If people behave irrationally–and we do–there’s little value in merely calling attention to that fact when it comes to how folks get bamboozled by what they read or what they watch. We know people are easily influenced by algorithms that send them down rabbit holes. I don’t accept shrugging and letting content providers continue to radicalize because it’s expensive or hard to solve.

Ads are really lucrative, so the money’s there. It’s not as if companies change up back to an uncurated timeline sorted by date/time, or that it’d be that hard to put the ad preferences in the hands of users instead. If someone wants to find radicalizing content, they’ll still be able to, but it’ll be their choice and not being shoved in their faces. They’re never going to choose it of their own free will, but I’m not sure it’s such a stretch to say Section 230 doesn’t protect feed curation when it’s controlled by the social media company, not by the user.

I’m just not that sympathetic to the “think of the internet companies” perspective. If the pursuit of profit headling creates these terrible outcomes–because people just cannot handle the subtle (or not so subtle) manipulation of their timelines, time for those companies to be held liable for it.