Lawrence Lessig on why AI and social media are causing a free speech crisis

There is no "crisis." This is the predictable result of what happens when you have commons with no policing.

I've enjoyed my time with it, but I never really understood why the Internet got a free pass on decency standards where newspaper, television and radio did not. It's another form of mass media. In each previous iteration, we seemed to understand just how corrosive mass media could be, and what sorts of manipulation those in control of it could do with it if left unchecked.

Product placement in film was the result of governance of advertising, FFS. We couldn't have people being exploited by the evils of marketeering! Now our biggest employers have tried to embed themselves in the fabric of the internet to do literally nothing but exploit consumers. And now they're leveraging AI to do it even more efficiently. It's insane.

We'll eventually settle on Public Access standards, where if you can't show it on TV, you can't publish it on the Internet. It'll probably be for the best, for as briefly as it matters-- for better or worse it will kill social media as we know it (look what happened to porn sites once they required uploaders to register as producers) and drive us deeper into "virtual realms" within the Internet.

Social media is easy to govern into obsolescence since it's accessible to the masses. Nobody is going to be quick to govern anything that happens between users in LambdaMOO, Second Life, Roblox, Metaverse, etc. This is literally the only reason I see in why Zuckerberg is so hellbent on VR-- you're no longer on the stuffy Internet with all those icky EU rules, you're in a video game-- his world, that doesn't technically exist, where only he makes the rules.