Why Big Tech Can’t Solve The Content Moderation Problem

Mark Zuckerberg’s letter this week to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), where he expresses regret over censoring free speech under pressure from the administration, is the latest salvo in the never-ending saga of platform content moderation. The White House, in a characteristically quick rebuttal, remarked that “tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.” Which is the sort of vague guidance that lacks specificity and falls short of addressing the underlying problem.

The reality is that content moderation—beyond the clear-cut cases of hate speech, violence, abuse, illegal activity, or threats to child safety, self-harm, etc.— is extremely difficult to get right and is bound to be perpetually flawed. The challenge only intensifies when it comes to breaking news or politically and socially charged events, where the stakes are high, and the incentives for various factions to skew public perception are even higher. There’s no easy playbook here; it’s messy, contentious, and often feels like an impossible balancing act.

Any centralized platform is destined to make mistakes—there’s no avoiding it. The idea of making genuinely “independent choices” or outsourcing these decisions to an impeccably balanced oversight board is more fantasy than reality. Even with the best intentions, the need for quick decision-making under uncertainty guarantees errors on both ends: censoring content that shouldn’t be, while simultaneously allowing fake or harmful content to spread before the truth can catch up. It’s a classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The pandemic offers a textbook example of how hindsight can make it easier to spot where mistakes were made—with today’s information, for instance, we can see that mandating vaccines for those who had already contracted the virus was likely unnecessary. However, it’s easy to overlook that, at the time, misinformation was spreading like wildfire across social media, and vaccines were a critical tool that saved millions of lives. A study published in The Lancet, one of medicine’s top journals, estimates that vaccines prevented as many as 14 million deaths worldwide. While there may be debate over the exact numbers, there remains a strong scientific consensus on the life-saving impact of vaccines, even in hindsight.

So, while the White House may have been acting with good intentions, it’s evident that the decision to censor free speech—including humor and satire—was wrong. But let’s be clear: the solution the White House reiterated this week is equally flawed. It merely shifts the burden from the government to a private company, effectively outsourcing the blame. Platforms shouldn’t be tasked with making these impossible choices. They are for-profit businesses, and while they should certainly take steps to curb content that is undeniably harmful, they should not be cast as the ultimate arbiters of our speech.

This is not a new insight. Internet platforms today wield too much power, and content moderation is a prime example of a responsibility they’d rather not hold, yet it permeates everything else they do. Even when there are sincere attempts to distribute control—like our efforts with the Libra Association—achieving truly balanced participation and representation is impossible within the confines of a traditional web platform. While the issue is most obvious in social media, it extends far beyond, impacting everything from merchants attempting to reach customers on Amazon to developers trying to distribute and innovate within Apple’s ecosystem.

What’s a better solution? For starters, grassroots efforts for verification and fact-checking—like X’s Community Notes—should be actively encouraged. This bottom-up approach is how the internet built Wikipedia, the most comprehensive and reliable encyclopedia available, and how Reddit users sift through news and controversial topics daily. Even better, fact-checking should be platform-agnostic. It’s a public good, and when someone goes through the effort to debunk a piece of misinformation, that correction should be as widely disseminated as possible.

Second, we need to adopt an open protocol approach to social media. Not only should users be able to take their audiences with them across platforms—something the FTC could enforce to rapidly accelerate competition and innovation—but they should also have the freedom to choose the algorithms and filters that shape their feeds. Imagine an algorithm marketplace where consumers can opt for content curated by their social circle, all the way to minimal or no filtering—much like what X under Musk successfully dismantled from the old Twitter.

The White House’s position reflects a paternalistic approach to content distribution, one that a different administration could easily exploit to serve its own interests. True progress lies in empowering users to critically evaluate information themselves and providing them with the tools to customize their own experience. Only then can we move toward a more resilient and transparent system.

The technology to make this vision a reality already exists, and open protocols built on crypto rails have demonstrated it’s possible. What’s lacking is the commitment to modernize our current web infrastructure—moving away from closed, walled gardens with excessive control over all types of curation, toward a more open and modular digital infrastructure.

Regulators have a crucial role in enabling this transformation, and instead of relying on regulation by enforcement—as exemplified by today’s S.E.C. action against OpenSea—they should consider how to support entrepreneurs in building the next generation of the internet. With the rapid rise of AI-driven content creation, the stakes could not be higher.