Attention to the Unseen

Jeff Kosseff writes: In 1995, Eugene Volokh published a law review article in which he predicted that the rapidly growing internet would “dramatically reduce the costs of distributing speech” and that “the new media order that these technologies will bring will be much more democratic and diverse than the environment we see now.” The concept, which Volokh dubbed “cheap speech,” would mean that “far more speakers—rich and poor, popular and not, banal and avant garde—will be able to make their…

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Ezra Klein writes: A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at a Presbyterian college in South Carolina, and asked some of the students where they liked to get their news. Almost every one said TikTok. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. And Chinese companies are vulnerable to the whims and the will of the Chinese government. There is no possible ambiguity on this point: The Chinese Communist Party spent much of the last year cracking down on…

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Renée DiResta, Laura Edelson, Brendan Nyhan, Ethan Zuckerman write: Social media platforms are where billions of people around the world go to connect with others, get information and make sense of the world. These companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok and Reddit, collect vast amounts of data based on every interaction that takes place on their platforms. And despite the fact that social media has become one of our most important public forums for speech, several of the most important…

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Anand Giridharadas writes: It is a perfect marriage for an age of plutocracy: Twitter with its serious problems and Elon Musk, the embodiment of those problems. What happens when the incarnation of a problem buys the right to decide what the problem is and how to fix it? Twitter has a disinformation problem — fake news about Covid vaccines, climate and more running buck wild across the platform. Mr. Musk has shown himself to be a highly capable peddler of…

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David Leonhardt writes: Two years ago, the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published a statistic that you don’t normally see. It was the share of wealth owned by the richest 0.00001 percent of Americans. That tiny slice represented only 18 households, Saez and Zucman estimated. Each one had an average net worth of about $66 billion in 2020. Together, the share of national wealth owned by the group had risen by a factor of nearly 10 since 1982. This…

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HuffPost reports: Former President Barack Obama said Thursday that disinformation on social media is hurting democracy, and that social media companies should be subject to regulation. “One of the biggest reasons for democracy’s weakening is the profound change that’s taken place in how we communicate and consume information,” Obama said in a speech at Stanford University. Obama noted that most people rely on search tools and social media as main sources for news and information, but warned a constant feed…

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Gizmodo reports: In the hours following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, employees at Facebook tasked with preventing “potential offline harm” found themselves under siege by a mob of a different sort. Reports of abusive content from users were flooding in. As one employee put it in an internal forum, many of the flagged posts “called for violence, suggested the overthrow of the government would be desirable, or otherwise voiced support for the protests.” The same day, Instagram employees…

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Natalia Antelava writes: “Your account has been suspended.” “You cannot post or comment for 3 days” “You can’t go live for 63 days” For Afghan journalist Shafi Karimi, the list of restrictions that Facebook has imposed on him goes on and on. “I am blocked and I am losing an audience, and people are losing vital information,” says Karimi, who is covering Afghanistan from exile in France. He is not the only one. From Afghanistan to Ukraine, and much of…

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