Snippet: Too Little, Too Late ☇

Nick Bilton for Vanity Fair (via Ben Brooks):

The problem is, it’s too little, too late. There are movements that have been created in this country as a result of these platforms choosing to do nothing to stop the spread of hatred and conspiracies by none other than Donald Trump and his attention-seeking duplicitous and deceptive family. Four years ago, there were no Proud Boys. Millions of Americans didn’t believe in a bizarre outlandish and totally ridiculous conspiracy theory called “Q.” And most people trusted that voting—especially in the presidential election—was safe and secure and would result in the rightful winner becoming the next president. As Andrew Yang noted, “Twitter bans for inciting violence should last for months or years not hours.” Yang was actually being nice by suggesting that Trump should be kicked off the platform for a period of time. Celebrities, politicians, and others in Silicon Valley called for Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg to ban Trump permanently from their platform. Countless people I’ve spoken with fear that if these companies don’t do just that, we could see a repeat of Trump’s assault on democracy in 2024, and by then, after he’s had four years to plan, it could be much worse than it was today.

Taking a step back and not focusing on Trump, conspiracy theories, and election questions, I think we start to see that social networks allow hate to brew, profit off of conflict, and sometimes haven’t done the minimum that they could to curb bad behavior. They’re not strictly to blame for last week, but have made a lot of things more frictionless (especially for fringe groups) over the last few years. I’ll admit that while already angry about the events of last week, plenty of things on Twitter made me angrier. That can’t be healthy.