While the attention economy is one metaphor to describe social media as a content distribution system, it is woefully inadequate to model policy on. It turns debate about problems exacerbated by social media into a set of consumer choices. #PublicInterestInternet

Fundamentally, to buy the attention economy argument you have to believe that people are blank slates molded by outside forces, rather than what we are, which is complex thinking beings, where motivated disinformers are using social media in the same way other professions do.

The one thing the hearing really lacked was a sense of who manipulates algorithms, how it is done, and to what ends. From that perspective, the companies should have been answering questions about how they determine what content to distribute and what criteria is used to moderate

We could have also gone deeper into the role that political advertising and source hacking plays on our democracy, or the need for curatorial models for information integrity. We must address how racialized disinformation is used to target and harass advocates and journalists too

I am sorry that I didn't have time to offer up more solutions, but the questions were not directed at me.

Here's what we could do to address misinformation-at-scale if we wanted to start today: