There are academic researchers and private teams all over the planet attempting to find solutions to disinformation, bullying and even spam.

Of course, it's pretty clear by now that there isn't going to be a magic bullet that is going to make everybody happy.

People are trying, what are you referring to?

Not OP. My impression is that a lot of the focus is around safety and specifically privacy. Both play right into social media giants' hands.

Instead we need to target Ads. Almost all problems can be eventually traced back to ads. At the very least traced back to the money incentive that ads create, on any platform.

Thanks, thats actually a great answer.

I would go one step further and suggest that ads are an issue for certain types of Economic games or Markets.

Any industry that depends on Ads tends to consolidate, and has an issue of incentives - the more people on the network, the more likely the network is able to survive.

On a tech forum people assume that challengers have better tech - but I would argue that challengers actually allow for more salacious/engaging content.

This is what creates the race to the bottom.

If the race to the bottom can be stopped - i.e. an incentive structure created that stops engagement being the primary metric, then the rest of the downstream problems are largely prevented.

Thats my root cause assessment of the situation. However once I get to this point, any solution seems to be a mess of intersecting fields ranging from morality, legal constraints, issues with press freedoms, free speech etc. etc.

So... I guess how do we set up incentives to not allow the most "engaging" content to dominate?