Antlike People
Rebutting social media's self-justifications


It goes without saying that the Googles and Twitters and TikToks of this world may reply that they couldn’t possibly stay open for business if they had to bear any responsibility for the accuracy of the verbiage they propagate.  But let’s consider this line of objection if it occurred in a different line of business.

For example, what would we say to a restaurant that served soup out of a single giant pot that everybody dipped their spoon into directly, which was filled by allowing anybody to just walk in and dump a bucket of whatever they brought into that shared pot?  I think we’d tell them that if they couldn’t come up with anything that was less of a health risk, we wouldn’t give them a license to do business.  I don’t see any reason to do otherwise with large enterprises that routinely dump sewage and neurotoxins into our brains.

The trick to screening out these pollutants may well be simply not to get into the weeds of designing processes and mechanisms for them to implement.  Just tell them what the penalties will be if they let those pollutants get through—in pretty much the same way we specify how much of what substance is allowable in our drinking water and what isn’t.  Then let them use that creative genius they’re always bragging about to come up with solutions of their own.