Improving Social Media: Misinformation & Free Expression
All Tech is Human Series #9: with Jasmine McNealy and Claire Wardle
Details from the original livestream event put on by All Tech is Human
Key Takeaways & Some Action Items
The 1st amendment
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” (Constitution of United States of America 1789 (rev. 1992)).
This is not absolute! -Jasmine
What Should Social Media Companies Do?
Educate people about the issues of misinformation and content moderation
Allow for academic conversation (e.g., doctors on Twitter) - but put measures in place to prevent that information from getting weaponized
Recognize that you are a trusted source of truth for some users
In some countries, you might be a single source of accessing the internet
Think About Power
What kind of rules are you creating for your users?
How do you enforce those rules?
Section 230
Not the first amendment, but does have expression implications
Corporate decisions aren’t always legal decisions: e.g., preventing porn on Facebook is a corporate decision, not a legal requirement -- Claire
Regulation related to content (from the government) is very difficult to standardize and to enforce
Misinformation
Most misinformation is illegal speech
Ambiguity gets weaponized -- Claire
Missteps happened during COVID-19, especially near the beginning of the pandemic, because there was no truth to hold onto to guide the moderation of misinformation
Until the CDC guidelines helped social media companies spread the most up-to-date health information
We need something that is globally going to compete as a response to regulate social media companies like Facebook
Annotated Resources
Jasmine McNealy (one of the guest speakers):
Twitter: @JasmineMcNealy
Claire Wardle (one of the guest speakers):
Relevant Media, Links, and Publications:
Parler offline following Amazon, Apple, Google bans over Capitol violence content
“The Real Facebook Oversight Board” → Made in response to Facebook’s Oversight Board
Post No Evil (Podcast episode about content moderation and the 1st amendment) from RadioLab
Facebook Ads, Propaganda, and Global Politics with Nayantara Ranganathan and Manuel Beltrán (Radical AI Podcast Episode)
More than Fake News: Fighting Media Manipulation with Claire Leibowicz and Emily Saltz from the Partnership on AI (Radical AI Podcast Episode)
Do you have any more action items or takeaways that you’d like to share that are related to this topic? Any resources you’d like to include in this list? We’d love to hear from you! Feel free to leave your thoughts in a comment below (you can post your comment by hovering over the bottom-right corner of the comment box) and clicking ‘Post Comment’.
