This gets to the very heart of the tension between what's good for social media companies and what's good for society. Western society would be much better off with less Russian bot traffic. Less misinformation, less promotion of destabilizing far-right or far-left viewpoints, less fundamental opposition. Meanwhile, social media thrives on divisiveness, controversy, and engagement bait.
The involuntary shutdown of the Yandex data centers would be a good moment to reflect on how much of the conversation is real and protected by free speech, and how much is driven by malign foreign actors. I imagine it would be technically easy enough to create filters that specifically block traffic from Russian data centers. Whether we'll want to or not will be a litmus test of where we stand on communication policy going forward.
This gets to the very heart of the tension between what's good for social media companies and what's good for society. Western society would be much better off with less Russian bot traffic. Less misinformation, less promotion of destabilizing far-right or far-left viewpoints, less fundamental opposition. Meanwhile, social media thrives on divisiveness, controversy, and engagement bait.
The involuntary shutdown of the Yandex data centers would be a good moment to reflect on how much of the conversation is real and protected by free speech, and how much is driven by malign foreign actors. I imagine it would be technically easy enough to create filters that specifically block traffic from Russian data centers. Whether we'll want to or not will be a litmus test of where we stand on communication policy going forward.
It shouldn't be hard to construct filters over the return, but I doubt the social media firms want to.
Funny, that...