The Age of Unregulated Social Media Is Over (opens in new tab)

The problem we're experiencing is what I've been calling "humanity at scale." The vast overwhelming majority of people can be perfectly fine, courteous, thoughtful, engaging, but if just 0.1% of the 3 billion internet users are lacking empathy, argue in bad faith, harass, threaten, etc., we're still dealing with 3 million people. And if those people don't particularly have much better to do, and can post pretty often, then you have the worst segments of humanity having a magnified voice.

The recent focus of troll farms and political interference increases that number by introducing people who wouldn't be interesting in doing it for free, but will gladly do it for a paycheck.

And then you have the social influence of all these voices saying and doing the worst thing and modifying the behavior of internet users who otherwise would never consider doing these things at all. This behavior becomes normalized where it wasn't before.

We used to think it was a matter of anonymity, but I don't think that's it, we've all encountered plenty of people willing to do these things under their real (or easily traceable) names.

I think it's just good ol' fashioned peer pressure, where the worst elements get the most influence and the best elements are easily ignored.

The fact that the new rules, whatever they will be, are so blatantly politically motivated (don't kid yourself, none of this would be happening if Clinton had won the election), suggests that there is approximately zero chance that they will be politically neutral.

Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is a society-damaging overreaction.

Angry people will still look for other like-minded people with whom they can share their grievances. The Internet makes it possible for larger groups to meet, talk, complain, and bond. When these folks get kicked off Facebook, substitute ecosystems will pop up on WhatsApp, some other social media app. Are "we" going to start restricting encryption next, just so "we" can keep the next unlikable candidate out of office? Not worth it IMHO.

How do we get lawmakers to understand the difference between the data going over an internet connection, the various transport protocols being used, and the end result that's being rendered in the browser?

If this is done poorly, by regulating network traffic overall like the FCC seems to want to do, we'll start to have real issues with overreach. Web content, streaming content, game traffic, etc. will all be held to some standard, or set of standards.

We, as the tech community, could get out in front of the problem. Some of issues raised in the article stem from the combination of almost effortless publishing at a massive scale, combined with complete anonymity.

We could define a standard that would allow for some kind of traceability or transparency, maybe public key cryptography, to prove identity. Social media sites like Facebook could voluntarily implement the standard. Browsers would be able to render some kind of simple UI indicator to mark content source trust, just like we have a lock to signify HTTPS today.

We can either wait and see what happens, or propose a technical and voluntary solution that would allow public internet traffic to remain as free as it does today.

Edit: it would be in Facebook's best interest to implement such a standard, because they clearly realize they have to do something, and this wouldn't get in the way of their ad revenue.

Oh, great, can't wait until social media companies become arbiters of truth and outright prevent you from reading things they've deemed unfit.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's definitely not doing nothing. The 2016 election has proved this.

It'd be interesting for Facebook and the like to provide a report to users of all the content they were shown that originated from accounts linked to foreign actors.

I worry more about measures that may be taken by platforms to prevent using pseudonyms (Facebook is a big enemy on this respect) in the mistaken belief that real names (or "authentic names", as Facebook calls it) would make people interact in ways that don't cause harm. Add to this making surveillance a de facto experience of having an online presence and humanity (as we know it) would be doomed.

I'm severely disinterested in regulated social media, even moreso than social media under any other conditions.

If I can't write fiction, then why write words ever? Be it on the internet, be it on a website, be it on an extra special website that people seem to find more important than most other websites.

Surely it can't be the majority of Americans in growing, significant economic need driving lack of confidence in "modern democracies."

Ours is very deeply corrupt. The ONLY place that is really being discussed is outside of equally owned media channels.

Don't like that state of affairs, but failure to incorporate it into this problem set is ripe for abuse.