3 ms·

>Allowing social media to grow unchecked without first understanding the risks has had disastrous consequences… Not gonna argue with that, but I’m having troub

by wrs 3y ago

>Allowing social media to grow unchecked without first understanding the risks has had disastrous consequences… Not gonna argue with that, but I’m having trouble imagining the alternative. Somehow we would have understood the risks without allowing the growth and observing the consequences? That seems unlikely, considering how surprised we all seemed when the consequences occurred. With AI we seem to have a lot more noise around imagining consequences, but in my mind there’s no reason that would correlate with completeness or accuracy of the predictions. There will be lots of very bad, and lots of very good, consequences that nobody can currently imagine.

bluGill 3y ago
What is important is what we can imagine today. What we discover or imagine tomorrow needs to be handled in tomorrows updates, but isn't a problem today. The courts require you to do due diligence in imagining and mitigating the problems we can foresee today. If we invest something next year you will have to redo that for products you make next year - but you don't have to retrofit that to what you did this year. Note that I said make not sell.
kevingadd 3y ago
I would argue that a more robust regulatory framework around social media could have at least prevented the worst harms. For example, more robust moderation or at least requiring companies to have responsive liaisons who speak the local language for territories they operate in could have mitigated/prevented the serious harms we've seen Facebook and Whatsapp cause in multiple countries i.e. Myanmar. This is of course assuming we'd get the kind of regulations we need, instead of useless security theater or regulations so onerous that they prevent products from developing at all. But it does seem like it would have been possible to prevent the worst of it, since many of these cases boil down to 'Facebook (or other big company) didn't care and didn't bother to try, and then bad things happened'

by wrs 3y ago

bluGill 3y ago

What is important is what we can imagine today. What we discover or imagine tomorrow needs to be handled in tomorrows updates, but isn't a problem today. The courts require you to do due diligence in imagining and mitigating the problems we can foresee today. If we invest something next year you will have to redo that for products you make next year - but you don't have to retrofit that to what you did this year. Note that I said make not sell.

kevingadd 3y ago

I would argue that a more robust regulatory framework around social media could have at least prevented the worst harms. For example, more robust moderation or at least requiring companies to have responsive liaisons who speak the local language for territories they operate in could have mitigated/prevented the serious harms we've seen Facebook and Whatsapp cause in multiple countries i.e. Myanmar. This is of course assuming we'd get the kind of regulations we need, instead of useless security theater or regulations so onerous that they prevent products from developing at all. But it does seem like it would have been possible to prevent the worst of it, since many of these cases boil down to 'Facebook (or other big company) didn't care and didn't bother to try, and then bad things happened'