Two weeks ago, I wrote about the regulation of social media platforms in “Social intelligence:”
Rather than focus on moderating the content itself, however, I would argue that regulation [of social media] should start with the algorithms.
Clearly the Justice Department wasn’t reading, as they announced a proposal last week that does the exact opposite of what I suggested!
There is a good summary here, but the TL;DR is that the Justice Department is attempting to force social media platforms to refrain from moderating content that isn’t pornographic, excessively violent, supportive of terrorism, or explicitly unlawful.
In other words, moderators couldn’t touch conspiracy theories about devil-worshipping Democratic pedophiles and pseudo-scientific advice about curing COVID-19.
I’m strongly opposed to the Justice Department proposal for many reasons, but I also disagree with those on the Left who argue that the problems with social media could simply be solved with more moderation. Certainly some content moderation is important, but it would be naive to assume the government (or private companies) could ever establish exactly the right content moderation policies that will curtail misinformation and conspiracies without chilling any legitimate speech.
Instead, I’ll elaborate on my thesis from a couple weeks ago and propose some content-neutral ways we could improve social media. And I’ll offer one amendment to my idea that we should “start with the algorithms.”
Any comprehensive reform should encompass broad product design changes that roll up into a central theme of slowing down social media.
If we accept that social media platforms are always going to host some problematic content, then we should try to introduce friction into the process of spreading content.
The Margins proposed a couple of good ideas for doing so in their “5 Point Plan to Fix Social Media”:
Limit the number of people to whom you can forward a message or link. This would constrain the reach of content that is shared privately via messaging tools.
Impose a minimum character count for social posts. This would introduce a barrier to sharing and increase the likelihood that users will contextualize the links and media they share.
I would throw out a few more ideas, as well:
Establish a “tape delay” for Likes, Retweets, shares and comments so they’re invisible to users and/or algorithms for a specified amount of time. This might not stop objectionable content from going viral, but it could at least slow down the process and hopefully give users more time to see news from reputable sources before encountering misinformation.
An alternative to the “tape delay” would be a “cooling off” period whereby users have to wait a certain amount of time after drafting a comment or initiating a Retweet/Like/Share before they could execute that engagement.
Twitter’s recent pilot of a feature reminding users to read articles before they Retweet them is another good starting point. It could be enhanced with a few simple questions (e.g., “Which of the following people was quoted in the article?”) that would prove the user consumed the content before sharing it.
On top of these changes, reinventing social media feeds to de-prioritize the role of algorithms would be perhaps the most impactful change. Again, from The Margins (emphasis mine):
Keep the feed reverse chronological by default. Every time a person logged in, they could manually opt into an algorithmically ranked feed, but they'd receive a cigarette label style warning on the dangers of algorithmic consumption.
Or if we must rely upon A.I., then I would return to the notion that social media algorithms should be reengineered to deemphasize engagement.
Ultimately, it’s hard to imagine any social media companies adopting these reforms without regulatory pressure from the government. This might entail the creation of an agency tasked with enforcing fines or even recalls upon social media companies that fail to adopt the proposed policies (or similar ones) to reduce the speed at which content spreads throughout their networks.
Just think of it like a speed limit for the internet.