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.

Incentives for productive speech: A speech community is likely to produce whatever kind of discourse it incentivizes. This means that users should have formal or informal incentives to produce speech that is recognized by other users as worthy.

A scholarly culture that reads and discusses enduringly great works incentivizes the production of such... 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.

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

All of these ideas are free-speech friendly. They do not involve top-down censorship, but bottom-up user choice. Letting people police the content on their own pages and feeds is the natural next step for platforms that want to empower users rather than constantly surveil and censor them. Such features are also just common sense. No one has an... See more

If we want to protect the rights of real people, it should be much harder to take away someone’s account and online property. But that only works if we have a way to know which accounts belong to a real and specific human with an authentic connection to the community. That implies more stringent validation requirements to get and keep an account.