“It's in some ways a very old problem. NBC has to decide what's acceptable at 8 p.m. And they do that within some guidance of what the FCC says, but mostly they're working within those barriers, and deciding what they think their audience will accept, what they think their moral compass is, what their advertisers will blanch at.
Now you've got Facebook and Apple and YouTube being in a similar situation, but I think the game is different. You can do classic stuff, like setting rules and deciding where the line is, but the other thing you can do now is you can design the platform so that you manage where those things go. It's not like there's no precedent for that either — you can build a video rental store and put all the porn in the back room, and have rules about how gets in there and who doesn't. That's using the material architecture and the rules to keep the right stuff in front of the right people and vice versa. But you can do that with such sophistication when you think about how to design a social media platform. You know much more about people, you know much more about what their preferences are, about where they're coming from, about the content. You can use the algorithm — the very same algorithm that's designed to deliver what you searched for — to also keep away what they think you don't want to see.”