"I was recently having a conversation with Natalia Antelava, founder of the newsroom Coda, about social media regulation. I was telling her my wariness about it: as a journalist, I don't want the government making rules about which speech is or isn't harmful. I know social media platforms are powerful, and do cause lots of harm, but for a long time I believed we were stuck with them as they are, because social media platforms are forums for speech,"
""I always think the way that big tech weaponized the First Amendment is very similar to the way the gun lobby weaponized the Second Amendment," she said. "The tech lobby has very successfully made sure, through incredible lobbying efforts, to contain all the conversations about regulation around the publication, free speech arguments." But really, social media platforms - and now AI services - are products."
""If the entire impact of my career were to make clear that social media platforms - that how people behave on them - is heavily influenced by the design choices of the owners of those platforms. If that was the only thing that people took away from my career, I would be wildly pleased with myself.""
An initial position expressed reluctance to support government regulation of speech, citing social media as forums for speech and concern over government control. A counterargument compared how the tech lobby weaponized the First Amendment to how the gun lobby weaponized the Second Amendment, noting lobbying shaped regulatory conversations. Social media platforms and AI services were presented as designed products that can be redesigned to operate more safely, analogous to vehicles. An example pointed out that platform owner design choices heavily influence user behavior. A forecast predicted a journalistic shift to view platforms as products, enabling renewed calls for safety-focused accountability.
Read at Nieman Lab
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