Social Platform Trust & Safety

Some users may not want to see any potentially abusive content at all, while others may, for example, need to sift through banal personal attacks in order to track credible death threats. The point, however, is that users themselves should be able to exercise significantly more agency over their own social media experience.

For example, you can send anonymous messages. You can anonymously DM somebody and you can send an anonymous message in a group. This is a format that has historically been really fun and people really like, but it inevitably falls apart because somebody gets bullied and kills themselves. For Daze, you'll be able to send anonymous messages, but... See more

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

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not... 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.