Bogus Ideas Have Superspreaders, Too

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You can sign up here to receive it weekdays. If the Rock encouraged his 58 million Facebook followers to vandalize a fast-food restaurant, Facebooks policies would treat it the same as if your neighbor blasted this to his 25 friends.  President Trumps tweets can subject people to relentless harassment, but Twitter applies the same (or even looser) rules to his account as to ours. This past week (and forever), internet companies have been trying to figure out how to handle posts that can encourage violence, contribute to social division and harassment, or spread false information about elections or other high-stakes topics. When online companies make these decisions, they largely consider the substance of the message, divorced from the messenger, to decide whether a post is harmful and should be deleted or hidden. But whether they intend it or not, celebrities, politicians and others with large online followings can be superspreaders  not of the coronavirus but of dangerous or false information.  And I wonder whether these prominent people need to be held to stricter rules.







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