“It’s okay to be honest about not knowing rather than spreading falsehood. While it is often said that honesty is the best policy, silence is the second best policy.” — Criss Jami, “Killosophy”

Disturbing news recently out of Silicon Valley: Thanks to mass layoffs, efforts to compete with Elon Musk’s laissez faire X (formerly known as Twitter), and amid political criticism, multiple social media sites are pulling back on their efforts to stem the tides of disinformation and misinformation spreading online.

That news comes just as the 2024 presidential race kicks into higher gear and as coordinated propaganda attacks from China and Russia intensify.

The Pew Research Center says half of Americans at least sometimes get their news from social media, so the companies’ moderation pullbacks could lead to more people taking in bad information and thinking it’s legitimate news.

That can lead to political radicalization and division, and that can sometimes spill into real life. A report out this month from Reuters says American political violence is the worst it’s been since the 1970s, with at least 213 cases of violence since the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol leading to at least 39 deaths.

You can’t blame all of that on social media, but that’s where a lot of the heated rhetoric begins.

And social media companies have tremendous power.

Facebook, the world’s biggest social media company, has nearly 3 billion active monthly users around the globe, according to data-tracking site Statista. The world’s most-read English language newspaper, the New York Times, has 8.8 million digital subscribers, or about 0.3% of Facebook’s reach.

With that power — as the Bible, Winston Churchill, and the writers of the Spider-Man comics say — comes great responsibility.

I group social media companies in with publishers, since most of their money comes from advertising and the distribution of information. Though almost all of their content comes from outside sources, social media companies — like all publishers — have a responsibility to ensure their content causes the least harm.

And that means they need to do all they can to police hate speech, calls for violence, and the kinds of blatantly false information that can cause harm to the public, such as conspiracy theories about vaccines.

They have to do so carefully. Harmful rhetoric comes from the left and the right, and they ought to moderate it all. And people from all along the ideological spectrum ought to be able to share their beliefs, so long as those beliefs don’t espouse violence or hate.

Social media companies can thread that needle with clear, transparent guidelines and firm adherence to those guidelines.

But social media companies are apparently pulling back.

The Washington Post, citing more than a dozen inside sources at social media companies, reported last week the companies have gutted content moderation teams with layoffs. Companies like Meta, which owns Facebook, have also tried to keep up with X, which Musk has intentionally designed as a free-for-all. And social media companies are getting skittish after conservative politicians accused them of colluding with the Joe Biden administration to remove conservative voices from the platforms.

That’s terrible news, but that is not the government’s problem to fix.

Social media companies are protected by the First Amendment from government intrusion. There should be no mandates on what social media companies have to allow or disallow. And the government, when making a request of social media companies, should be aware of the tremendous power of government and make it clear such requests come with no carrots or sticks that might influence social media companies’ decisions.

And the ultimate responsibility is ours. We as a people should be accountable to ourselves for not posting content that sows disunion and for knowing how to spot fake news. Russia and China may be to blame for spreading inciteful falsehoods, but we’re to blame for letting it work on us. We should approach social media — and all media — with a healthy skepticism, especially as social media companies pare back their moderation efforts.

But social media companies cannot abdicate their responsibility for what shows up on their pages, and content moderation should remain an important part of the infrastructure behind social media feeds.

Otherwise, social media sites should all have a pop-up banner explaining that any and all information on the site could be total bunk and users shouldn’t take any of it seriously.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.