San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Force companies to make social media safe for kids
Regarding “Bay Area social media executives face heated Senate panel on child safety” (Politics, SFChronicle.com, Jan. 31): On one hand Mark Zuckerberg and his tech bros tell senators they are doing everything they can to control content that leads impressionable teens to kill themselves. On the other hand, we are told every day how amazingly artificial intelligence can scrape the internet and create faces that look and talk like real people.
So, why can’t AI monitor all internet content and block harmful lies aimed at kids?
When the ridiculously overpaid tech execs say they can’t fix the internet, they are really protecting their profits.
Internet platforms are publishers and should be open to lawsuits for libel and fraud the same way newspapers are.
Repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects them from liability, and watch how fast they find a way to use AI to clean up the internet.
Expose Trump
Regarding “Trump said he plans to declare martial law. Here’s what that would look
like” (Open Forum, SFChronicle.com, Jan. 31): A collective lack of imagination and limited access to straight talk has led some people to say they would prefer a dictatorship to four more years of President Joe Biden.
Every day I hear how important it is to listen to Donald Trump as he tells us his plans. The news media have the opportunity and responsibility to take his promises and connect them to events in present-day dictatorships.
Trump’s deliberate use of repetition to dull the shock normally evoked by lies and formerly charged language has successfully obscured the horrific implications of his words.
By reporting and helping us to make these connections, the news media will be actively demonstrating the importance and relevance of a free press, one of the many freedoms Trump has maligned and promised to curtail.