BU Today: YouTube is just the latest company to take a step back on moderating the content on its platform, following similar moves by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and X, owned by Elon Musk. Who benefits from less stringent moderation?

Michelle Amazeen: I think it helps those who don’t want people to have accurate information. More broadly, I think what’s happening is that there’s an incentive to manufacture confusion. [At the highest level], we have an administration that doesn’t like to be held to account by evidence or experts. We’re seeing a decline in trust in expertise and many institutions, a lot of which I think has been driven by those who are politically motivated to gain power. 

There’s also a commercial motivation here. It’s expensive to moderate content. You have to hire people, train them, develop algorithms to catch keywords and such. That all costs money. We have to remember that YouTube is a commercial company. Its number-one priority is to make money, not to inform the public—and especially not at a time when regulation is politically inconvenient.

BU Today: Speaking of politics: do you think the government has a responsibility to step in if social media companies back off from regulating themselves?

We need more government regulation. Congress has basically been asleep at the wheel while social media has overtaken all other media. Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act has been used to shield social media companies from being held to account for content on their platforms. I think that needs to be modified; if you’re developing media products that are harmful, you need to be held to account for it. 

Going back to what I said earlier, by abandoning or loosening content moderation rules, companies are complicit in manufacturing confusion. I think it’s akin to how in the past, the fossil fuel and chemical industries dumped hazardous byproducts by burying them in the ground. Then, decades later, when schools and subdivisions were built on those sites, people started getting sick from the contamination. In response, Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency developed Superfund sites [for cleaning up hazardous waste]. I think that’s where we’re at now. We need digital Superfund sites. So many of our digital locations are polluted with hazardous information, and we need more regulation to address that.

BU Today: Do you see that happening anytime soon?

It’s hard to say. Thinking back to when George Floyd was murdered in 2020, people were out in the streets protesting—and then we saw all these initiatives pass to look at policing and how we’re treating non-white people. So who knows what’s going to happen with social media sites loosening their regulations at the same time that things like LA’s immigration protests are happening, where we’re seeing a lot of confusion and difficulty distinguishing what’s accurate information. Maybe something else big will happen that results in more protests, and a movement will emerge where people try to take back responsibility and accountability [for information online].

BU Today: So what can be done as social media platforms relax moderation?

This could be an opportunity for news outlets to double down and really promote what they’re doing. Most of these social media influencers aren’t on the ground in LA doing reporting. It’s reporters from CNN, from the local NPR station affiliates, who are putting themselves in harm’s way in order to report on what’s happening based upon journalistic standards. So much of what we see on YouTube and social media is people trying to grift off confusion. One of the examples in the Times article involved a YouTube video of [Health and Human Services Secretary] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., claiming that COVID-19 vaccines alter people’s genes. There are a whole slew of people who are trying to leverage that disinformation to sell people vitamins or other unproven things that won’t protect you against COVID-19. Reporters aren’t the ones trying to sell you some survival kit so that you can go fend for yourself in the wilderness.

BU Today: Finally, being susceptible to misinformation goes hand-in-hand with subpar media literacy. What are some things you recommend for anyone trying to improve their media literacy and be more discerning online?

First, think about who’s posting the content you’re viewing. Who created it, and for what purpose? What might the motivation be for putting this message out? And, is there anything that’s being left out from the message? Then cross-reference. If you find something that’s intriguing, but you’re unfamiliar with the source, go see if anyone else is talking about that thing. Look to reputable news sources, such as NPR, PBS, or non-US sources like the BBC or the World Health Organization. Finally, it’s helpful to understand how our media systems work. Public media is nonprofit and supposed to serve the public interest versus commercial media—which is the vast majority of our media—whose number-one priority is to make money. Think about how those models impact the type of content that’s out there.