General Discussion

I worked in IT for 40 years — from the earliest years of the Internet when universities took advantage of DARPAnet up until last year. The promise of the Internet held together pretty well until always-on Internet connections made it into homes. Then Google tracking and meta-data collection/selling started the decline by incentivizing content be captivating rather than informative. The advent Social Media (MySpace/Facebook) meant every kook had a cost-free publisher with zero editorial discretion applied. Algorithms rewarded polarizing content with no fact-checking and then… we end up where we are today.

I only see two ways to reign things in and make people or “online publishing platforms” accountable for what they put out there. Either:

- Revoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which provides legal immunity to Internet platforms for user-generated content, OR

- Remove the anonymity that usernames/handles supply so that everyone has the same liability potential as they would if they published their words on physical paper instead of screens. (If the Internet platform can’t be liable, then the identifiable poster must be)

I wish there’s another way to unwind the Pandora’s Box of misinformation and acrimony that unregulated social media has brought us, but I don’t see it. (Another option that could help us as a society would be to criminalize hate speech in publication. If Canada can do it, the US should be able to do so too, but a Constitutional Amendment might be necessary to make that happen.)