Everyone wants to try to rein in Facebook, Tiktok and other social media. This is one obvious solution
Powerful technology has perhaps never presented a bigger set of regulatory challenges for the U.S. government.
Before the state primary in January, Democrats in New Hampshire received robocalls playing Ai-generated deepfake audio recordings of President Joe Biden encouraging them not to vote. Imagine political deepfakes that, say, incite Americans to violence. This scenario isn’t too hard to conjure given new research from NYU that describes the distribution of false, hateful or violent content on social media as the greatest digital risk to the 2024 elections.
The two of us have helped develop and enforce some of the most consequential social media decisions in modern history, including banning revenge porn on Reddit and banning Trump on Twitter. So we’ve seen firsthand how well it has worked to rely entirely on self-regulation for social media companies to moderate their content.
The verdict: not well at all.
Toxic content abounds on our largely unregulated social media, which already helped foment the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the attempted coup in Brazil on Jan. 8, 2023. The dangers are only compounded with layoffs hitting the industry, the Supreme Court and Congress failing to address these issues head on, and inscrutable
CEOS launching dramatic changes to their companies. Broad access to new and increasingly sophisticated technology for creating realistic deepfakes, such as Ai-generated fake pornography of Taylor Swift, will make it easier to spread dupes.
The status quo of social media companies in the U.S. is akin to having an unregulated flight industry. Imagine if we didn’t track flight times or delays or if we didn’t record crashes and investigate why they happened. Imagine if we never found out about rogue pilots or passengers and those individuals were not blacklisted from future flights. Airlines would have less of an idea of what needs to be done and where the problems are. They would also face less accountability. The lack of social media industry standards and metrics to track safety and harm has driven us to a race to the bottom.
Similar to the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration, there should be an agency to regulate American technology companies. Congress can
pays special attention to the midlife period, an area where the health gap feels most critical. “The most important time for me to evaluate a woman is between 40 and 60,” Larkin says, and yet that's when they are most often lost in the healthcare system. They're past their childbearing years and have yet to show up with symptoms of serious diseases. But that's exactly when early signs of serious diseases start to emerge. Men, for example, start to show signs of heart disease in their 40s, but many women aren't
aware that their risk of a cardiovascular event — the number one killer of women in the US — rises sharply in their 50s.
Midlife is also a time where the lack of clear information about menopause means so many women fall prey to unproven and often expensive solutions. The lack of good, evidencebacked information and supportive care from the medical community has pushed many women to look for answers on their own.
Companies are more than happy to fill the void. But that means that instead of evidence-backed
care, we get at-home menopause tests that most experts think aren't actually helpful. Rather than clear guidelines and support about hormone replacement therapy, we get sketchy supplements from Drew Barrymore. Instead of sound advice on sexual health, we get Gwyneth Paltrow's jade eggs. (To be clear, I'm all for celebrities normalizing aging. But they are not medical experts and don't always elevate experts who offer evidence-based advice. And we ought to be very skeptical when their efforts to destigmatize also line their pockets.)
Yes, there are reasons to be hopeful about women's health. The last year has brought several important advances, including a new treatment for postpartum depression, the first drug for hot flashes associated with menopause, and a rare biotech startup focused on a treatment for preeclampsia. There's been a palpable sense among physicians focused on women's health that momentum is building around conditions that have for too long gone ignored. Biden's $12 billion could build on that success.
But forgive me if my excitement is tempered by
a deep frustration, given the long history of neglect. It's also unclear whether this Congress will actually approve the funds and how soon they would be spent. (For comparison's sake, the annual budget for the National Institutes of Health is $48 billion.)
When I look around at what's happening in the rest of the biomedical universe — like the deep investments that have led to astounding new technologies like Crispr or that have changed the course of certain types of cancer — it can feel like I'm celebrating getting the crumbs of a three-tiered cake.