Dec 12 2019
Crowd Funding Quackery
A recently published ethics paper addresses the issue of whether or not it is proper for crowdfunding sites, like GoFundMe, to allow campaigns to fund dubious medical treatments. This question is also part of a more general issue – how tech companies have replaced traditional industries and institutions thereby bypassing existing mechanisms of safety, justice, and quality control. On the medical issue, the authors write:
Recent studies have shown that many individuals are using crowdfunding to finance access to scientifically unsupported medical treatments. Recently, GoFundMe prohibited campaigns for antivaccination groups on the grounds that they “promote misinformation about vaccines” and for treatment at a German clinic offering unproven cancer treatments due to “the need to make sure people are equipped to make well‐informed decisions.” GoFundMe has not taken any additional actions to regulate the much larger presence of campaigns seeking to fund unproven medical interventions on the platform. In this article, we make the ethical case for intervention by GoFundMe and other crowdfunding platforms.
The basic principle is that tech companies still retain an ethical and legal responsibility for how their platforms and technology are used. Most applications and social media outlets begin as an unregulated peer-to-peer environment, just facilitating an individual exchange between two private citizens. In a way this is a Libertarian nirvana. However, as such applications scale up the downsides that have already had to be dealt with in the traditional industries they are supplanting begin to resurface.
We can take any such app as an example, such as Uber. The Uber app, which I use, is very convenient. They have definitely made a better mousetrap. But as Uber has grown huge, we begin to question what responsibility they have to their drivers and riders. How much do they have to vet drivers to protect riders? What kinds of protections and benefits should they offer drivers? Did they just replace a regulated industry with an unregulated one? The same questions have arisen with Air bnb, which critics warn is being used to simply create de facto hotels that skirt regulations.
There are two principles here. The first has to do with the role of regulations in general to protect the public from exploitation of various sorts. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole entirely, but just summarize my position as this. I support carefully considered and monitored regulation to keep society functioning optimally and prevent exploitation, externalizing costs, unfair competition, and the like. The only truly free market is a regulated one, because an unregulated market will become increasingly distorted over time as the powerful use their power to obtain more power (rather than play fairly). At the same time we have to be humble regarding unintended consequences, which is why regulations need to be minimalistic and monitored for their effects. If you buy some version of this basic premise, and are not an anti-regulation purist, then it should be concerning that effective regulations are being nullified by an app. This is happening without any elected representatives of the people making any decisions – without any public representation. In the extreme this can evolve into a tech oligarchy.
The second principle is fairness. If one industry that is regulated is competing with another that is unregulated, that gives an unfair advantage to the unregulated one (regardless of what you think about regulations in general).