The big social network founders are totally out of their depth

Mark Zuckerberg may want to ask someone smarter, thoughtful, and civic-minded to decide on the future of his company

Imight be the only person on earth feeling sorry for the big boys of technology. Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, all those Google nerds: They’re monumentally screwed, because they have no idea how to tame the web and social media monsters they have created.

The way I see it, these guys — and they are mostly guys — were arbitrarily chosen. They started with some good ideas, some luck, great timing, got lots of people to believe in their rosy vision, and they won the unicorn lottery.

Little did they know or care what problems they were creating. Now, they’re being asked to solve — or acknowledge, or something — some really big issues, like what to do about people who use their platforms to meddle in elections or spread lies, paranoia, bigotry and straight-up hate.

The world expects great things of them, because they’re supposed to be geniuses. Problem is, they’re not. There’s nothing they can do except apologise, turn off their big machines and walk away. I doubt they’ll do that. Instead, they’re manufacturing baloney explanations about how they will use more technology, or maybe more people, to handle the civic duties they had hoped to avoid.

Take Zuckerberg. He made big promises to Congress about the capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) to root out toxic content. Sadly, they were also wildly premature, something that Dorsey at least had the decency to admit: Algorithms can’t comprehend truth. They just repeat the past.

If we train them to delete tweets with a specific word in them, they can certainly be automated. But the malevolent actors who want to blow through an automated censoring algorithm will do so easily. Until we have a model of truth that is much better than what we have now, there’s simply nothing else to say about it.

That leaves hiring humans to filter everything that emerges from the firehose of meaningless updates, cat pictures and lies, possibly with an automatically generated list of ranked things to worry about (which, to be clear, is not AI, it’s just an automatically generated list of things to worry about).

Yet there are major problems here, too. For instance: So, back to my sympathy. These boys are all super rich, so it’s limited. But I’m imagining being their mom, feeling for them. They all started out wanting to make the world a better place using cool technology, and here they are, dealing with all of this democracy and public responsibility stuff, which they never signed up for and honestly don’t have the chops to handle on their own.

As their fictional mom, I’d like to offer some advice. Retire, step aside.

Maybe find a new hobby. Ask someone smarter and more educated, thoughtful, and civic-minded to decide on the future of your companies.