I just watched Zuckerberg on Rogan, and Zuck changed how I looked at the misinformation problem. There is a way of relating to the world where you are in it, or subject to it, and what came out of that interview is that Mark never left the reality we all shared before social media. What makes him so uncanny to others is that his entire ontology is grounded in a world outside social medias effects. What most of us feel as the world, he sees as the effect of a thing. Whereas, an entire generation has been brought up with it as their substrate, the mother of their tongue, and to them and their identities what they read online is as real as the news once was.

What changed in that Rogan interview is it provided enough time to understand Mark's perspective, where harmful misinformation isn't bad because it's misinformation, it's bad because it's tangibly harmful, and there is a very open and nuanced discussion possible about what harmful means. Even when that's controversial, to even have that conversation you need a certain level of abstraction and optimism that you are speaking to someone who wants sincerely to cause less suffering. The irony is that this necessary trust in the intentions of the other person is what has largely been lost by throwing everyone together in the same place without apprehension of the terms or agreement on basic principles - the result is a power struggle.

I get why Facebook stepped back and outsourced those promotion/censorship decisions, both realpolitik wise, but more importantly, in making the best possible decision to separate powers from a governance perspective. What I did not understand before that I do now was his optimism, and I recognized the perspective of one of the few people on earth who do not see themselves as subject to social media and the internet. He's still a hacker, these are all still just things (because that's what they are), and he's still outside all this, and that's how he can be optimistic.

Google's approach in the article seems to be part of a partisan agenda that is easy to conflate with Mark's optimism, and when the vast majority of people talk about misinformation, they aren't talking about what Mark talked about, they are only using the words with tangentially aligned meanings that reinforce their narratives.

His comment about Dorsey's thought of a tiered twitter where there would be internet wildland and the current platforms become islands of civilization made the diversity of views quite stark. It also implies Jack was pushed out of Twitter, because that aligns with Mudge's story as well.

To understand what misinformation is, you have to be able to step back from the screens themselves and recognize them and their contents as separate, objective things that are a very microscopic but hypnotically engaging pico size part of actual reality. Mark talked about it with Rogan in the context of BJJ and surfing. Those experiences are reality - and I say they are where language itself ends. There is no narrative when you are engaging reality because your mind isn't focused on parsing and reparsing its artifacts and arguing with itself to reinforce its idea of self. It is focused on the present physical reality of your senses, speed, power, warmth, sun, your skin.

Misinformation in this context is that there's shit on the screen that is designed to bring you real suffering and physical harm. Full stop. It's not about owning the other team. There are representations we have created that work as powerfully as games, and the words you use to express your feelings and your beliefs about yourself were placed there not only by old movie and tv show lines, but by tweets and reddit posts. There there are forms made of language and symbols that rewire your thinking and cause you to suffer - and direct that visceral and instictive reaction to it at others.

Google's going to do stupid google things in this case because all signs point to most of their people being post-internet minds whose identities are dependent on what they think the internet thinks of them, and they're just going to inflame the very partisanship problem they think they are fixing. The interview with Zuckerberg drew it together with that reality-rooted hacker optimism that all this stuff is just still things, which I think is what Musk and Dorsey see, and who prevails in this is what will play out over the next few years.

You should really watch that interview.