Social Platform Trust & Safety

For synthetic media to reach millions of views—as the Swift images did in just hours—they need massive, aggregated networks, which allow them to identify an initial audience and then spread. As the amount of available content grows with the broader use of generative AI, social media’s role as curator will become even more important.

The resulting problems are not primarily problems of disinformation, though disinformation plays some role. They are the problems you get when large swathes of the public sphere are exclusively owned by wannabe God-Emperors. Elon Musk owns X/Twitter outright. Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta through a system in which he is CEO, chairman and effective... See more

Facebook Groups also allow moderators to remain anonymous, despite the platform otherwise requiring “real names.” While anonymity is not a panacea for harassment—many harassers in our study used their real names—it makes it possible for public figures to evade responsibility for engaging in hate or harassment.

We can immediately rule out reproducing the current system in which a tiny number of companies govern permissible speech and what safety means for billions of people. We don't want social media that's like Twitter except without a demented owner. You cannot fix social media by having a non-profit run it or by guiding it with some ethical principles... See more