Niall (Neil) Ferguson

speaker

315 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Niall (Neil) Ferguson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Call Me Back - with Dan Senor · AI is Activating Antisemites Left and Right - with Niall Ferguson · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

Now, one interesting thing, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this since we wrote the piece,

is that no serious effort is being made to identify human origin content online versus AI origin bots content.

This is simply nothing that seems to interest the masters of Silicon Valley.

Why not?

Because the bots are part of the business model.

So there isn't a serious effort to distinguish human content from non-human content, even as the volume of non-human content grows exponentially as the AI models become more powerful.

What would help a lot would be if online content were credibly differentiated so that one could tell the human content from the bots.

Towards the end of The Square and the Tower, I asked what we could do.

I even wrote a paper after its publication called What Is To Be Done for Hoover, which looked at ways that we could reduce the ways that network platforms like Facebook could be instrumentalized by bad actors.

One was the rewriting of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

That's an issue that's fallen by the wayside.

But for many years, the legislation created a Catch-22 in which network platforms could enjoy all the benefits of being publishers.

They could edit, delete, whatever they liked, promote whatever they liked, with none of the downsides of being publishers.

So harms online that have arisen from network platforms, they were not liable for.

Now there's gradually...

some sign that the courts are changing their view of this.

But it's, in my view, 10 years too late.

And it was a major mistake of the first Trump administration not to go after a rewriting of Section 230.

My sense is that we as a free and open society can deal with this problem, but we need to recognize it for what it is, and we're not doing that.

The Chinese obviously can harness algorithmic media

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