In 2020, the need to contain misinformation about COVID-19 pushed Facebook and Twitter into a role they never wanted—arbiters of the truth, says evelyn douek in an op-ed for The Atlantic.
“Gone is the naive optimism of social-media platforms’ early days, when—in keeping with an overly simplified and arguably self-serving understanding of the First Amendment tradition—executives routinely insisted that more speech was always the answer to troublesome speech. Our tech overlords have been doing some soul-searching.”