Technology advances quickly and lawmaking advances slowly. 50 years ago, this wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a problem, because the flow of information would be a lot slower, and fewer people would be exposed to these things. Today, Trump posts something hate-filled on the internet and his followers everywhere in the country see it immediately. Same goes for any other person with social media influence. If Elon Musk posts something provably false, tens of millions of people consume it. A hundred people can post the proof that it’s false within minutes, and a fraction of those people will see it and even fewer will care.
The problem isn’t the speech, the problem is the platform they’re given.
The platform is a tool, and like most tools it can be used for both good and evil. I agree it’s making the problem significantly worse, but hyper focusing on just the platforms while ignoring the people using them doesn’t seem like the right approach either. I don’t know how to preserve the positive aspects of platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube while also preventing them from being abused to spread hate and lies. I feel like there must be something that can be done to at least improve the situation a little. The various “community notes” features I don’t think were a terrible first step, although they’re also far from a solution. It’s a complicated problem with a lot of potential pitfalls, but one I think is going to be critical to solve and soon because the problem isn’t going away, as long as we have an internet it’s here to stay.
Technology advances quickly and lawmaking advances slowly. 50 years ago, this wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a problem, because the flow of information would be a lot slower, and fewer people would be exposed to these things. Today, Trump posts something hate-filled on the internet and his followers everywhere in the country see it immediately. Same goes for any other person with social media influence. If Elon Musk posts something provably false, tens of millions of people consume it. A hundred people can post the proof that it’s false within minutes, and a fraction of those people will see it and even fewer will care.
The problem isn’t the speech, the problem is the platform they’re given.
The platform is a tool, and like most tools it can be used for both good and evil. I agree it’s making the problem significantly worse, but hyper focusing on just the platforms while ignoring the people using them doesn’t seem like the right approach either. I don’t know how to preserve the positive aspects of platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube while also preventing them from being abused to spread hate and lies. I feel like there must be something that can be done to at least improve the situation a little. The various “community notes” features I don’t think were a terrible first step, although they’re also far from a solution. It’s a complicated problem with a lot of potential pitfalls, but one I think is going to be critical to solve and soon because the problem isn’t going away, as long as we have an internet it’s here to stay.