But by January 9, Trump and many of his supporters were permanently banned from social media platforms, and Parler, a redoubt for Trumpists among others, had been dropped by Apple and Google app stores and even removed from the Amazon servers that hosted the site. In the leadup to the January 6 siege of the Capitol, President Trump and his allies could use social media as a coordination mechanism for a motley collection of illiberal forces to mobilize a fierce attack intended to generate a surreal spectacle, disrupt the certification of the presidential election, and assault any politicians unlucky enough to be caught by the mob as it breached the Capitol. But this is the platform politics crisis in early 2021.Īs Aaron Sibarium recently argued in American Purpose, the event and the responses to it show the paradox of the online digital commons. If you had told a lay observer a decade ago that there would be a crisis over Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms banning the president of the United States for inciting a violent riot against Congress that included a barechested, behorned man dressed as the “QAnon Shaman,” you would likely be accused of writing bad science fiction. But the old problem hasn’t gone away: How do we know whether the machines will do as we wish? We once obsessed about how to restrain machines we could not predict or control - now we worry about how to use machines to restrain humans we cannot predict or control. The robots are now humanity’s saviors, suppressing bad human mass behavior online with increasingly sophisticated filtering algorithms. Primal terror of mechanical menace has given way to fear of angry primates posting. We hear warnings that nothing less than our collective ability to perceive reality is at stake, and that if we do not take corrective action we will lose our freedoms and way of life.

We see ourselves as imperiled by the terrifying social influence unleashed by the Internet in general and social media in particular.

Today we fear a different technological threat, one that centers not on machines but other humans. We would be lucky to be domesticated as pets kept around for the amusement of superior entities, who could kill us all as easily as we exterminate pests. The mechanism varied, but the result was always the same: Uncontrollable machine self-improvement would one day overcome humanity. Once upon a time - just a few years ago, actually - it was not uncommon to see headlines about prominent scientists, tech executives, and engineers warning portentously that the revolt of the robots was nigh.

Brand disabled in doom bots