Something I think about a lot is Tide Pods.
Someone just made a joke one day, that Tide Pods look delicious.
And so people started, you know, just making posts about this on social media.
And it was just transparently hilarious.
But the platform's incentives are such that if you actually did eat a Tide pod,
you'd get a million views.
And what had seemed super funny, all of a sudden was a public health hazard.
Platforms, for I think very understandable reasons,
have a terrible time figuring out when the joke stops being funny.
"Twitter, for the very first time, has fact-checked President Trump...."
"...on voter misinformation."
"That's the line Facebook, Twitter, and others seem to have drawn."
"Trump continues to falsely insist that the election was stolen."
"Twitter has put up a flag more than a hundred times since Election Day."
"Trump urging his followers: Be there, will be wild."
"Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!"
"Twitter permanently suspending the president's personal account...."
"...due to the risk of further incitement of violence."
"Facebook."
"YouTube."
"Pinterest."
"Shopify and Paypal."
And so the question is, what is the right moment for the platform to intervene?
I think we're in a period of rethinking what misinformation is.
I think the past few years, we had the thought that misinformation was individual bad posts,
and maybe some individual actors that needed to be disciplined.
But, if we could just prune that garden,
the rest of our information ecosystem would be okay.
Alex Jones is sort of the classic example.
"Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube..."
"...have now removed content associated with Jones and InfoWars."
He does not have nearly the influence over American life today.
But that kind of whack-a-mole approach
is just not giving us the information ecosystem that we want.
This idea that the election has been stolen, which we know to be false,
is being repeated ad nauseum all across the Internet,
in private chats, in private messages, as well as in public.
This is becoming the big lie.
It's larger than any one user.
It's larger than a thousand users.
It's going to require a much more serious and difficult approach
than simply removing one account,
no matter how prominent that account might be.
147 members of Congress voted to overturn the results of the election
after the Capitol had been attacked.
Are these platforms ready to deplatform 147 sitting members of Congress?
Removing Trump was the easy part.
He incited an attack on his own government.
That is not a close call.
The hard call is, you're about to have maybe 70 million Americans,
or some huge percentage of that, talking,
including in online spaces, about an election being stolen that was not stolen.
And that is going to have a lot of really dangerous consequences.
I don't think these platforms will succeed
if they can only be defined by what they will not allow.
It's that — what are they replacing it with?
There needs to be a positive, constructive counterbalance
to all of the misinformation and conspiracy theories.
What can they do to build a better media ecosystem?
Because if we don't have a shared sense of reality,
I truly do not believe we are going to have a liberal democracy in America very much longer.