Reason #13798 to Regulate Social Media

I’ve been noticing something lately that’s honestly pretty concerning. The current “zeitgeist” on Twitter changes from one day to the next, and it’s starting to have a massive impact on businesses. The problem is that businesses are supposed to be built for the long term, but they’re being forced to react to a platform that lives entirely in the short term.

I’m not saying Twitter is inherently bad, but the way it’s structured today is definitely a problem. The algorithm is built to reward attention-seeking behavior rather than reality-seeking behavior. It turns out that the things that get the most attention are often the least real, and the systems we have in place, like Community Notes, are just completely insufficient for telling the truth.

Marketing vs. Merit

You end up with this huge bucket of consumers who believe whatever is happening on their feed. This forces companies to be extremely reactive because the Twitter zeitgeist can actually move the needle.

A perfect example of this is the debate between Claude and OpenAI’s Codex. If you talk to programmers who use both, most will tell you that Codex is the better product. But because the Anthropic team was able to manufacture this super viral loop on X, it almost destroyed the concept that the best product wins. Maybe the best product wins in the long term, but in the short term, the best-marketed product is winning. I don’t think that’s actually good for the world.

The Viral Loop Problem

The way people have figured out how to “hack” these algorithms for viral marketing moments isn’t a great mode for building products. It damages the world way more than we realize. On some platforms, maybe a viral loop is fine, but if Twitter is supposed to be our digital town square, we need a correct way of moderating which voices are heard. We need to know that those voices are being truthful.

The Reality of Groupthink

I don’t think it’s been all bad, and I think Elon actually has good intentions for the platform. But it’s become so political that everything has just averaged out to groupthink. Whether it’s on the left or the right, these algorithms pump narratives at us that are really hard to distinguish from reality.

In the long term, that’s just not good for society. It leads me back to the same conclusion: this is exactly why we need to regulate social media. We can’t keep letting the loudest, most viral voice dictate the reality of our businesses and our lives.