Tom Curtis

I think this movie is crucial watching for anybody who wants to understand the modern world. It clearly identifies a genuine problem, and one that it is critical that we solve. If the movie has any weakness, it is the complete lack of discussion of actual solutions. Clearly simply banning social media is not viable. To my mind, part of the virtue of the selective feeding of information for advertisers, and social media, is that it avoids sending messages that antagonise. If my social media sent me a steady diet of crank science, or racist messaging; I would immediately disengage from it. But those messages get plenty of play because social media algorithms avoid showing them to me, but target instead those who like them, or at least are vulnerable to them. I think that, therefore, part of the solution to the social dilemma must be regulation, strictly enforced, requiring that recommendations reach a more inclusive field. How exactly that would be worked out in social media, I am unsure of. I first had a similar idea in relation to politics, where I think it should be a legal requirement on political advertising that any advertising sent to anybody in an electorate, be sent to everybody in the electorate. Basing feeds on electorate sized bodies, or municipalities is probably impractical; but some method must be regulated to break up the isolated communities in social media who are blinkered to the majority of information because of the individual targeting of their feed. At the same time, social media must be made legally responsible for the quality and truthfulness of their content. They have long argued that they should be exempted from that, on the basis that they are not publishers, but merely carriers. That claim, however, is false; for their targeting of feeds exercises an editorial role, meaning that they in fact publish that which they include in your feed. Therefore, unless the feed is randomly selected, or based exclusively on explicit searches; they should be treated as publishers of their content, and have the full legal liability that goes with that role.