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Weihsueh Chiu's avatar

I was wondering about the "heckler's veto" and "information glut" -- and that maybe part of the problem is the actual velocity of discourse, that maybe we need a way to "slow down" and add some "friction" in the social media realm. The analogy I'm thinking of is with respect to high frequency trading (HFT) on Wall Street -- firms were literally buying space closer to the NYSE servers so that they could shave microseconds off their "latency" and increase their profits in a way that has no economic rationale once or ever, and that adds to market volatility. In finance, even a minuscule financial transaction tax would reduce HFT substantially... Is there some way to add some type of "virality tax" that could at a sort of circuit-breaker to the (destructive) business model for social media? Would that help?

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Nicholas Weininger's avatar

What grounds are there to believe that the American public, working at the federal level, can in fact make better decisions than the tech executives on these questions-- which as you say are hard questions, new to most people and requiring unusual domain knowledge? The pitfalls of leaving things to Mark Zuckerberg are apparent and you're right to call them out. But "getting our act together as a society" may not actually be a feasible alternative in this case, and without that, the decisions political leaders would make on these issues and the laws they would pass are likely to be even worse than unaccountable Zuckerbergian rule.

Rational civic deliberation on novel, nuanced issues like these happens at the municipal level in the US sometimes-- perhaps occasionally even at the state level. It happens at the national level in other countries much smaller and less polarized than ours. There is no reason to believe that it can be made to happen anytime soon at the US federal level, regardless of the results of the next few elections. Given that reality, for all the real problems of leaving referee authority with tech executives, I'm inclined to believe it is the least bad alternative on offer.

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