I'm presently reading Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World, and in chapter 2 he discusses how we do a lot of learning socially from others in our tribe. This kind of learning is more efficient than trial and error, but it requires trusting those near to you, and it involves a lot of other psychological mechanisms, such as taboos, that strongly reinforce the learning with strong emotions, such as fear of ostracism. There is explanatory power there in considering what's happening with social media and its intense flame of simultaneous communication and destruction. If you learn from your tribe primarily, then those "other tribes" are at best neutral, but often implicitly evil. Along comes the internet to greatly amplify both signals, and to expose you like never before to the belief systems of other tribes. It is a recipe for disaster.
If you haven't seen the Netflix show The Social Dilemma, it is worth watching for its interviews with social media developers and executives, many who find that their own products are addicting, and who prohibit their own children from using them, at least some of the time.
As for the white hot First Amendment debate related to last week's cancellations, before forming your opinion completely, I advise looking at some of the resources below. Starting with “Dear [all of you]: before hot-taking on how to regulate online speech, please consider reading some of the foundational work in this area,” Alex Stamos posted a thread on Twitter 1/9/21
Dear journalists, venture capitalists, TikTok teens and other ThinkFluencers: before hot-taking on how to regulate online speech, please consider reading some of the foundational work in this area.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) January 9, 2021
Start with @Klonick's groundbreaking overview:https://t.co/p0pq039eLG
with links to resources about the First Amendment and legal debate about online content moderation. As much as we would like it to be simple, it appears that this is not a black and white issue, I have copied some of the resource links here for your reference, just in case the tweet is deleted.
The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech by Kate Klonick @Klonick
Who Do You Sue? by Daphne Keller @daphnehk
Jeff Kosseff's Twenty Six Words that Created the Internet. @jkosseff
The Rise of Content Cartels by Evelyn Douek @evelyndouek
Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech under Surveillance Capitalism by Jillian C. York @jilliancyork
Other sites with empirical data: http://eipartnership.net, http://io.stanford.edu, http://cip.uw.edu, http://digitalsherlocks.org/ourwork, http://graphika.com
Alex Stamos' YouTube video "The Platform Challenge" by Alex Stamos @alexstamos
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