| Social media as a decoupled virtual public space can't both exist and protect our individual rights and the implicit dependencies that culminate in retaining a certain level of rational thought, at least not at the same time. Any communications platform that allows a many to one interaction, with the ability to obscure the source (you), is a danger to democracy. By raising the noise floor, or manipulating sentiment in a inconsistent way, in such platforms, you can manipulate on a grand scale individual perception by distorting reflected appraisal. Its a fundamentally harmful and destructive process. You do also however need anonymity at the same time, and there must be cost. Competing interests guarantee that this will never be possible in a centralized system. The feedback relationship which is distorted, and distorts itself, will run off the rails. Human moderation doesn't scale, and AI moderation can't determine unique meaning, and hallucinates, distorting reflected appraisal in the process, isolating (through punishment), and removes agency. We need to appropriately secure our communication platforms from these subtle but corrupting outcomes that are brittle and lack resiliency measures. |