I've been thinking about this a lot recently, in part due to contributing to some liberal policy work on the subject and in part due to it being all over my social media timelines, so I thought I'd throw open a thread to see what people are thinking.
The UK government is planning an Online Harms Bill that may among other things attempt to criminalise "social media pile-ons" according to recent reports. How will they do this? A very good question and your guess is as good as mine. There are some genuine and big problems that needs regulating but as far as I can tell the government have both no idea how to do it and no interest in finding out: the purpose is a) to appeal to their voting base who are worried about the internet corrupting everyone into leftists and b) to maybe give rich people some tools to stop poor people being a nuisance to their twitter feeds.
They're slightly assisted by nobody else having a real suite of solutions. I'd like to see more action to break up social media business models and open up APIs, to make it easier for e.g. third-party developers to create alternative timeline apps etc for major social media providers and give people a bit more choice over how they access content. I'm a bit more wary of action to try and regulate how social media do moderation, in that I think it's already difficult to get bad actors removed and I worry wrapping more legalities round it would make it harder to remove bad actors who were wealthy enough to challenge the companies. It seems to me that it's difficult to simply treat social media like an open market, and also problematic to start treating it as a utility, but I think that's the sort of structural scale one probably needs to think on.
Meanwhile, Facebook is apparently trying to create its own VR world. I thought this was a pretty interesting piece on the prehistory and problems of the Metaverse:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/10/facebook-metaverse-was-always-terrible/620546/
