“We all know that feeling,” says Charlie Warzel, a reporter at BuzzFeed who’s written about everything from viral misinformation on Twitter to exploitative child content on YouTube. Journalists are not in the business of resolving disputes for Facebook and Twitter. “This is what serves the public conversation best.” But journalists and outside researchers do not have access to the wealth of data available internally to companies like Twitter and Facebook. And unlike journalists, companies have the power to change the very incentives that keep producing these troubling online phenomena. Social media platforms are doing society no favors by relying on journalists to leach the poison from their sites.

Source: New York Times October 19, 2018 23:38 UTC