Ezra Klein on the deep problem posed by social media

From a conversation with Tyler Cowen:

I think that social media and the way we deal with it — and this is true in a lot of places — we end up focusing on, one, the easy cases rather than the hard cases, like fake news as opposed to real news. Everybody agrees that fake news is bad, and you shouldn’t have it. Real news can also be very bad in terms of what it emphasizes, or the quality of the work, and so on. But the question of how to handle it is much, much harder, and it’s not going to be something that a Facebook supreme court handles.

I think the underlying and very deep problem with Facebook, with Twitter, with a bunch of them, is building the future of our communication commons atop a business model that is about engagement mediated through the intensity of the viewers’ or audiences’ emotional reaction. I don’t think that’s something the Facebook supreme court can solve, and I also don’t think it is a good thing for the future. But nobody really seems to want to fight it.

The questions about privacy — I think they’re important. The questions about fake news are important. All the questions people bring up in these cases are important. But I think all of them are also less important than the question of, is the future of how we will communicate with each other, of how politicians will communicate with the public, of how, basically, all important communication will be structured and incentivized — is it what gives you the strongest emotional countercharge?

If so, I think that we are in for this period where a lot of energy is going to go towards the most outrageous and most offensive players because they both get the energy of the people they inspire and the people who hate them. And it’s the combination of the energy and counter-energy that gives them so much control of the conversation.