“In journalism, reporters who lie are fired. But no newsroom has a structure like Facebook, with 2 billion individuals publishing stories and no real editors. On a platform where users can publish freely, and provocations and misinformation are incentivized by the very architecture of the platform, what’s a publisher to do? Perhaps a better question is: What is the publisher’s moral or ethical responsibility?” Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic: The Most Powerful Publishers in the World Don’t Give a Damn. — I’m not sure that they don’t give a damn. But what we’ve learned (again) over the past few weeks is that Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey aren’t up to the task of establishing and expressing clear policies when it comes to content moderation on their networks. And that’s not necessarily a surprising revelation. It’s a difficult, and in some ways, unprecedented challenge. Two steps would help. First, bring in more journalism experts who have some experience managing these kinds of problems. Second, bring users into the process. This is, after all, our public square. We are Twitter. We provide the content. We built the community. Why are we ignored when it comes to what gets said and who gets to be part of that community? We are everything else. So we should also be the editors.

+ “Twitter is doubling down on the same squishy point of view that has allowed too much of it to become a cesspool over the last several years, and it has little intention of truly cleaning up.” Kara Swisher in the NYT: Rules Won’t Save Twitter. Values Will.

+ It turns out tech companies can edit when they want to. The Intercept takes you inside Google’s effort to build a censored search engine in China.