Every time there’s another big new story about harmful content on a social platform and another flurry of questioning why that platform didn’t find it and stop it, I think back to viruses and malware, and how virus scanners and security software were not the answer

Harmful content generated by users, even fake users, is inherently scalable, not because it’s harmful but because it’s content. It’s people + the internet. Scanning, filtering and moderating harmful content is inherently unscalable and unrepeatable.

The Internet removes all gatekeepers, filters and moderating influences, and it lets any two people on Earth with the same idea find each other and tell themselves they’re right. That not a bug or a feature. It’s what the internet is.

The idea you can solve this by beating up Facebook and with more moderation and more software is maybe like all those 19th century monarchies that thought they could fend off political change by closing a university every now and then and hiring more secret police

The solution to the malware explosion of 20 years ago was not more scanning, or shouting at Microsoft to fix it, but changing the software model. we went to sandboxes - to iOS and chromeos - and we went to the cloud

The stupid (and far too widespread) criticism of Facebook is that solving this is much easier than Facebook says. The worrying criticism is that it might be much harder than Facebook thinks

The striking thing about today’s BuzzFeed Facebook story is not that it wasn’t on top of fake news in Honduras, but rather the complete insanity of one company in Menlo Park even trying to be on top of every level of political discourse in every country on Earth

Another dumb response to this would be to say you should break Facebook up. okay, so now what do people in Honduras use, and how is that managed? You haven’t solve the problem at all. It’s not as though any other platform does this any better.