Season 1 - Episode 9 - Entering the unchartered waters of morality and social media

The week after the George Floyd riots, we look at the question of morality and social media. Morality is hard concept to grasp, at an age of immediate information transmission, hyper-virality, and mass manipulation. How are platform companies responding? We look at the four classes of responses: 1. rules based editing; 2. removal of a post; 3. flagging and 4. virality throttling.

But is it enough? How are decisions made? Does a Silicon Valley company need to think about the moral implications of its technology advances?

Facebook - its future is private, says its CEO

Boron rods - Removal of COVID-19 conspiracy theory at Facebook and Youtube - Twitter efforts - More Twitter efforts - French government efforts irritate the media - slowing down the virality rate of social media app: WhatsApp - another WhatsApp update coverage - will we entrust humans or machines to curate news?

Executive branch push to remove boron rods - Threats - Executive order - industry silence

Laissez-faire approach - Facebook - Facebook employees react

No social distancing between media and the executive branch - phone call

What robots and AI help fascism - we could see it coming in 2017

How to approach social media curation in different countries - Apple and China

To stream or not to stream suicide - Facebook decides on a complex moral case

Facebook and election campaigning - Facebook decides on pre-election spend for one week before Election Day - Facebook stops political ad campaigning for one week before Election Day

Facebook and the Mauritius oil spill crisis

Fighting fires and false rumors