by Tracy Rosenberg
Online Harms Need A Structural Solution: Ham-Handed Censorship Won’t Fix It
There is no doubt about it. Internet 2.0 made some people a lot of money. The quandary of the early 2000’s of how to monetize the Internet was answered by the rise of surveillance capitalism, and those positioned to grab the data in Silicon Valley have made (and in some cases lost) vast fortunes.
But as the early 2000’s receded, it became abundantly clear that the economic miracle of the monetized Internet had grave societal harms. Not just the obvious one of the institutionalization of an oligopoly of Big Tech firms who had scaled beyond any semblance of real competition, but kitchen sink harms that included the exploitation of children and youth, sexual abuse, black markets for harmful drugs and guns and the spread of virulent disinformation.
Not surprisingly, the large-scale distribution and increasing visibility of harmful content led to desires to make the “bad content” go away, some broadly recognized as such and other more ambiguously characterized as such depending on ideology.
