I can talk about that on two fronts. First, so much of the debate on this is kind of further downstream, so how do we think about it? The very first part of fighting for human rights, or free expression, actually begins with having the facts.
Right now, the platforms all want you to debate content moderation, which is the furthest downstream. If you're stuck here, the platforms make more money out of surveillance capitalism. What we need to do is to really move further upstream to the operating system, the algorithmic amplification. That's incredibly important. That's what a great book, Weapons of Math Destruction, calls “opinions embedded in code”.
Once you're there, you then move further upstream to the root cause. That's all the way here. We start from here, and that's surveillance capitalism, and that's where all of the problems connect that seemed to have been siloed. That includes safety, privacy, antitrust, and content moderation.
Part of our problem now is that these have been exploited by geopolitical power. These networks now form a global nervous system of what I call “toxic sludge”, and that's fuelled by nations like China and Russia.
In 2018, we connected the information operations in the Philippines with Russian disinformation networks through websites in Canada. In 2020, Facebook took down information operations from China that were creating fake accounts for the U.S. elections. In the Philippines, those same accounts were polishing the image of the Marcos, campaigning for Duterte's daughter, and attacking Rappler.
In 2021, the U.S. and the EU called out China and Russia for COVID-19 disinformation. I guess I want to just emphasize how connected we all are.
I guess the upside here is that we're starting to see more legislation. Last week, the European Union hammered out the last details of the Digital Markets Act. That's to be followed by the digital services act. I know Canada has this also in play, but these two will take time.
I continue, as I did in the Nobel lecture, to appeal to U.S. legislators to reform or revoke section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, because we, at the front lines, need immediate help.