Thread · 5 tweets · 5 Oct 2021

I agree with Charlie that we can think about more than one problem at once, but on this specific topic I would go one step further: Antitrust might not solve but it would very significantly help with content moderation issues. 🧵⏬

A key problem with toxic content isn't that it exists — that's hardly new — but that it gets amplified. With monopolies, when toxic content becomes successful, it spreads like wildfire. It's exactly like parasites on a monoculture: get one and it's a blight.

Another way to look at it is that unintended consequences and failure are inevitable (just ask the Facebook engineers who had so much fun yesterday), so we need to structure our world so that failure remains local and the rest robust.

We are dealing with companies that are openly seeking to intermediate all the world's information or relationships. These goals are explicitly incompatible with a healthy, diverse, collaborative society.

We tend to think too much about antitrust from purely the economic angle, but it is also a key consideration in building the right infrastructure for a thriving digital society. Finding structural remedies to a monoculture with just two gatekeepers for all is key!