We all want to be able to speak our minds online. We want to be heard by our friends and have someone say something back to us. At the same time, we don’t want to be exposed to unpleasant comments.
Tech companies address this conundrum by setting standards for free speech, a practice protected by federal law, and hiring in-house moderators to review individual pieces of content and remove posts that violate predefined rules.
There are certainly problems with this approach. Bullying, misinformation on topics like public health, and misrepresentations of legitimate elections are rampant. But even if content censorship were perfectly implemented, it would still miss a lot of problems. We need a new strategy: one that treats social media companies as potential pollutants of the social fabric, and directly measures and mitigates the impacts of their choices on us. Read the full article.
—Nathaniel Rubin & Thomas Krendel Gilbert
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