So this is a really contentious point, but first off:

It's easy to shrug off allegations of being an arbiter of truth. I think it's obvious that what the truth needs now is guardians. But why is this? https://twitter.com/jack/status/1265837139360485376

It's because *like it or not* the structure of our social media does influence what perceive as true. You may think your service is neutral because it is determined by an algorithm.

It isn't. It isn't in the very same way that our society is full of implicit bias and all these people with privilege are swimming around in this bias and not noticing it.

"But wait", you say, "isn't this really about the marketplace of ideas?"

We have this idea that if we let everybody talk, and then vote (Implicitly or explicitly), what will bubble up to the surface is the truth as is best understood.

I spent ten years of my life working for a company who said "Democracy on the web works".

I wish I could say that were true. I want it to be true, because it means we could substitute a very hard social problem ("what is the truth?") with a technical problem ("how do I bubble up interesting content? Can I filter things with math and make them useful?")

I am here to tell you there is no royal road to the truth. There is no algorithmic one either. We have been at this project for more than a decade, and the dominant lesson is that using social connections to derive the truth simply *does not scale*.

And the failure modes are SUPER FUCKING BAD. Our democracy in the US is hanging by a thread. On Facebook, 64% of the people who joined radical groups did so *because the algorithm told them so*.

Our President? When he's not telling people to poison themselves with an anti-malaria medicine that does *worse* than nothing, he is busy insinuating the journalists he doesn't like committed murder. That's when he's not undermining the basis of our 244 year old democracy.

He got this position despite losing by millions of votes because he had the help of foreign powers and his own party's operatives to manipulate social media to back up his narrative that up is down, Benghazi is a scandal, freedom is war, and her emails mattered.

Not a day goes by when I don't read a story about how some madwoman's theory that vaccines cause pandemics is now trending in the minds of millions of Americans.

The free exchange of ideas is the *opposite* of what we got. We were promised a dozen Arab Springs.

We'll be lucky if the fifty cent army doesn't get us another Tiananmen in the next three months with the lies they tell on social media.

What did this was a naive belief in unregulated markets and platforms wedded to the idea that algorithms can give us more and better truth.

As I write this, this project has failed. It has failed on YouTube, it has failed unimaginably on Facebook, and it has failed here.

So don't tell me you're not the arbiter of truth. You and your platform *already are*. And this little footnote next to Trump's latest lie?

It is literally the least you can do.

Because the truth that will set humanity free is not you washing your hand like some sort of postmodern Pontius Pilate and stepping back.

The truth needs friends. It needs allies. It needs a posse.

Without this the technological terrors that we've constructed could very well spell the end of our experiment in self governance and democracy.

So no, I don't want to hear about how you won't be an "arbiter" for the truth.

I want to hear how you want to be its champion.