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6 tweets,
2 min read
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1/ Surprise surprise ... the company founded to "rate women" is struggling to find its moral compass.
Here is the broader issue though, best formalized in the seminal *multi-tasking* paper of Holmstrom-Milgrom.
Here is the broader issue though, best formalized in the seminal *multi-tasking* paper of Holmstrom-Milgrom.
2/ The main goal of companies like facebook and twitter is to maximize revenue, which come from how many eyeballs the company can attract and retain. They can attract eye balls through two types of effort (this is the multi-tasking).
3/
"good effort": only allow decent, factual conversations. Impose firewalls such as zero bots, take down fake/anonymous accounts, ban hate-speech.
"bad effort": allow a free-for-all environment where bots, slander and fake-news rules.
"good effort": only allow decent, factual conversations. Impose firewalls such as zero bots, take down fake/anonymous accounts, ban hate-speech.
"bad effort": allow a free-for-all environment where bots, slander and fake-news rules.
4/ Clearly facebook and twitter have chosen to push on both margins. They lose too much revenue if they were to clamp down on bad effort in any serious way. And this will always be the case, given the competitive pressures within the respective companies.
5/ So we should not hold our breath waiting for these companies to "self-regulate" - it is not going to happen. The only solution here is outside regulation by the people's representatives.
6/ I wrote a paper once making this point with Daron Acemoglu and Michael Kremer (long before facebook was a thing). You can read it here for the full logic behind this twitter thread: princeton.edu/~atif/MFG.pdf
