[montagg]

Well, we’re talking about Facebook, so I’m not worried about gulags. At least from Facebook itself. From the people who get their information on Facebook, though, maybe I should be.

I’m positing that in the long run it will be easier and less detrimental to society to establish some kind of editorial guidelines around misinformation and hold platforms accountable to them than it will be to educate enough people quickly enough to vet misinformation for themselves, especially as misinformation becomes increasingly hard to spot. I say this knowing fully that defining what misinformation is will be extremely hard, and you’re putting a lot of power in the hands of whatever person or group does that. Every decision is a trade off where you choose what benefits you think are best and what problems you think you can solve best and trying to balance them. I think we can better solve the problem of effectively limiting power abuse than we can of limiting the broad abuse of inherent human biases.

Edit: I should also note, I agree with a handful of the assumptions I listed above, specifically that democracies are built on the idea that people can broadly reach the right answer together. I still believe that. But I also believe in clearing out the brush and debris in the way so the crowd can actually use that superpower well.