The dark side of crowdsourcing?
Earlier this week, at our weekly faculty research lunch seminar at the Kennedy School (one of the few “free lunches” that has survived our budget crunch-driven cost savings), Jonathan Zittrain, the Internet law and policy guru at Harvard Law School …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-argument. In July 2009 the New York Times argued that the crowd is wise when it's focused, crediting curated aggregation rather than raw mass opinion; by August the same paper was documenting how fast cyberspace-tracked news stories burn out from attention decay. The economics had been questioned even earlier — a 2006 analysis of the Web 2.0 economic conundrum asked who actually captures value from user-generated work.
First-order effects
- Jonathan Zittrain's Kennedy School research presentation gives the skeptical side of that debate an academic anchor at Harvard Law School, moving 'dark side of crowdsourcing' from blog complaint to citable scholarship.
Second-order effects
- Outlets and platforms whose editorial identity rests on harnessing focused crowds — the model the Times defended in 2009 — now face a credible counter-framing they must answer rather than ignore.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the burden shifts toward verification: whoever consumes crowdsourced information inherits the cost of checking it, making verification capacity a structural requirement for any platform built on open contributions.
The trend: The crowdsourcing debate is pivoting from whether crowds are wise to who absorbs the cost when they are manipulated or wrong.