It Will Take More Than Robots to Manage the Robots

By now the sophistication of false information about Israel and Hamas is clear to anyone who opened their phone this week. As tech platforms rely ever more on artificial intelligence in their battle against disinformation, the havoc in the Middle East exposes the limits of technology to police technology's harms. It is more important than ever that we understand how global platforms like Meta, Google, and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, make decisions about what content gets amplified and what taken down. It's not as though platforms didn't know they had a huge disinformation problem that human content moderators alone could not solve. Two years ago, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen detailed for Congress how growth and profit drove decisions: "The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats and more combat," she testified.