Suddenly everyone is learning again what it means to be a “media platform”.

You have free speech, but no one guaranteed you free reach. If you want to harness the power of the megaphone, AND you believe in “free enterprise”, then you have to play by the megaphone co’s rules.

You want fairness in broadcast and journalism? Aww, Maybe the Republicans under Reagan shouldn’t have repealed the Fairness doctrine back in 1987.. (but hey it allowed Fox News to get off the ground)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

The “Twitter fact check” clusterfuck has nothing to do with Twitter, or fact checks.
It has to do with the fact that we’ve had such a dumpster fire of a media/infotainment landscape for the last 30 years that the simple act of calling out a misbehaving politician is exceptional.

We’ve all been living in a boiling pot for so long that the ice cube landing on our backs feels like pain.

The design and architecture of Twitter could be vastly different. Why *not* make all elected officials' tweets subject to crowdsourced fact-checking?
Why *not* give all users the option to hide tweets from officials until they pass some validation threshold?

Why *not* build a "Twitter++" that has only verified humans and not bots (and humans that declare their political sovereignty of domicile)? Then every aspect of the UX/UI can be option-flagged to only show counts/content from verified accounts.

I understand: it's a huge PITA to implement & it's bad for business. Anonymity has certain nice aspects.

But you know what? Not having household nuclear reactors is inconvenient, but it's safer.

At this point, the fallout from "zero-accountability amplification" is clear.

Imagine if carmakers in the 1950s had made 300mph vehicles, and people left & right were killing themselves and each other.
What would it take to get them to install speed limiters?

Everyone's mental health and civic harmony are collateral damage of viral attention markets.

And just to reiterate: IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.
IT'S JUST SOFTWARE.

You can design it so that every politician's "tweet" goes, by default, can only be viewed in a UI that presents alternative points of view, fact checks, etc. Get rid of vanity metrics (Like/RT counts).

You can add, you know, a Corrections box like traditional broadcasters, where *bad information you pushed into a million eyeballs* can be corrected.
Make it a damn modal.

Expose transparent metrics to users about how much bot-gamed content they were exposed to each week. Etc.

We force food producers to label what goes into every box of crackers, but the hours and hours of algorithmically gamed, toxic memetic flow that streams into billions of eyeballs is.... treated as "mere pixels"?

Are we really going to pretend that there is no harm here?

"Sticks and stones may break my bones
But millions of people seeing Trump tweets can never hurt me"

Does anyone really believe this?