Legal Leap
With gratitude to all of you who have read and supported this newsletter over the past year, I want to share some personal news: I’m going to law school.
That means Wild West will become a very intermittent newsletter for quite a while. Paying subscribers—THANK YOU—will soon receive a pro-rated refund through the online payment system. (If you have any issues with this, just email me: wildwestnewsletter@gmail.com.) But my hope is that all of you, both paying and non-paying readers, will stay on as free subscribers and see what evolves.
The original mission of this newsletter was to go “inside the legal shootouts that could redefine rules for the internet” and I intend to keep tracking a number of those legal battles, particularly the fight between Washington state and Facebook over who gets to set the rules for online political ads. Some key moments, including the Washington State vs. Facebook trial and potential revisions to Washington’s uniquely strong political ad rules, are coming right up.
However, weekly publication just won’t be possible during law school. I’ll publish when I can, and perhaps I’ll also turn the newsletter over to occasional guest writers. No set schedule. No promises. No cost to you.
Again, my thanks to each and every one of you for coming along on this adventure so far. This side-project would not have worked without your subscriptions, and I hope it has provided you some worthwhile news, links, explanations, and maybe even some insight on issues like Section 230; new anti-trust efforts underway in the Big Tech realm; whether a guy can really take Facebook to small claims court (a story that generated a great public radio follow-up); why Washington state can’t seem to pass a digital privacy bill; where beauty lies online; how algorithmic oversight can actually accomplish good things; how disinformation flows; what Biden’s doing about all this; and what’s going on with all the drama and intrigue at the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission as it considers what to do with some nation-leading political ad transparency rules it passed in 2018 (rules that have been rather unpopular with lawyers for Facebook and Google).
Now, for any of you wondering why a guy like me is going to law school:
As with any leap, there are a lot of reasons. One is that when I look back over my journalism and try to divine a theme or some sort of tendency, it’s obvious: the stories that have grabbed me and readers the most all had to do with the law. Trial stories. Law-breaker stories. Stories of forgotten laws and wrong-headed laws and laws that don’t exist but maybe should. Stories involving judges, lawyers, plaintiffs, and defendants. I find the law to be a uniquely compelling subject because I see it as a uniquely powerful force. For whatever reason, it’s a force I naturally tend to gravitate toward. I’ve long wanted to better understand and use it.
Another reason for this leap is that I’ve received a generous scholarship from the University of Washington School of Law that will allow me to emerge from legal education without debt. That opens a path for me to use my legal training in creative and positive ways. For example, it makes it possible to see a future in which my legal education ends up amplifying the impact of my writing and journalism. I know there are a good number of practicing lawyers who once were journalists. Maybe some of them went to law school thinking the same thing I’m thinking now. But there are also a good number of journalists with law degrees, and many of them do very interesting and valuable work. I’m not naive enough to predict where I’ll land after three years of law school, but my intention is to make as much positive impact as I can out of this incredible opportunity.
Three years is a long time. It’s also not. We’ve been slogging through a pandemic and putting all kinds of things on hold for 18 months now. That’s more than half the time it takes to get a legal education. Three years is also a small fraction of the time I’ve been earning a living by typing words, and I was typing words long before anyone ever paid me. So whatever unfolds, I don’t believe I’ll stop writing.
There are other reasons, but who wants to be a bore? I’ll stop there and once more thank you all for reading. I know there are a lot of people trying to explain and explore the massive collision between technology and democracy that’s underway in our society right now, so I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to read the news and perspective I’ve had to offer. The University of Washington School of Law is a leader in investigating and illuminating that particular collision, so hopefully my time there will enhance whatever perspectives I may be able to offer in the future.
Again, this isn’t meant to be the last Wild West newsletter ever. But it will certainly be the last weekly one for a while. I hope we’ll see each other in your in-box again before too long.
- Eli
Some of the things I’ve been reading:
• What happens when your digital data falls into the hands of the Taliban? As Reuters reports, “Thousands of Afghans struggling to ensure the physical safety of their families after the Taliban took control of the country have an additional worry: that biometric databases and their own digital history can be used to track and target them.”
• Can the Taliban use American digital media platforms now? No, say Facebook and YouTube. The Taliban is still banned. But maybe not if it ends up being recognized by the international community as the legitimate governing force in Afghanistan… Vox has a good explainer on this tricky dance.
• “What is to be done with all the bad content?” A worthwhile longread over at Harper’s.
• “Only Facebook knows the extent of its misinformation problem,” The Washington Post reports. “And it’s not sharing, even with the White House.”
• Also, only Facebook knows what its most “widely viewed content” is and… the way the company is sharing information about that widely viewed content seem odd:
