Communications of the ACM
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (of Technology)
Om Malik is the founder of Gigaom and a partner at True Ventures.
To put it mildly, the last ten days have been tough to watch. They have also shown us the power of the third eye — the camera on our phone. Hundreds of thousands of videos, photos, and voices have been recorded and shared on social platforms. These same social platforms have been the source of much consternation, raising questions about who we are trusting to decide what and how we get to view information.
If our social platforms are going to be gatekeepers, then they need to acknowledge their role in the information ecosystems. It is knowing what to boost and what to ignore that makes a good platform.
The battle of good email versus spam email has taken a long time, but it has been worth fighting. The struggle between real information and fake information is no different. Unfortunately, what we have is ambivalent algorithms on our social platforms that blindly amplify both hope and hate.
This gets complicated pretty quickly.
From Om
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