I have mixed feelings on @elonmusk's Twitter purchase
Pro: Elon is a very smart guy, who tends to find ways to fix broken systems, make them work better than before.
Con: Twitter isn't rocket science, it's social science, which is messier and more complex. A small thread: Con: Elon's philosophy around this to date are only that free speech is important, not at all about the inherent tensions between virality and accuracy. As @aza and @noupside have eloquently said: Freedom speech isn't freedom of reach.

In this new piece for @WIRED, @noUpside and I put the history of misinformation in context, and share how we might fix it. Thread: wired.com/preview/story/… Social media didn't create misinformation. You don't need to look back very far in history to see that we emerged from a fog of fairly constant misinformation, where rumors and falsehoods were arguably *much* more common than facts. 2/

In this piece for @TheAtlantic, @jonhaidt and I explore how social media has upended our institutions in the last 10 years. We seek to answer: Why does it feel like everything has gone haywire? And what can be done to fix it? 1/x theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… @TheAtlantic @JonHaidt The founders of the United States thought a lot about human psychology, and included mechanisms in the Constitution to let passions cool & encourage reflection and deliberation. Many of social media’s features today do exactly the opposite. 2/x

How Twitter stole the mantle of being one of the most harmful tech companies in the world today. Thread: 1/ Twitter has been hungrily picking up the scraps of outrage-attention that Facebook left on the table when they changed the news feed algorithm last year.