Tech

The story of Section 230 in the United States—and around the world, as other countries followed America’s lead in giving free rein to these American companies—is stunningly simple. Technology platforms had been given the freedom to sell the first consumer product ever that was absolutely immune from age-old common-law or modern regulatory

There is no teleological arc for digital platforms; they don’t move in one direction toward perfection, the way hard drives have been able to store more and more data over time. Instead, it is cyclical, swinging between different strategies of centralization and decentralization like a pendulum.

Instead of leveling the field between small and large, the open Internet has dramatically tilted it in favor of the most massive players.

In retrospect we should not be surprised that an industry excluded from basic liability and told it would not be held accountable grew up to be irresponsible and unaccountable.

Gamergate announced our new era, of American life shaped by social media’s incentives and rules, from platforms just beyond the outskirts of mainstream society.

The expansion of our technological reach is not increasing our self-efficacy, but undermining it.

people who use social media frequently perceive significantly more political disagreement in their daily lives than those who do not.

people keep coming back to social media because they help us do something that makes us distinctively human: create, revise, and maintain our identities to gain social status. Social media allow people to present different versions of themselves, monitor how others react to those versions, and revise their identities with unprecedented speed and

The sharing contest is what produces social gravitation in the web.