CEOs of social media companies should not hide behind “naiveté” and “free speech” as an excuse for letting fake news and harassment flourish on their platforms
IT'S NOT OFTEN you hear some of the richest, most powerful men in the world described as naive, but it's becoming pretty commonplace. Tweets: @profgalloway , @wired , @ilvestoomas , and @wired Tweets: Scott Galloway / @profgalloway : Former Reddit CEO says de-platforming makes social networks better: companies can address harassment without hurting their platforms. Taking down bad content works, and research supports it. http://www.wired.com/... @wired : .@ekp: “Jack Dorsey knows what having Donald Trump and Infowars on his platform means. These CEOs, and the board members and investors who back them, choose not to know the details. Because they don't want to know.” http://www.wired.com/... Toomas Hendrik Ilves / @ilvestoomas : My 1.5 years here in Silicon Valley has led me to agree this is probably right. Add incredible arrogance toward those not in the business, as if we are all tech morons and Luddites. If this doesn't change real moron-Luddites will indeed “fix it”... badly. http://www.wired.com/... @wired : .@ekp: “I struggle to believe that these brilliant product CEOs, who have created social media services used by millions of people worldwide, are actually naive. It's a lot more likely that they simply don't care... They've been trained to not care.” http://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This op-ed lands in the middle of an arc the corpus has been tracking since big tech's 2017 gaffes and election-interference concerns began eroding public trust in the sector. Scott Galloway's argument — echoed by former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves in the same thread — is that Jack Dorsey and his peers know exactly what hosting Donald Trump and Infowars means, and that 'naiveté' is a business choice, not an excuse.
The piece also arms the pro-moderation side with evidence: a former Reddit CEO's claim that de-platforming makes networks better, backed by research showing taking down bad content works without hurting the platform. Two years later, the 'Wild Wild Web' era of shoot-first tech strategy was declared over, suggesting the argument aged into consensus rather than controversy.
First-order effects
- Jack Dorsey faces direct pressure over Twitter's hosting of Donald Trump and Infowars, with critics naming board members and investors as accountable alongside him.
- The cited Reddit precedent gives every platform executive a research-backed rebuttal to the claim that removing harassers or bad-faith actors damages growth.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and institutional investors gain a concrete lever: if boards are 'bankrolling' unmoderated platforms, moderation policy becomes a governance issue, not just a product one.
- Platforms that moderate aggressively can differentiate on brand safety, forcing laggards to defend laissez-faire policies against both evidence and rivals.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, content moderation migrates from optional PR posture to core infrastructure — the gut calls made under duress by Facebook and Twitter's CEOs formalizing into policy teams and stated rules.
- The counter-current persists: Musk's later promise of open-sourced algorithms and authenticated humans shows the free-speech framing survives as a competitive pitch, meaning the debate shifts from whether to moderate to who decides how.
The trend: Platform governance is moving from willful naiveté toward moderation as deliberate strategy, with trust itself becoming the product platforms compete on.