Recently I posted a comment to this video below. What got me to post this comment besides the video itself was the censorship of Coronavirus videos on YouTube created by Dr. Seheult which thankfully are still all available on MedCram. Also I recently heard of censorship on Facebook as well.

Comment to Video

Personally I believe that major problems with social media as it is are privacy, censorship and machine learning curation of content that may include unintentional bias. I understand with machine learning many times the bias is accidental and purely based on the data going in to create the model. Another subtle potential issue with social media is manipulation, as in the manipulation of human behavior in order to create a situation in which they can be motivated to act in ways that are good and thereby profitable for the entity that owns the platform but not in a healthy behavior pattern for the individual in the long run. In my opinion humans can be subtly gamed with stimulating content curated by the platforms that can do things from as simple as encouraging more use of it to something along the lines of gently reforming a set of values that could sway a populations way of thinking over time. All institutions are capable of doing this but, social media being a unique personalized experience certainly has more power in this regard. It can be both your best friend and worst enemy. To shift forward into a new and more equitable model, in my opinion a good idea would be to redirect the funds that go from the government to the companies that run the social media platforms and fund programs at research universities to foster the development of alternative social media platforms. This would include any fines that would become levied on the social media companies for violations of the laws that will be written as a result of this executive order. The idea is to foster the development of alternative platforms that allow for a public commons on the Internet that is ideally along the lines of a self organizing system. Preferably it would not be under the control of any single entity and have transparency as far as the technology is concerned so there are no tricks up it’s sleeve, such as privacy concerns, censorship issues and unintended model/algorithm biases and unintentional human behavior modification. A model for this would be along the lines of what has been done with academic scientific research, open source software or other media such as Wikipedia, which by the nature of having many eyes on it becomes self adjusting to the needs and wants of the users, with the mechanism that achieves the results in plain sight. No doubt given enough funding and some bright minds on the task this could become a reality as the current technology required to achieve this goal is readily available.