"The real problem is that social media distorts our perceptions of the public sphere."

"By targeting users with droves of content meant to resonate specifically with them, it causes us to create a false mental model of society."

"The report concluded that the misinformation and disinformation propagated by social media create “a chain reaction of harm,” acting as a “force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society.”"

"Those professionals are referring to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which provides immunity to social media platforms regarding content posted by third parties."

"Having spent much of my career studying how software systems can amplify human abilities and enhance human intelligence, it is clear to me that social media does the opposite."

"It distorts our collective intelligence and degrades our ability to make good decisions about our future."

"We humans are decision making machines."

"This is how we come to understand the complexities of our world and make good decisions throughout our lives."

"We call it intelligence."

"For intelligence to work properly, we humans need to perform three basic steps. First, we perceive our world. Next, we generalize our experiences. Finally, we build mental models to help us navigate our future."

"The problem is that social media platforms have inserted themselves into this critical process, changing what it means to perceive our world and generalize our experiences."

"It is within the public sphere that society develops an understanding of ourselves — our collective wisdom."

"It embodies our collective sense of what views and values our society holds at each level, from the hyperlocal to the more distant."

"Each of us now has a deeply flawed mental model of our own communities."

"We must instead blame the machinery of distribution."

"The platforms do this by profiling us over time and using those profiles to target us with selective content — custom curated news, ads, and posts that do not represent our society as a whole."

"As a result, we all feel like we are experiencing the public sphere every day, when really each of us is trapped in a distorted representation of the world."

"Thus social media degrades our collective intelligence and damages our ability to make good decisions about our future."

"This gives most of us an overinflated impression of the prevalence of our own views and values, and an underdeveloped sense of the prevalence of conflicting views and values."

"This dynamic amplifies extreme perspectives and drives polarization, but even worse, it destroys our collective wisdom as a society."

"I am saying that we all need to be exposed to a real representation of how views and values are distributed across our society. That is collective wisdom."

"This brings me back to my core assertion — that the biggest problem with social media is not the content itself, but the machinery of targeted distribution."

"To fix this, we have two options: We can either cut the strings by banning profiling and targeting practices, or we can make the strings visible so we at least know when we are experiencing distorted views of our world."

"On the other hand, we can make the strings visible without disrupting business models, but we need to do it in an aggressive way."

"Currently platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow users to see primitive targeting information about advertisements."

"Does this help users understand how the targeted ad fits into the public sphere? I do not believe so."

"To solve this, we should push for transparency in targeting. This means requiring platforms to clearly disclose the demographic characteristics of the exposed population when targeting us with any piece of content that is not distributed broadly."

"The goal is not to suppress content. We want to make the machinery of distribution as visible as possible, enabling each of us to appreciate when we are being siloed into a narrow echo chamber, and when we are not."