The WelQ shutdown: taking down all ten curation sites (2016)

On carrying speed into the public sphere

The core of this crisis response lay less in the financial loss itself than in how to face the damage to trust that the way it ran the business had invited. DeNA had built, in mobile games, a style of gathering page views through search and expanding a business on speed and volume. The root of this problem lay in carrying that style into the domains of medicine and health — where accuracy can be a matter of life and death — without first putting a vetting system in place. In the sequence by which President Moriyasu closed every site, entrusted the dissection of his own company to an outside committee, and took responsibility by cutting his pay, there was a reckoning with the very way the business was run.

That said, the question this problem posed does not stop at DeNA alone. How far does media that chase scale on inflows from search bear responsibility for the accuracy of the information they carry, and for the rights of others? The venture temper that prizes speed and experiment is a force that gives rise to new businesses, but in domains bearing on people’s health and safety it can also become an excuse for skipping the trouble of verification. The observation that the words “permanent venture” had become an indulgence for expansion remains as a question that continues to this day — how a company in a hurry to grow reconciles itself with public responsibility.