All media companies need to be held responsible for not doing due diligence against the spread of disinformation. Disinformation is currently the main tool enemies of different nations are using against each other
While I agree there’s a responsibility for combating misinfo, you can’t rely on nation states to decide what is misinfo. Authoritarians do and will abuse this to silence criticism of their regimes.
What you see and don’t see on social media is already decided by nation states. It’s just countries like Russia, China, and Iran do it covertly.
They can push the things they want to the top of the algorithms with a relatively small (for a nation state) amount of resources. Sure they usually don’t outright ban content (but that can happen too by spamming abuse reports) but they can effectively shadow ban people by simply promoting everything except for the things they don’t like and use bot spam to do the social media equivalent of signal jamming.
And of course (as we’ve seen with Musk) the leadership of social media companies can be influenced (by a combo of same the misinformation they use on everyone else + money) and made into assets for nation states. This allows them to have some influence over who gets officially blocked on social media.
Yes it’s not ideal to have nation states influencing speech, the current is to have foreign adversary nation states influencing speech. The choice is between having democracies having a de jure influence on social media or have authoritarian countries have a de facto influence on social media.
All media companies need to be held responsible for not doing due diligence against the spread of disinformation. Disinformation is currently the main tool enemies of different nations are using against each other
Edit to make the statement more general
While I agree there’s a responsibility for combating misinfo, you can’t rely on nation states to decide what is misinfo. Authoritarians do and will abuse this to silence criticism of their regimes.
What you see and don’t see on social media is already decided by nation states. It’s just countries like Russia, China, and Iran do it covertly.
They can push the things they want to the top of the algorithms with a relatively small (for a nation state) amount of resources. Sure they usually don’t outright ban content (but that can happen too by spamming abuse reports) but they can effectively shadow ban people by simply promoting everything except for the things they don’t like and use bot spam to do the social media equivalent of signal jamming.
And of course (as we’ve seen with Musk) the leadership of social media companies can be influenced (by a combo of same the misinformation they use on everyone else + money) and made into assets for nation states. This allows them to have some influence over who gets officially blocked on social media.
Yes it’s not ideal to have nation states influencing speech, the current is to have foreign adversary nation states influencing speech. The choice is between having democracies having a de jure influence on social media or have authoritarian countries have a de facto influence on social media.
Does anyone else get the feeling that our leaders have been playing way too much Stellaris, Rimworld, and EvE?