| Social-media companies have failed us, Friend.
They promised us cute pictures of our nieces and our friends’ new puppies. And what they delivered instead was hate speech, deadly disinformation, calls to violence and propaganda.
It’s not just that companies like Meta (Facebook) are failing to remove or moderate hate and disinformation. These companies are actively amplifying this content — and causing it to go viral. Why? Because it makes them money.
Enough is enough. It’s time to #FixTheFeed. Tell Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube to stop amplifying the worst content on their platforms and #FixTheFeed. Fix the Feed We know that the growing disinformation crisis is causing irreparable damage to our democracy and our society. Online hate and disinformation lead to offline harms like violence at polling places and increased risk of contracting illnesses like COVID-19. And this disproportionately harms communities of color and non-English-language users.
The longer these companies wait to fix their feeds, the more harm they inflict on our democracy and the more likely we are to see election disinformation, violence and hate spread.
Companies may claim these problems are just too big to solve. But as a leader of the Change the Terms coalition, we’ve outlined exactly the steps these companies need to take to #FixTheFeed: Fix the Algorithm: Stop promoting the most incendiary, hateful content Protect People Equally: Staff up to protect democracy for all, across all languages Show Us the Receipts: Disclose your business models and moderation practices Join with Free Press and dozens of our coalition partners to demand that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube stop the spread of hateful, violent, misleading and false content across all languages ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. When we speak together, we cannot be ignored.
Tell these companies: #FixTheFeed.
With gratitude,
Rose, Nora and the rest of the Free Press team
freepress.net |
