This particular verdict is a long time coming. How it drives meaningful change is the bigger question.

One of the challenges we need to resolve is the race to the bottom for online communities - engagement metrics will always result in a PH level that supports more acerbic behavior.

There’s multiple analyses that you can find, if not your own experience, to believe that we should be able to do better with our information commons.

Just today, I found a paper that studied a corpus of Twitter discussions and found that bad-faith interactions constituted 68.3% of all replies (Twitter data).

The engineer and analyst side of us will always question these types of analyses.

I’ve read enough papers at this point for the methods to matter more than the conclusion.

1) meta, and the other tech platforms need to open up their research and data. NDAs and business incentives prevent us from having the boring technical conversations.

2) tech needs someone else to be the bogeyman - the way we did for tobacco. The profit incentive ensures profitable predatory features pass review. Expecting firms to ignore quarterly shareholder reviews for warm fuzzies is … setting ourselves up for failure.

Regulators (with teeth) need to be propped up so that the right amount of predictable friction (liability) is introduced.

3) tech firms need an opportunity or forum to come clean. The sheer gap between the practical reality of something like content moderation vs the ignorance of users and regulators - results in surprise and outrage when people find out how the sausage is made.

4) algorithm defaults decide the median experience for participants in our shred market place of ideas. The defaults need to be set in a manner that works for humans and society (whatever that might be).

Economies are systems to align incentives to achieve subjective goals.