Recently Meta decided to end their fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram. The move has been both hailed and criticized. They are replacing the fact-checkers with an X-style “community notes”. Mark Zuckerberg summed up the move this way: “It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

That is the essential tradeoff- whether you think false positives are more of a problem or false negatives. Are you concerned more with enabling free speech or minimizing hate speech and misinformation? Obviously both are important, and an ideal platform would maximize both freedom and content quality. It is becoming increasingly apparent that it matters. The major social media platforms are not mere vanity projects, they are increasingly the main source of news and information, and foster ideological communities. They affect the functioning of our democracy.

Let’s at least be clear about the choice that “we” are making (meaning that Zuckerberg is making for us). Maximal freedom without even basic fact-checking will significantly increase the amount of misinformation and disinformation on these platforms, as well as hate-speech. Community notes is a mostly impotent method of dealing with this. Essentially this leads to crowd-sourcing our collective perception of reality.

Free-speech optimists argue that this is all good, and that we should let the marketplace of ideas sort everything out. I do somewhat agree with this, and the free marketplace of ideas is an essential element of any free and open society. It is a source of strength. I also am concerned about giving any kind of censorship power to any centralized authority. So I buy the argument that this may be the lesser of two evils – but it still comes with some significant downsides that should not be minimized.

What I think the optimists are missing (whether out of ignorance or intention) is that a completely open platform is not a free marketplace of ideas. The free marketplace assumes that everyone is playing fair and everyone is acting in good faith. This is 2005 level of naivete. This leaves the platform open to people who are deliberately exploiting it and using it as a tool of political disinformation. This also leaves it open to motivated and dedicated ideological groups that can flood the zone with extreme views. Corporations can use the platform for their own influence campaigns and self-serving propaganda. This is not a free and fair marketplace – it means people with money, resources, and motivation can dominate the narrative. We are simply taking control away from fact-checkers and handing it over to shadowy groups with nefarious motivations. And don’t think that authoritarian governments won’t find a way to thrive in this environment also.

So we have ourselves a Catch-22. We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. This does not mean, however, that some policies are not better than others. There is a compromise in the middle that allows for the free marketplace of idea without making it trivially easy to spread disinformation, to radicalize innocent users of the platform, and allow for ideological capture. I don’t know exactly what those policies are, we need to continue to experiment and find them. But I don’t think we should throw up our hands in defeat (and acquiescence).

I think we should approach the issue like an editorial policy. Having editorial standards is not censorship. But who makes and enforces the editorial standards? Independent, transparent, and diverse groups with diffuse power and appeals processes is a place to start. No such process will be perfect, but it is likely better than having no filter at all. Such a process should have a light touch, err on the side of tolerance, and focus on the worst blatant disinformation.

I also think that we need to take a serious look at social media algorithms. This also is not censorship, but Facebook, for example, gets to decide how to recommend new content to you. They tweak the algorithms to maximize engagement. How about tweaking the algorithms to maximize quality of content and diverse perspectives instead?

We may need to also address the question of whether or not giant social media platforms represent a monopoly. Let’s face it, they do, and they also concentrate a lot of media into a few hands. We have laws to protect against such things because we have long recognized the potential harm of so much concentrated power. Social media giants have simply side-stepped these laws because they are relatively new and exist in a gray zone. Our representatives have failed to really address these issues, and the public is conflicted so there isn’t a clear political will. I think the public is conflicted partly because this is all still relatively new, but also as a result of a deliberate ideological campaign to sow doubt and confusion. The tech giants are influencing the narrative on how we should deal with tech giants.

I know there is an inherent problem here – social media outlets work best when everyone is using them, i.e. they have a monopoly. But perhaps we need to find a way to maintain the advantage of an interconnected platform while breaking up the management of that platform into smaller pieces run independently. The other option is to just have a lot of smaller platforms, but what is happening there is that different platforms are becoming their own ideological echochambers. We seem to have a knack for screwing up every option.

Right now there does not seem to be anyway for any of these things to happen. The tech giants are in control and have little incentive to give up their power and monopoly. Government has been essentially hapless on this issue. And the public is divided. Many have a vague sense that something is wrong, but there is no clear consensus on what exactly the problem is and what to do about it.