can ascertain if a story is fake or not, and how high on the scale of
credibility.
A digital space needs rules. Facebook already has rules—it
famously deleted the iconic image from the Vietnam War of a naked
girl running away from her burning village. It also deleted a post by
the Norwegian prime minister critical of Facebook’s actions. A human
editor would have recognized the image as the iconic war photo. The
AI did not.
There’s a bigger, if unpublicized, reason Facebook as of yet refuses
to bring back human editors—it would introduce cost. Why do
something the users can do themselves? You get to hide behind
freedom of speech, even if you have a crowded theater and someone
yells “Fire!” Fear and outrage? All the better. Facebook has good
reason not to see itself as a media company. It’s too much work and
would introduce friction to growth. And that’s something the Four
don’t do.
Utopia/Dystopia
Media platforms where you are the product have empowered,
connected, and facilitated greater empathy among billions of people.
The shift in value from old-media to new-media firms will result in job
destruction and, as with any upheaval, risks.
The greatest threats to modern civilization have come from people
and movements who had one thing in common: controlling and
perverting the media to their own devices in the absence of a fourth
estate that was protected from intimidation and expected to pursue
the truth. A disturbing aspect of today’s media duopoly, Facebook and
Google, is their “Don’t call us media, we’re a platform” stance. This
abdication from social responsibility, enabling authoritarians and
hostile actors to deftly use fake news, risks that the next big medium
may, again, be cave walls.