You think the internet is a clown show now? You ain’t seen nothing yet…
The Guardian
Social media platforms are laying off their ‘trust and safety’ teams. Brace yourself for a new wave of unfettered misinformation and abuse. (...)
[W]e may have passed the point where tech platforms stopped caring about moderating what happens on their platforms. From now on, (almost) anything goes.
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Robert F Kennedy Jr on a video screen at an anti-vaccination rally in Washington, January 2022. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP.
If that’s true, then we have reached the most pivotal moment in the evolution of the tech industry since 1996. (...) In 26 words, the clause guaranteed immunity for online computer services with respect to third-party content generated by its users. It basically meant that if you ran an online service on which people could post whatever they liked, you bore no legal liability for any of the bad stuff that could happen as a result of those publications.
On the basis of that keep-out-of-jail card, corporations such as Google, Meta and Twitter prospered mightily for years. (...)
But moderation is difficult and often traumatising work. And, given the scale of the problem, keeping social media clean is an impossible, sisyphean task. (...) AI that can outwit the ingenuity of the bad actors who lurk in the depths of the internet has yet to be invented.
And, more significantly perhaps, times have suddenly become harder for tech companies. The big ones are still very profitable, but that’s partly because they been shedding jobs at a phenomenal rate. And many of those who have been made redundant worked in areas such as moderation, or what the industry came to call “trust and safety”. (...) After all, if there’s no legal liability for the bad stuff that gets through whatever filters there are, why keep these worthy custodians on board?
Which is why democracies will eventually have to contemplate what was hitherto unthinkable: rethink section 230 and its overseas replications and make platforms legally liable for the harms that they enable. (...)
Tags: #internet #internet_safety #social_media #digital_media #media #instagram #facebook #meta #politics #twitter #google #politics #discrimination #racism #hate_speech #conspiracy_theory #anti_vaxer #moderation #fake_news #disinformation