Tressie McMillan Cottom

Well, when Emily agrees with me, I do feel pretty good.

I would be even more pointed and say, there is no economic incentive for these platforms to do a better job of making consumers more informed and making them more media literate.

In fact, the incentives are in the other direction.

So when the tools become cheap enough and accessible enough, which is what we have seen with things like Grok or Sora, which is really popular to manipulate video and photo images in particular, is that

The ability to manipulate images has existed for a very long time.

It is now, however, sort of democratized.

It is available to so many more actors.

We saw what happened, though, when that came for text, right?

So one of the reasons that Twitter became such a lightning rod in the popular discourse and in political discourse was because people had come to trust the text that was shared on Twitter, and then suddenly it felt like overnight

You were overwhelmed by what we might call pre-AI slop or that moment right before the AI slop, which is you were flooded with questionable text suddenly.

And you see a decline in trust, but you don't necessarily see a decline in people using it.

So the takeaway, if I'm a person running a social media platform, is people will not change their user behavior based on whether or not they trust the platform.

They will change their user behavior based on whether or not it's easy to use or it appeals to us emotionally.

That means the incentives aren't there to be a trustworthy media platform.

And that is actually not a job that the platform itself should be deciding, right?

The real question here is where is the government?

Where's legislation?

Where is sort of popular outcry to say we deserve

a better media environment than the one that we have.

If we leave this to just pure economic incentives, the social media platforms are doing exactly what they should be doing.