Why we must regulate social media and criminalize fake news — Part 3

When I started this article, I had a few questions and some provocative issues I wanted to present. However, as I started writing, and writing usually has a life of itself, it started to appear several other questions and issues I felt I had to address. As a result, the article became too long and it is now going to be published in three parts (“Anatomy of disinformation and fake news”, “How we made it to this point and the role of online platforms”, and “Why and how we should regulate social media and criminalize fake news”). Each part can be read independently, but to understand the whole and to connect all the ideas, you should read all three.

1. Why and how we should regulate social media and criminalize fake news

What is the moral mission of a government? Lakoff (again) describes it in his book “The Political Mind”: “Protection and empowerment are part of the moral mission of government” and “Empathy is also the moral basis of laws protecting citizens from abuse by the government”. When society goes in disarray, when companies and entities go in a questionable, undesirable direction, the government must step in based on its moral mission to protect its citizen. Our democracy and society are not for sale or to be controlled by rogue actors/entities based on lies, on their interests, and rooted in the ability or will of a private company to control it: this is completely insane. Social media and tech must be regulated.

“The market will self-regulate” is an outdated economic mantra we know to be incorrect for decades (as I write this, the GameStop case is unrolling. This is the stock market real-life destruction of this mantra. In fact, it exposed corrupted practices of Wall Street) and social media proves it incorrect once again: the social media platforms would have to abandon the core of their business models, probably profiting less for a while, in order to design a product with human wellbeing in mind and with limited, controlled, and transparent data collection and usage. They know and many sounded the alarm, as exposed in the documentary “The Social Dilemma”, but they still didn’t change. They will not change by themselves, the market does not self-regulate, remember? The business model of these companies is rooted in advertising, refined to the microtargeting/hyper-personalization to those who pay more, therefore they will not self-regulate. More: so far, the efforts to curb excessive fake news and to eliminate…