by Yuval Noah Harari
Two things that should be done at the governmental level, and there is something to be
done on the individual level. On the governmental level, the two most obvious things to
do is to ban fake humans, that we don't want algorithms pretending to be humans and
thereby distorting our information systems. If you go online, let's say to Twitter, and
you see that the story has a lot of traction, a lot of traffic and you think, oh, a lot
of humans are interested in this. So, I should also get involved, but actually it's not
human, it's bots and algorithms. This should be banned. So, we shouldn't have the
situation when algorithms that pretends to be humans are running our conversations. The
other thing is that corporations should be liable for the actions of their algorithms.
Whenever you talk about it with the big tech companies, they immediately raise the flag
of freedom of speech. We don't want to censor our users. The problem is not with the
human users. Humans produce enormous amounts of content, some of it is hate and greed,
but there is also a lot of other good content. The problem is that the corporate
algorithms of Twitter and Facebook and TikTok and so forth, they deliberately spread the
hate and the fear and the greed because this is good for their business interests. And
this is what they should be liable for, for the decisions and actions of their
algorithms, . . .
