I signed up for Facebook in June 2006, right after I washed my hands of high school and got ready for the seriousness of college. A friend who had graduated the year before invited me to the website, and I was eager to find other people who were headed to my tiny liberal arts campus.

Facebook was young then and still limited to students with an .edu email address. I used it prolifically for years – to share jokes, memes, media, to chat with classmates and friends, to build an image of myself – but I have a distinct memory of thinking, “When will I not be on Facebook anymore?” It was a kid thing then, a thing young people did – where was the line? When would I retreat from this juvenile space and build for myself instead something more professional, more opaque?

Social media has changed dramatically in the past fifteen years, and the time has long come for me to leave it. The way these websites operate has become increasingly detrimental to our personal self-image and our social discourse. As social media shifted its model to data mining that profited off of every post we make – with little regard for the actual content – I decided I was tired of giving them any more information to spin into gold.

But I think it’s also worth examining how social media can be used in a new, more equitable world. Part of that goes hand-in-hand with information literacy. Libraries and archives and every high school class I ever took were big on this concept of understanding, evaluating, and integrating knowledge to answer questions.

Did Media Literacy Backfire?

This article from danah boyd does an exceptional job of parsing why disinformation has taken hold in the age of information literacy – and how the concept itself can facilitate disinformation rather than hinder it.

The entire series of articles from Points is exceptional, and strikes at the disingenuous idea that simply teaching media literacy can stop this wave – to do so is like slapping duct tape on a breaking damn. It does not address the core problem, and it will not be enough. We have to better understand the problem in order to rectify it – and at the danger of sounding anti-free speech – content moderation may in fact be the best tool we have.

Are There Limits to Online Free Speech?

Which is why I’d also recommend reading this article from Alice Marwick, that examines how the promise of a self-regulated internet built in the grand tradition of the Forum became a place where intolerant ideas could spread unchecked.

Content moderation by private technology companies is not a First Amendment violation; in most cases, it’s just a matter of enforcing pre-existing Terms of Service. But this victim/bully dichotomy allows them to garner sympathy from many who truly believe that the internet should be a stronghold of free speech.

Marwick shaves close to Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance in this article. Mainly, that in order to foster a free, tolerant and accepting society, there must be limits against intolerant thought and behavior.

“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

I find that this is an increasingly self-evident truth. That we as a society must enforce what behavior we find appropriate. It is disingenuous to argue that fighting against intolerance and purposeful misinformation is akin to censorship – it is still illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater. We must take action before the consequences become so dire.