This is not sustainable:
During the midterm elections in the United States last year, Twitter added, most of the false content on its site came from within the country itself. Many of the misleading messages focused on voter suppression, with the company deleting almost 6,000 tweets that included incorrect dates for the election or that falsely claimed that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement was patrolling polling stations.
Twitter Says False Content Is Evolving, and More Comes From the U.S.
It is both dangerous and ineffective to rely on big corporations to curate messages so that only “good messages” are seen. We can’t even decide whether we want this. On the one hand, it scares us that big companies have this power. On the hand, we insist that they use it.
It will get worse. Deepfakes are coming to the political space. (This one is amazing.) And videos do not have to be fake to be taken out of context.
So what to do? Facebook/Twitter/Apple/Google are not the solution. Corporate decision making is not immune from bias, mistake, and poor policy. But it is less transparent and less aligned with our social goals.
We need to slow down and stop making snap judgments. We need a renewed emphasis on the legitimacy / authority of the source. The good news is that we might get better at this over time.