A CERN MODEL FOR STUDYING THE INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT

The social media platforms remain an enigma, even after repeated instances of hate speech, foreign interference and other harmful content served up to millions of people worldwide. Companies’ content policies are not enforced. Upcoming digital rules are either limited or untested. And an inability for outsiders — everyone from journalists and academics to regulators and policymakers — to access social media data to get under the hood of these platforms is a massive blindspot.

So how do we fix that? Alicia Wanless @lageneralista from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Jacob N. Shapiro, a professor at Princeton University, think they have a solution. They want to create the equivalent of a European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, for tracking what happens across social media. This gets complicated, so stay with me. The goal is to build a multinational coalition of researchers, civil society groups and, potentially, regulators who can all tap into the same collective infrastructure which would allow greater access to social media and feed into how policymakers think about online content rules.

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    11 year ago

    Maybe the answer isn’t some governing body that dictates what is or isn’t acceptable. I don’t know what a good answer is and maybe there isn’t one, but giving an entity three power to censor the internet is antithetical to speech in general.