The 2023 Social Media Summit@MIT Event Report

REWIRING 

SOCIAL 

MEDIA 

How to make platforms 

BETTER FOR EVERYONE 

2023 SOCIAL MEDIA SUMMIT@MIT

Panelists Offer Solutions 

to Social Media’s Ills 

In order to save platforms, we may need to fundamentally 

blow up the model and start over 

It’s been more than a decade since social 

media platforms have transformed our lives in 

unimagined ways. During that time, social media 

has become intertwined and synonymous with 

all media—a dominant force for information flow 

and a major channel for social interaction, political 

communication, and commercial marketing. 

This rise has fundamentally changed the world’s 

information landscape from a comparatively small 

number of producers (such as news networks) to a 

world where everyone is accessible, everyone is a 

content receiver, and everyone is a producer. It’s also 

an environment where content can be influential, 

regardless of its source. 

But along with the massive volume of information 

and access comes growing concern about how to 

tame it. While the “democratization” of content can be 

celebrated for its reach and global resources, social 

media has advanced far faster than most people 

realized or wanted. Misinformation has become so 

commonplace, gatekeepers and content moderators 

are required. But now—with the gradual removal of 

these gatekeepers—the misinformation and malicious 

actors that were starting to decline may be on the rise 

again and hard to stop. 

Social media’s core circuits need rewiring. 

Global citizens seem to be collectively waking up and 

asking questions: How did we get here? How do we 

dial back the speed and strength of this proliferation 

of misinformation, hate speech, addictive behavior, 

and privacy invasions? Whom do we trust, if there are 

no guardrails and gatekeepers? In short, can social 

media be saved? And if so, what will the new social 

media environment look like? 

In response to these and other questions, the 2023 

MIT IDE Social Media Summit (SMS@MIT) was held 

virtually on May 23, attracting an audience of more 

than 17,000 live viewers. Session topics included the 

role of AI, combating misinformation, and achieving 

the promise of social media. 

WHAT’S INSIDE 

4 Platforms at a Crossroads 

6 Social Media Drills Deep 

8 

Is the Tide Turning for 

Misinformation? 

10 Ethical AI: A Work in Progress 

12 Tomorrow’s Platforms Today 

CLICK ON VIDEO ICONS THROUGHOUT 

THE REPORT TO VIEW SESSIONS 

FROM THE EVENT 

2 

3

Platforms at 

a Crossroads 

Social media still 

rules, but players 

are shape-shifting daily 

WATCH VIDEO 

Sinan Aral 

Director, MIT IDE; David Austin Professor of 

Management and Professor of Information 

Technology and Marketing, MIT Sloan School 

of Management 

“From public health to teen entertainment, from 

finance to education, social media platforms 

are shaping opinions and our understanding of 

everything,” Sinan Aral, director of the MIT Initiative 

on the Digital Economy (IDE) and professor at MIT 

Sloan School of Management, told attendees of 

the Social Media Summit. We may have heard that 

before, but now, Aral noted, the rules, dominant 

players, and business models are a moving target. 

Twitter of a year ago isn’t the Twitter of today. Meta, 

Google, TikTok, and Spotify, among others, are 

shape-shifting to accommodate more sophisticated 

algorithms, AI, ChatGPT, and decentralized 

communities. New ecosystems are forming to 

counter established networks. 

The stakes have never been higher. They include 

fair elections, free speech, global currencies, and 

personal privacy. There’s new urgency and public 

awareness, but so far, neither the tech industry nor 

the U.S. government have taken strong leadership 

roles, despite recent testimony from OpenAI and a 

statement from AI experts that something needs 

to be done. 

Aral noted that in many ways, social media is at a 

crossroads. “Large platforms have gone private, 

policy changes are underway at Twitter...and new 

Generative AI, and deep learning—in development 

for many decades—have burst onto the scene for 

public use last year,” Aral said. 

“These changes,” Aral added, “have an immense 

impact on text, images, video, and synthetic 

generation of information that influences how we 

think about our world.” 

Aral said that the IDE is conducting scientific research 

into social media, AI, decentralization and Web3 to 

assess political, social, governmental and business 

fallout, and how to stay ahead of the curve. 

We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, as Renée 

Richardson Gosline of MIT said during her AI Ethics 

panel. But speakers throughout the day pointed to 

three key remedies to revive the ailing social media 

environment: responsible AI, interventions against 

misinformation, and new platform ecosystems. 

Panelists disagreed about centralized versus 

decentralized platform design, about content 

moderation techniques, and about the role of 

laws and regulation. They said the race by platforms 

to implement ChatGPT, prediction algorithms, and 

advanced AI ahead of competitors could cause 

further harm. Yet in many ways, the day’s speakers— 

coming from legal, behavioral science, technology, 

and economic perspectives—were each essentially 

saying, “We can and must do better.” In this report of 

the day’s discussions, we offer concrete action items 

and recommendations. 

Users also have to be rewired to relinquish the 

comforts and crowds of their social platforms in favor 

of more discerning, open platforms, such as Mozilla, 

T2, and Mastodon. And if they do, tomorrow’s social 

media may offer decentralized, shared, and safer 

spaces for public discourse. 

We know what to do. It’s time to act. 

3 METHODS TO REVIVE 

SOCIAL MEDIA 

RESPONSIBLE AI 

Educate programmers and the 

public about AI bias; regulate 

platforms, and penalize offenders. 

MISINFORMATION 

INTERVENTIONS 

Disincentivize click-bait, keep content 

monitors on platforms, and add 

friction or nudges to encourage truth 

NEW PLATFORM 

ECOSYSTEMS 

Revamp the business model 

to include decentralized, open 

platforms that protect users. 

4 

5

Christopher Graves, the keynote speaker at the 2023 Social 

Media Summit@MIT, offered a revealing look under the hood 

of social media marketing tools. He described the growing 

danger of what he calls “personality-based marketing,” a 

rising—and somewhat disturbing—approach that matches 

individual personality traits to social media habits. 

How Behavioral Science 

Can Decode Us 

Graves knows more about digital marketing than most. The 

founder and president of the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral 

Science, part of Ogilvy Consulting, he pointed out that 

companies are now correlating users’ online behavior— 

even photographs of their faces—with specific personality 

characteristics. Organizations then use these sophisticated 

results to build a data “genome” and deliver content aimed at 

encouraging specific actions. 

Personality Traits 

COGNITIVE STYLE 

People have a series of filters that either sharpen or distort 

their beliefs, preferences, and decisions, Graves told 

SMS@MIT attendees. “I can now test individuals at large 

scale to better ‘decode’ them,” he added. 

“When you use this for good, it could possibly lead to 

rapprochement or resonance,” Graves said. “But if you use 

it for ill will, it could be very malicious manipulation.” 

WORLDVIEW & AFFINITIES 

While marketing has long used personality-driven 

techniques to find, segment, and sell to customers, 

today’s AI-based approaches are far more sophisticated 

and accurate. Also, where earlier approaches attempted 

to change or convert ideas, today’s behavioral approaches 

focus on changing behavior. 

Graves said that personality inference can be done in six 

distinct ways, all of which can be accelerated with AI for 

pattern recognition: eye tracking, text parsing, images 

(especially photos of faces), music and sound, behavior 

on a mobile phone, and social engagement. 

SOCIAL MEDIA 

DRILLS DEEP 

Olgivy’s cognitive scientist 

Christopher Graves describes 

sophisticated new marketing 

tools to ‘decode’ online behavior 

WATCH VIDEO 

Christopher Graves 

President & Founder, Ogilvy Center 

for Behavioral Science 

“Companies have 

great interest in 

figuring out who you 

are based on your 

digital footprint.” 

Christopher Graves 

President & Founder, Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science 

Graves described three lenses that marketers use to 

gain insights into individuals: personality traits, cognitive 

style, and worldview/identity. These factors come into 

play when a social media platform—or a user or advertiser 

on a platform—wants to persuade others to take a specific 

action. People with different personalities, cognitive styles, 

and worldviews will respond better or worse to different 

kinds of messages. 

‘Decoding’ Personality Traits 

In the past, personality profiling was typically done with 

surveys and tests. But today’s social media platforms can 

remotely “decode” people by observing their preferences 

and behavior online. 

One approach claims to correlate personality types with eye 

movement; another purports to do the same through your 

use of language. Yet another technology claims to use a 

photograph of faces to determine personality types or even, 

according to one researcher, a person’s sexual orientation. 

It’s not clear whether this kind of tracking is being used 

now by the leading social media platforms, Graves said. 

But patent applications around personal inference have 

been filed by companies that include Facebook, Google, 

Microsoft, and Spotify. These companies, Graves added, 

“have great interest in looking at your digital footprint and 

digital breadcrumbs to figure out who you really are—not 

who you say you are.” 

Getting to Know You 

These analytics could also be used to empower AI chatbots 

for good purposes. For example, in the case of vaccine 

resistance, an empathetic approach might hear out the 

person’s reasons for concern and then match a pro-vaccine 

storyline to that person’s personality type. 

Another example: People could also opt-in to use personalityinferring 

chatbots to help them quit smoking. “If you know 

how somebody’s wired and respectfully approach them on 

their terms in ways that make sense to them, you probably 

have a slightly better chance at helping them,” Graves said. 

Despite the promise, personality-aware AI could make the 

spread of misinformation even more pernicious. “Imagine 

I’m trying to whip you up into anger, into further polarization,” 

Graves said. “I will have better tools and a much more finely 

nuanced understanding of your hot buttons.” 

6 

7

WATCH VIDEO 

IS THE TIDE 

TURNING FOR 

MISINFORMATION? 

Truth is making progress on social media. 

But with platforms regrouping and facing 

tough times, can the gains continue? 

Tom Cunningham 

Economist 

Kate Klonick 

Associate Professor of Law, St. John’s University 

David Rand (Moderator) 

Professor, MIT Sloan, and Research Lead, 

Misinformation and Fake News, MIT IDE 

While the threat of online misinformation remains serious, 

some experiments with intervention seem to be working 

and turning the tide. The proliferation of fake news peaked 

in 2016, and since then, growing concern has kept online 

misinformation in check. This panel, led by IDE leader David 

Rand, considered what should—and should not—be done to 

keep it there. 

Greater awareness and vigilance are helping to keep social 

media truthful. Still, it seems unlikely that misinformation and 

fake news can be eliminated entirely, especially as platform 

companies face earnings pressure, panelists said. Debates 

now center on how social media platforms and others should 

combat the spread of misinformation and prevent backsliding. 

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, social media 

platforms have experimented with interventions to flag or 

remove false information. This type of content moderation 

has been effective and represents the best way forward, 

said Tom Cunningham. 

Cunningham, who previously worked as an economist and 

data scientist for Facebook and Twitter, believes that content 

moderation can reduce misinformation. But there are tradeoffs, 

he added, such as inadvertently taking down accurate 

information and infringing on free speech. Identifying 

misinformation isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. 

Rand agreed, noting that when fake news first began to 

spread on Facebook, he believed it would be easy to tackle. 

“There are things that are true and things that are false,” he 

recalled. “If the platform wanted to do something about it, it 

could just get rid of the false stuff.” However, Rand said that 

once he started working in the field, “I changed my mind. 

This is way more complicated than I’d appreciated.” 

Rand now sees online information as a “continuum” of truth 

and falsity, with most content somewhere in the middle. 

“That doesn’t mean we’re in a post-truth world,” he said. 

“It’s just that accuracy is hard to measure with certainty.” 

Research shows that most social media users don’t actually 

want to share misinformation, Rand explained. Instead, many 

are either confused or not paying enough attention. 

Gold Standard 

Professional fact-checking by dedicated employees is “still the 

gold standard,” Rand said. But even fact-checkers don’t always 

agree on what’s true or false. 

Cunningham suggested that decentralized social media 

platforms accelerate the spread of misinformation because 

they’re “bad at assessing the quality of content...people 

tend to click whatever is shiny, whatever looks good, but not 

what is good.” This can amplify sensational and superficial 

ideas. By contrast, centralized media—newspapers, radio, 

and television—have traditionally been more cautious, fearing 

they’ll lose readership and ad revenue, or risk litigation. 

[Read more about decentralization on page 12.] 

Kate Klonick noted that Facebook and Twitter are mostly 

centralized, which may be good for creating what she 

called “one place for intervention.” But over the next couple 

of years, she expects to see more decentralization, where 

“misinformation is breeding, and it’s going to be very difficult 

to track.” 

Cunningham noted that while misinformation is still too 

prevalent, it has declined by a factor of five or 10 since 

peaking in 2016. The reason? Platforms, he said, have 

“added friction on politics, on sharing, on viral content, on 

certain types of reactions, on content from new producers, 

on content from fringe producers, and on content that looks 

like clickbait.” While this has significantly decreased the rate 

of misinformation, Cunningham added, “Anything that looks 

a little bit like misinformation is going to get suppressed 

as well.” 

Platforms Under Pressure 

Cunningham also maintained that social-media companies 

should strive to be platforms that distribute high-quality 

“In a free society, the law does not necessarily have a 

role to play in trying to determine truth.” 

Kate Klonick 

Associate Professor of Law, St. John’s University 

content, not just platforms that maximize retention, likes, and 

time spent. And yet, in the current cost-cutting environment, 

many social media companies have been laying off their 

ethicists and fact-checkers. 

Klonick said that while “lots of work has been done to raise 

awareness about malicious actors and misinformation,” the 

tradeoff may be increased public skepticism about what is 

or is not fake news. 

She doubts that legal interventions will help to clarify online 

truth. “One of the very unpopular things that I have said over 

the last five years, but I think is ultimately true, is that in a 

free society, the law does not necessarily have a role to play 

in trying to determine truth,” Klonick explained. 

Sometimes, she added, it’s best to let the private sector be 

the gatekeepers. Platforms know how to create friction and 

slow things down. “Markets,” Klonick said, “respond faster 

than the law to changing norms.” 

For these reasons and more, Klonick doesn’t see legislative 

remedies coming to the rescue anytime soon. Policy 

proposals, she said, are “a disincentive, a stick...but they’re 

not that helpful.” What’s more, she said, substantial bans on 

certain types of content, based on subjective judgments, are 

“not going to be in line with First Amendment principles at all.” 

The Cost of Regulation 

In many countries, social media platforms already comply 

with content regulations, Cunningham noted. Much of that 

content would be removed anyway, he said: “They’re going 

to take down terrorist stuff, child porn; they’re going to take 

down hate speech.” 

Before the current layoffs, platforms were aggressively 

addressing the problem. They were spending 5% of their 

overall costs on data scientists, content raters, and different 

structures for moderating content, Cunningham said, even 

when they were not legally required to do so. The reason 

wasn’t altruism or free speech, but pressure from advertisers. 

Cunningham isn’t confident that most platform companies 

“have a super-clear North Star; they’re responsive to half a 

dozen different constituencies.” Those include the media, 

governments, advertisers, users, employees, and investors. 

“All of those,” Cunningham added, “have very strong opinions 

about what content should be on the platform.” 

Ideally, social media platforms will discover new ways to keep 

the good content while eliminating the bad. But, Cunningham 

warned, “I don’t think that we should be crossing our fingers 

for that business model in the very short term.” 

8 

9

WATCH VIDEO 

ETHICAL AI: 

A WORK IN 

PROGRESS 

Panelists explored tough challenges 

raised by new content-generating tools 

and urged awareness and regulation 

Anthony Habayeb 

Co-founder and CEO, Monitaur Inc. 

Paris Marx 

Newsletter and book author, and host of the Tech Won’t 

Save Us podcast 

Kalinda Ukanwa 

Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Southern 

California Marshall School of Business 

Renée Richardson Gosline (Moderator) 

Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management and 

Human/AI Interface Research Group Lead, MIT IDE 

Like most tools, generative AI can be put to use for many 

purposes. It can create impressive new text and images from 

existing content. But it also lacks oversight, and is guilty of 

bias and hasty corporate rollouts. 

The opportunities as well as the risks of new AI tools were 

discussed by the Responsible, Human-First AI panel at the 

Social Media Summit@MIT. The discussion, moderated 

by MIT’s Renée Richardson Gosline, offered perspectives 

from a business leader charged with implementing ethical 

AI, an academic who is developing systems and future 

programmers, and an outsider critiquing it all. 

“Generative AI models have gained widespread adoption,” 

Gosline said, citing reports that ChatGPT gained 100 million 

users in just two months after its November 2022 launch. “But 

what does this mean?” 

AI in the Spotlight 

AI isn’t actually new, noted Kalinda Ukanwa. “Whether we’re 

selecting a movie from Netflix or using a GPS app to find our 

way around a city, we’ve been interacting with AI all along,” 

she said. “Yet people did not perceive that as AI. It was always 

this thing that was running in the background.” 

That’s changed with the advent of generative AI tools. 

ChatGPT is now part of the “kitchen-table conversation,” 

said Anthony Habayeb. 

Concerns over the potential harms of generative AI have 

extended to governments. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, 

the company that created ChatGPT, recently told the U.S. 

Congress that AI needs more regulation. U.S. President 

Biden, speaking to recent graduates of the country’s Air Force 

Academy, worried aloud about AI’s ability to “overtake human 

thinking.” And the European Union is considering a new 

legal framework, known as the AI Act, that would regulate AI 

development and use. 

While Ukanwa doesn’t expect “to get to a place where [AI] is 

not going to harm anybody,” she asked, “How do we minimize 

that harm in an intelligent way?” Ukanwa’s recent research 

paper, Algorithmic Fairness and Service Failures: 

Why firms Should Want Algorithmic Accountability, makes 

the case for third-party monitors of AI development, who 

don’t have skin in the game. 

Paris Marx sees a darker motive behind both the spread of 

generative AI tools and the explosion of interest they’ve 

generated. “These technologies are inherently political, less 

in the sense of party politics and more in the term’s broader 

meaning,” he said. “When these technologies are developed 

and deployed, there are certain goals and desires.” 

Marx views the hype over ChatGPT “getting the venture 

capitalists excited again,” spurring investment, and getting 

Microsoft to challenge Google so that responsible AI isn’t a 

priority. But while platforms are publicly saying they’re going to 

implement ChatCPT responsibly, “they’re laying off and firing 

all of the AI ethicists,” Marx said. 

AI bias is baked in by its human programmers, panelists noted, 

whether consciously or not. In addition, generative AI tools rely 

on already existing content, and they have no way of filtering 

that content for bias or inaccuracies. 

Responsible Solutions 

Yet Habayeb sees solutions. “AI is built by people and it can 

be managed,” he said. For instance, insurance company data 

may be biased against a certain cohort causing higher rates. 

“There might be other data that we can bring into an AI system 

to make the pricing outcome more equitable,” Habayeb added. 

Gosline said that while we can’t put the AI genie back in the 

bottle, we can use AI more critically and deliberately. Ukanwa 

sees the need for greater awareness, too. She recently 

participated in a town hall meeting on AI, sponsored by a 

Los Angeles radio station, that addressed generative AI 

and its potential impact on society. “Afterwards,” Ukanwa 

recounted, “people said, ‘I didn’t know these were the 

implications of AI.’” 

Marx clearly favors government oversight. He’s skeptical of 

corporate motives for self-regulation that put profits over 

social good. “There are many ways these technologies can be 

rolled out in a negative way,” he said. “Unless there’s pressure 

from the government,” consumer rights are not considered. 

Could the profit versus ethics argument be false? Ukanwa 

thinks so. “There’s this narrative that if I do something ethical, 

I’m going to lose profits, and I can’t have both,” she said. “But a 

lot of research is building a case that you can have both.” 

There are good business reasons to develop fair algorithms, 

Ukanwa said, adding, “This is what shareholders need 

to understand.” Habayeb agreed: “Proactive governance 

messaging is good for business.” 

“A lot of research is building the 

case that you don’t have to sacrifice 

profits for business ethics.” 

Kalinda Ukanwa 

Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Southern California Marshall School of Business 

10 

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WATCH VIDEO 

TOMORROW’S 

PLATFORMS 

TODAY 

Social media pioneers share 

their visions for principled, 

decentralized platforms 

ACTION ITEMS FOR 

ALTERNATIVE PLATFORMS 

DECENTRALIZE 

THE ECOSYTEM 

STAND FIRM ON 

CORE PRINCIPLES 

USE OPEN 

PROTOCOLS 

BE PREPARED 

TO COMPROMISE 

Mitchell Baker 

CEO, Mozilla Corporation, Chairwoman, Mozilla Foundation 

Michael Masnick 

Editor, Techdirt, and CEO, Copia Institute 

Sarah Oh 

Co-founder, T2 

Renée DiResta (Moderator) 

Technical Research Manager, Stanford Internet Observatory 

“To build any kind 

of user-generated 

content platform 

today, trust and 

safety have to be 

fundamental pillars.” 

Sarah Oh 

Co-founder, T2 

Some experts believe that if social media is going to survive, 

it needs a major overhaul. Panelists looking at future models 

said that by learning from yesterday’s mistakes, we can fix 

today’s broken systems. In fact, promising alternatives are 

already emerging. 

Renée DiResta moderated a provocative panel which 

focused on decentralized web networks—also known as 

Web3–and the rise of social media platform alternatives. 

These emerging ecosystems include Mastodon, Mozilla, 

and Bluesky Social, all of which DiResta said are part of a 

federated universe, or “fediverse.” (The SMS@MIT event was 

held prior to Meta’s release of Threads, an app to rival Twitter, 

which has attracted millions of users.) 

Most of the new platforms are decentralized by design. 

This means that instead of accessing the internet through 

services mediated by companies like Google, Twitter, and 

Facebook, users own and govern sections of the internet 

themselves. The new communities, DiResta said, can teach 

us about alternatives to the more centralized ecosystems 

that are now dominant. 

For example, Mastodon describes itself as free and opensource 

software developed by a non-profit organization. It 

supports microblogging features similar to those of Twitter. 

Bluesky, a similar platform, is now being beta tested. 

But decentralization isn’t a prerequisite for alternative 

platforms. T2, a nascent online community represented on 

the panel, will be centralized. But T2 still promises it will 

provide the high levels of user privacy, security, and social 

dynamics that today’s platforms lack. 

Decentralized or not, these models promise changes for 

both users and developers disillusioned by social media’s 

misinformation, vitriol, and marketing focus. However, these 

new online sites will also find that reaching the scale 

of current global communities will be a long, tough climb. 

Mozilla Leads the Way 

DiResta noted that Mozilla pioneered many of these concepts 

years ago. Mitchell Baker, who became Mozilla’s CEO in 2020 

and has been with the company since its origins, said that 

“decentralization has been a part of Mozilla’s ethos from 

the very beginning.” Founded in 1998, Mozilla was the opensource 

developer of the Firefox browser, and it has long used 

protocols that support open, one-to-many social engagement. 

Mozilla’s new effort, Mozilla.social, will be a social site that is 

not neutral to all content. “We don’t want to be neutral to hate, 

we don’t want to be neutral to racism, we don’t want to be 

neutral to misogyny,” Baker said. “Mozilla is about inclusion; 

it’s in our identity and manifesto.” 

The big challenge for Mozilla and others is how to maintain 

their ideals while scaling up. “Operating at scale has its own 

set of problems,” Baker said. “We’re trying to be very, very 

intentional about [reaching] scale, while operating under a 

different set of principles.” 

In 2019, when conversations around content moderation were 

heating up, Mike Masnick wrote an essay, “Protocols, Not 

Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech,” for the 

Knight First Amendment Institute. At the time, people were 

asking how platform companies could achieve both content 

moderation and privacy. Concerns were also raised about trust 

in a market dominated by four large companies. Government 

regulation was a flashpoint then, as it is now. 

Decentralized, Open Protocols 

Masnick’s premise was that building open protocols for email, 

news, chats or searches—as in the early days of the Internet— 

would ensure integrity. “Indeed,” he wrote, “some platforms 

are leveraging existing open protocols but have built up walls 

around them, locking users in, rather than merely providing an 

interface.” Masnick hoped that decentralization “would push 

the power and decision making out to the ends of the network, 

rather than keeping it centralized among a small group of very 

powerful companies.” 

Masnick also anticipated that decentralization would lead to 

“more innovative features, as well as better end-user control 

over their own data,” adding, “it could help usher in a series 

of new business models that don’t focus exclusively on 

monetizing user data.” 

His earlier words seem prescient to many new ventures. The 

pendulum seems to be swinging back to decentralized models 

that better protect both user privacy and free speech. 

Sarah Oh told attendees that she believes “the domination 

period” of the four large platforms “ended sometime last 

fall.” Oh is part of what she called a “small and mighty team” 

building a Twitter alternative with the familiar look and feel of 

a centralized platform. 

People want “to feel safer, less exhausted, have a higher 

quality product experience, really great UI, and have something 

that works fast,” Oh said. That’s why T2 won’t “diverge too 

much from the experience [users] had the last few years,” she 

explained. T2 is developing a short-text format that not only 

works well, but also upholds principles and values that mirror 

how users live and engage with information offline. “To build 

any kind of user-generated content platform today,” Oh said, 

“trust and safety have to be fundamental pillars.” 

Ethics vs. Profits? 

Moderator DiResta asked the panel about feasibility and 

tradeoffs: Can a social platform that upholds highly ethical 

values also be commercially successful? 

Oh replied that there’s “no playbook” for newcomers. In fact, 

she said, “there is pressure to build a business in a certain 

way, reach certain metrics, and raise the funding necessary to 

continue to grow your platform.” 

Masnick, while admitting “there is no silver bullet,” remains 

optimistic. Yet he acknowledged the difficulty of building trust 

and safety online, especially as a platform grows. “You always 

think there are easy solutions,” he said, echoing a comment 

made in another panel earlier in the day. “Just ban the bad 

people and help the good people. It turns out that it’s not 

easy...there is no perfect answer, no right way to do this.” 

Baker knows first-hand how difficult content moderation can 

be, especially at scale. It involves deciding what your audience 

wants, while also maintaining firm guidelines. For Mozilla, she 

said, “inclusion is not negotiable. And hate crimes, misogyny, 

stalking, and death threats...that is not inclusive.” 

Building a product that responds to both the market and 

philosophical implications can be a tough balancing act. 

As a pioneer, Baker said, “you have to be willing to take the 

arrows from all sides.” 

12 

13

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