In AI, Platforms Find A New Way To Lose Trust
The 15 years I spent working in Silicon Valley at the height of the tech boom trained me to be wary of the hype around new technologies. After watching 3D, AR, chatbots (the first time), and countless other would-be game-changers come and go, my wariness turned into a full-blown skepticism that aligns with the view of late researcher Roy Amara: society tends to overestimate the effect of new technology in the short term and underestimate its effect in the long term.
When The Information’s 2024 predictions about AI and the US election suggested we’re overblowing its likely impact for this fall, I felt validated and heartened to see some “level-headed, anti-hype” analysis.
In conversations on this topic, most people disagree with my skepticism. Last week, the FT’s Hannah Murphy published a comprehensive look at the situation, quoting several experts and insiders suggesting that, yes, it could be as chaotic as some suggest. Casey Newton, reporting on Platformer about how OpenAI is approaching the issue, credited them for “banning some novel uses of its technology preemptively, rather than waiting for disaster to strike and disabling it only then.” Reading this line, I wondered if my perspective mirrored the errors of last decade’s social media platform decision-makers, simply kicking the can down the line, waiting to take the issue seriously until it was already wreaking havoc.
The more I think about it, my perspective on the impact of AI on elections might be underplaying the issue. That said, the debate about AI and elections relates to a larger topic that I absolutely agree has been worsening issue for years: the collapse of trust of the information from many of the world’s most populated mediums.
When I joined XOMAD, there was already ample evidence of the persuasive power of influencers, especially on behalf of brands trying to push products. What I underestimated – even as an employee of a company specializing in mass deployments of local nano- and micro-influencers – was how the broad collapse of trust in most information exchange systems would leave these kinds of social media influencers as the most trusted election resource for most people.
It's too late for most information platforms, like social media platforms, to impact how trustworthy users find the content on the platform. In the long term, I believe few advertising-based social media platforms can exist with such a trust dearth; most users want to spend their time and attention on a platform where they feel safe and that hosts information they can trust, and once users no longer believe a platform can serve them that kind of experience, they’d leave, which should deplete advertising revenue.
As I’ve said before, I expect the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election to define the next “platform reckoning,” the deepest social media platform reshuffling that political campaigns have had to do since the advent of social media, when campaigns will need to figure out how to reach an audience atomized across many different social media platforms. But first, in 2024, we’ll need to try to gut through an election season amidst the deepest distrust in information platforms in recorded history.