It’s been a while
Looking back I haven’t written one of these since mid November. Seems like it got to difficult to keep up with it after returning to work. Well I returned to work in September so I did them both for at least two months. Oh well, no looking back!
WHO to believe
This is a topic is a messy one but messy topics are what this kind of writing is supposed to all be about right?
I’m glad I’m not at a social media company right now. I tend to agree that more speech is the way to solve these kinds of problems but there are millions of Americans who have created their own universe of facts.
The world is flat and and Donald Trump is the smartest man on the planet. And who’s to say that they are wrong? What if I’m the one with the wrong information? How do we decide what’s true and what’s not? That’s a really scary idea. If we don’t have a shared understanding of reality what makes us all one country?
There are supposed to be some truths that we as a country believe, life liberty and the persuit of happiness. I can still get behind those. Can Trumpers? I’m sure they would say yes but what if you ask if it should include everyone in the country, even folks you disagree with. Maybe even if some of them are immigrants.
This is such a broad topic that the idea of writing anything even remotely coherent in 10 minutes is a bit crazy.
Let’s focus on the technology angle for now. What should Facebook and Twitter do. I think sharing more and more information at the right time to the right people is key. And doing that does often require them to take a stand on a issue, and often take a stand fast enough that the country as a whole doesn’t know what it believes in anymore.
Maybe this particular form of globalism is just to hard to do. Can 7 billion people agree on anything? Maybe what this really points towards is a need for more and more focus at the local level. Do things make more sense and are more clear when your focused on just NYC politics?
Maybe what Facebook and Twitter need to do with these issues is just acknowledge both sides of the argument and let each side make its case? Two warnings on each tweet?
Hell if I know