We Shouldn’t Ask Technologists To Be Arbiters of “Truth”

Big Tech’s enforcement of various official truths that turned out to be false has undermined trust in both the leading tech companies and society overall. In addition to their own content moderators, four other organizational entities have been used to determine misinformation, disinformation, and so-called malinformation.  All four have serious shortcomings:

• Government: Politicians have always engaged in mis-, dis-, and malinformation (sometimes they pretty much have to), but insisting that governments are a non-debatable source of truth is textbook Orwell.
• Mainstream Media: Given that US media trust is at an all-time low, how can these organizations possibly serve as accepted arbiters of truth? By working so closely with this national security and media nexus, Meta, Alphabet, and Twitter aligned themselves much more with official authorities and power than free speech and societal trust.
• The Scientific Community: The problem was the censoring and demonizing of any critics, even though questioning, learning, and change have always been the essence of science. Similarly, the constantly repeated mantras of “the science is settled,” “follow the science,” and even “the science” are simply wrong. Should we listen to “the science”? Certainly. Should we always follow it? Certainly not. Is there a single major field of science that is “settled”? Changing views are especially important in medicine, whose history has often been about correcting the terrible misunderstandings and malpractices of the past.
• Self-Appointed Guardians:  The names are hard to keep straight: The Digital Trust Project; Project Origin: Securing Trust in Media; the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership; the Disinformation Governance Board (disbanded); the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), and many other groups and organizations all say they want to improve digital trust. But they are mostly a mix of traditional institutions and media convinced that new media is the problem. They also tend to be reflections of partisan groupthink.