Facebook is in the unique position today to face both the problems of centralization and decentralization. On its centralized core platform it is confronted with making content decisions, while on WhatsApp it struggles with slowing down the spread of rumors and calls for violence. Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for Facebook which has been arrogant about these issues and has put growth above anything else. Nonetheless everyone who is building new decentralized platforms would do well to think about these issues NOW.
The Internet itself is quite decentralized relative to Facebook. That’s of course why InfoWars and many other conspiracy websites are out there. Facebook has long wanted to convince people around the world that it is effectively the Internet (after all time spent outside of Facebook is a lot harder to monetize). But of course it is not and it can easily censor content on its network. That is quite obvious based on its long suppression of even vaguely sexual content. So of course now it needs to rightly answer the question as to why it lets Holocaust denial be spread through its connections.
But Facebook also already has a foot in a semi-decentralized future due to its acquisition of WhatsApp which provides end-to-end encrypted messaging. Here content travels in a way that cannot be observed or censored. That is of course what many people building new decentralized systems are dreaming of. But that dream too has a nightmare version of it which played itself out in Sri Lanka and Myanmar among other places, where WhatsApp was used to spread rumors and calls for violence that amplified bloodshed. Here Facebook is reduced to trying to diminish the viral coefficient by limiting the number of forwards.
In a fully decentralized system neither type of intervention will be possible. There will be no central censor (Facebook) and no obvious throttle for virality (WhatsApp). That is the explicit goal of building such systems and that is great to the extent that the censor is asserting market or political power to the detriment of competition or the voice of the people. But it would be a mistake not to anticipate that these systems will also be used to spread conspiracies and incite violence.
So what is to be done? Unfortunately there is no simple answer. There is not “just add some AI” quick technical fix. Instead we need a massive transformation. We need to shed the Industrial Age and enter the Knowledge Age. That requires changing pretty much everything about how we live and how our societies work (just like we changed pretty much everything when we went from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age). If you want to read my take on all of that, you can find it in my book World After Capital.
