Op-ed by Joshua Geltzer @ Wired.com, March 11

Geltzer is executive director and visiting professor of law at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection as well as an ASU Future of War fellow at New America writing a book on the issues discussed here. From 2015 to 2017 he served as senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

[....] When Russia manipulates elections via Facebook, or ISIS recruits followers on Twitter, or racist landlords deny rentals to blacks and then offer them to whites through Airbnb, commentators and companies describe these activities as “manipulation” or “abuse” of today’s ubiquitous websites and apps. The impulse is to portray this odious behavior as a strange, unpredictable, and peripheral contortion of the platforms.

But it’s not. It’s simply using those platforms as designed [....]

Recognizing that these challenges—and others—emerging on modern communications platforms stem from their inherent features isn’t an indictment of the companies whose services we’ve all come to rely on; to the contrary, it shows just how hard these problems are. And it calls for a reorientation as to how the companies and the rest of us think about addressing these challenges.

First, [....]