions may actually make matters worse.

The SMH today reports that:

“The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has threatened legal action against a widely read but controversial US-based website over an article that encourages racial hatred against Aborigines.
…
In a letter to Joseph Evers, the owner of Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED) – a more shocking version of Wikipedia that contains racist and other offensive articles dubbed as “satire” – the commission said it had received 20 complaints from Aborigines over the “Aboriginal” page on the site. (SMH 17/03/2010)”

As online rights group EFA points out in the same SMH article, trying to censor material on the internet may simply lead to that material being made more widely available. Rather like fighting the hydra, removing one copy of a racist rant or tasteless piece of humour may lead to multiple new versions springing up in its place.

Attempting to gag groups or suppress particular views may also, inadvertently, expose those groups and their views to a much wider audience than would otherwise have been the case.

Over at the Skepticlawyer blog, LE explains the risks of the AHRC’s chosen course:

“ This reminds me of both the recent defamation case filed by Lindsay Lohan against E*Trade for US$100M (after an E*Trade commercial featured a “milkaholic” baby named Lindsay) or the Liskula Cohen “Skank NYC” case. In the end, I doubt I would have known about either piece of defamation if Lohan or Cohen had not sued for defamation.

Similarly, by bringing the action here, the AHRC may have actually given a massive burst of publicity it would not have otherwise had. It’s highly unlikely that I would have ever come across ED or any of its articles without the publicity garnered by this claim, and even more unlikely that I would have lingered for more than 5 milliseconds once I realised what the site was like.” (SkepticLawyer.com.au  17/03/2010)

Ignoring racist sites and groups won’t make them go away. But a head-on assault with all legal cannons firing risks making martyrs out of objectionable characters and giving their message a massive audience boost. Perhaps, in some cases, the way to minimise the harm from online idiots is simply to make sure they aren’t given a bigger soapbox from which to shout their message.

(p.s. mutual hat-tip to LE for notifying me of her post after I’d pointed her in the direction of the ED case and Lindsay Lohan’s latest antics)

Competition for Audiences – Platforms v Programs

HeathG Gaming & Technology

One of the common challenges faced by both telco and media operators is managing the introduction of new products that cannibalise existing cash cows. The telecommunications sector faces a number of examples of this such as the substitution of mobile phones and VoIP for traditional PSTN lines and calling.

Introducing new products that position the company for the future, whilst maximising the profits from established products, is a delicate balancing act. It’s also one that has the potential to create internal conflict, as the Seven network appears to have discovered recently.

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Prescription insurance: Moral hazard vs transaction costs

admin General

A person with insurance for drug prescriptions is more likely to use drugs and less likely to worry about getting the cheapest or most cost effective prescription. This leads to the expectation that the demand from the insured for drugs would result in higher prices than if individuals bore most the cost of drug prescriptions, but that is not correct:

Our paper provides evidence for what we consider a surprising outcome: in the case of the new prescription drug program for Medicare enrollees, moving consumers from cash-paying status to membership in an insured group lowers optimal prices for branded prescription drugs below what they otherwise would be. This is surprising because the standard effect of insurance is to create inelastic demand and therefore elicit higher prices from a seller with market power (Duggan and Scott Morton 2006). However, the insurers that we study bundle insurance with a formulary and other mechanisms to create elastic demand. An individual consumer typically does not know which drugs are acceptable therapeutic substitutes; the consumer’s physician typically has poor knowledge of prices, especially negotiated prices; and any one consumer is too small a share of demand to negotiate with a pharmaceutical company. A prescription drug plan can potentially surmount all three hurdles.

Our evidence leads us to conclude that the formulary and other mechanisms perform the special role of allowing buyers to move market share among drugs with patent protection, thereby raising cross-price elasticities and lowering purchase prices (or reducing price increases) for branded drugs. This result contrasts with the common intuition that an uninsured consumer, paying at the margin for her own purchases, is the best tool with which to create competition in the market and impose pricing discipline on sellers. Certainly, this reasoning is at least part of the rationale behind many current policies in health care such as tax-free health care savings accounts (R. Glenn Hubbard, John F. Cogan, and Daniel P. Kessler 2005). Our evidence suggests that this picture is incomplete; for maximum effect, the consumer also needs to be part of a group that can substitute one provider for another.

Mark Duggan and Fiona Scott Morton, 2010, The Effect of Medicare Part D on Pharmaceutical Prices and Utilization, American Economic Review, 100(1) 590 – 607.

Penbo for Media Watch?

HeathG Politics & Society

David Penberthy’s article in ‘The Punch” today looks at the role of celebrity agent / PR man Max Markson in the recent Lara Bingle affair.  The thrust of Penberthey’s article is that Markson’s attempts to maximise the short term revenue opportunity from the recent media attention has in fact harmed, rather than helped, Bingle’s reputation.  Penberthy is well aware of the irony of his moral outrage:

“I’m under no illusions about the perception of journalists and journalism. And, as a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, I’m not about to embark on a career as an ethicist. “ (The Punch, 15/03/2010)

Maybe not a career as an ethicist, but perhaps the ABC should consider him as the next host of Media Watch.  Whilst he’s no ‘clean skin’, appointing Penberthy would be a great example of ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’. After all. who better to highlight all the tricks of the media trade than a former Daily Telegraph editor?

What’s your competitors character?

HeathG General

What’s the character of your competitors? Are they Guardians or Idealists? What about the temperament of their leaders?

Understanding the character of a company and it’s leaders is a useful way of distinguishing between what a competitor could do, versus what it is likely to do. For the CI practitioner, this is an extremely valuable distinction. A shopping list of possibilities isn’t really actionable as there are too many ‘possibilities’ for any manager to plan for. What’s needed is a way to screen the ‘possible’ actions and create a short list of what’s actually likely to happen. This is where understanding the culture of a company and the character of it’s leaders provides a useful sorting mechanism. And this is why the Mindshift’s course on competitor profiling is probably one of my favourite courses.

So how does it work?

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Time for TIO Complaint Rankings

HeathG Gaming & Technology

I’d like to make a complaint. It’s about the way the  Telecommunications Industry Ombudsmen (TIO) reports its complaint statistics.

Around October each year, the TIO publishes it’s annual report that almost invariably reports a rise in complaints. For instance in the latest reporting year (2009) we’re informed “the highest increase in complaints was among mobile phone users (79% rise), followed by internet (57%), landline (40%) and mobile premium services (13%).” (TIO 23/10/2009).

The report also provides a detailed breakdown of complaint data by service provider. This tends to be popular with the IT media, who use it produce headlines such as “Telstra records highest telco complaints“.

My concern is that by using complaint volumes as it’s key metric, the TIO may be creating inaccurate perceptions about the performance of particular product categories or service providers. This in turn impacts public policy and regulatory behaviour(1), as well consumer choice.

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