As people like @alexstamos have rightly pointed out, this whole cauldron of outrage creates powerful disincentives for the social media giants—the only ones who have the data—to study what is going on. You don't have to worry about subpoenas for research you never conducted.
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For people who don't know my work, I've been beating on Facebook like a piñata ever since I was on MySpace. it brings me comfort and happiness. But I also think we need to find a way to step out of the social media thunderdome and find a way to understand and fix this dynamic.
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I also think that whatever approach we take from that can't be limited to academics, lawyers, and the various former tech executives who saw the error of their ways and have become the most prominent voices in this field. We can't NPR or social justice our way out of this problem
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But the direction this project is going now is to create technical, legal and regulatory tools for power elites to suppress public speech that they find ideologically harmful. And at the same time, they express dismay that alienated people continue to flock to alternate realities
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We need some fresh thinking on how to incorporate communication technologies into our social lives in a way that doesn't incentivize anger, radicalize the vulnerable, and turn every issue into tribal war. Nerdesse oblige on the part of the current players is not going to cut it.
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And finally, we have to take this discussion out of the American cultural context these companies marinate in. You can't localize the dynamics of social media the way you would translate a web page, by doing an American version first and then tweaking it a bit for the foreigners
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A lot of people have been comparing Facebook to big tobacco, but in my view the better metaphor for social media is alcohol. Unrestricted it's a disaster, but most of the work of keeping it in check is done by social norms, and differs across cultures. Some do better than others.
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While we wait, though, letting a bunch of pasty nerds continue to run this apparatus of influence for profit is no bueno. Let's at least demonetize it (by cutting away at the taproot of surveillance and data collection) while we figure out how to live with it long term.
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All that said about the futility of prescriptive content policing, I still believe people should do thirty years without parole for posting any recipe that doesn't start with the ingredient list and continue immediately with a straightforward description of how to make the dish.
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Replying to @Pinboard
This is Google's fault. I run a website part of which is a substantial recipe collection. Google will basically not rank you if you do this
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Yeah, I know. People there need to go to jail.
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