Over the last two decades, humanity has struggled to adapt to one the most groundbreaking and disruptive technological advancements the world has ever seen: social media.
Incredibly interactive and addictive, it has absorbed most of our lives and day-to-day functions. The sheer speed and amount of information we consume is unfathomable, something that, even a couple of decades ago, we could not comprehend.
Social media has its obvious downsides of shortened attention spans and mental health side effects, but the most recent case mounted against social media is how it is affecting the information landscape.
The concern is warranted considering the speed of information and lack of meaningful consumption.
Current approaches
Under both the Biden and Trump administration, we saw interactions between government and private social media companies to influence visibility and platforming of purveyors, of what they perceive, of misinformation.
The compliance of social media companies is important to note considering the legal headlock they are in due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and we can see this firsthand with Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos hedging their bets and moving toward conservative virtue signaling to save face and gain favor with President Trump.
Although Trump is taking the more nuanced approach, signing an executive order to bar the executive branch from engaging with social media companies, recent deportations and arrests over though crimes and wrong-think related to the Israel-Palestine conflict is concerning.
Although court ruling dismissed the notions of coercion, our European counterparts are becoming a little more aggressive on the matter, largely criminalizing hate speech and other “harmful speech.”
Misinformation is a slippery slope
The reason I am bringing the government approaches to influencing content moderation is the core issue with defining wrong-speak and misinformation in a democratic society.
At least in our Bill of Rights, there is no authority who can overrule the First Amendment without amending the Constitution itself. This is where the situation becomes blurry.
But besides the “Constitution says so” aspect, it’s a core part of a democratic society’s social contract of debate and communication.
Humans have always been susceptible to or engaged in misinformation—it’s nothing new. What is new is how we consume the misinformation, which is the root of the issue, and is compounded when fed into algorithms showing the most engaging information regardless of value.
Although it sounds like an easy fix—remove all bad information—the irony all speech control efforts face is it will create more radicals in addition to the impossibility of monitoring all social media accurately. Similar to a lesson learned in the War on Terror, if you eliminate a terrorist, you create 10 more.
When you alienate people from the information landscape, and therefore society, you empower them. The Forbidden Fruit Theory is especially true when you consider grievances a population may have with their authorities.
The handling of misinformation in COVID-19 is a perfect example. Regardless of the efficacy of their claims, figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. only became more popular and were legitimized after being de-platformed.
The problem is we are not tackling the issue at its core. The issue is the design and use of our information landscape. It was never tested before implementation on society at large. It is the greatest and furthest reaching science and surveillance experiment ever conducted, and we will not know the results until it is too late.
The idea humanity is too ignorant to navigate information is quite cynical, but an argument I would be tempted to entertain due to the design of social media.
Essentially, we need a better way to communicate. But censoring speech will only make our information landscape even worse, radicalizing people and segmenting our already fragile political system.
