Tools and Weapons: The Promise and The Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

As these show, there is likely to be room for complementary regulatory approaches, combining a more narrow focus on specific categories of objectionable content with a broader effort to provide users with more information on its sources. One important feature of the latter approach is its emphasis on addressing the spread of disinformation not by assessing whether content itself is true or false but instead by providing social media users with accurate information on people’s identity. It’s a commonsense approach that’s been adopted in modern-day political advertising. Leave it to the public to decide what is true. But let them make that decision based on an accurate understanding of who is speaking. And in the twenty-first century, let the public know whether it’s a human being or an automated bot that’s doing the talking.