Here's a hypothesis on one reason so many people persistently get content moderation and CDA 230 wrong -- unlike traditional media which is direct one-to-many communication, social media is an indirect modality.

What do I mean by that? I mean that when people say things like, "Zuckerberg controls what people say on Facebook," or "Jack is in charge of what appears on Twitter" this is both in some sense true and not really. Because social platform control means indirect control.

You set incentives, rules, pathways, nudges, and try to foster conditions more likely to end in your vision of a positive community (admittedly, some are more self-aware and explicit about this than others). And then people come and express themselves within that environment.

This indirect control is really different IMO than the direct editorial control you have running something like the NYT. In my experience, many regulators and journalists have a default mental model based on direct media. You run the company, you control what it publishes.

This is not to say that social media platforms shouldn't be morally responsible for the content on platforms that arise from the environments they create. They should. But I think there is one hugely important difference that is both obvious and often drops out of the discussion.

And it is this -- there's now another party here with agency. You don't have readers. You have users. The people writing on social media are citizens, a range of people expressing themselves, not pros taking guidance from the institution.

Social media is in this sense a pass through. Just as tariffs get passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. If you increase risk and liability for platforms based on content, that restriction on expression will be passed on to citizens, generally the least powerful.

So, here's a good rule to remember -- whatever thing you think you are doing to social media, you are actually doing to normal people. I get that many people are upset with tech companies right now and want to constrain or punish them for a range of good and not as good reasons.

But, tech companies especially the large ones will adapt. It may feel like you are punching Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey but you're also actually punching everyone who wants to post and gets restricted, not to mention smaller platforms trying to keep up.

This is what I mean by indirect modality. It may seem obvious, but in my experience many people fall back into thinking of social media companies as creating and publishing content, rather than fostering environments where content outside their direct control is posted by people.

I had a meeting with some government reps and they said: "If any TV station showed this content, we'd pull their license. So, take it down, or we're gonna pull your license." But ... it's not our license getting pulled. It's the licenses of hundreds of millions of people writing.

People who have worked in content moderation for years get used to this style of thinking like a native language, and it's IMO one way you can distinguish between noobs and experienced trust and safety people.

I've seen plenty of others start to get used to this indirect way of thinking about content on social media and then revert back to their default mental model of traditional direct media when they switch to auto-pilot.

It's probably not the only factor, but internalizing this indirect mode is IMO key to thinking precisely about the dynamics of social media. And I fear that unless regulators and journalists get the hang of it, we will continue to have bad reporting and bad bills.

Because proposed fixes to CDA 230 and ostensible solutions to social media generally make this error of extrapolating from a model of direct control.

I'm not sure how to fix this in time, but here are some things I've tried: go play some pool and only take bank shots; drive someplace familiar but only take left turns; play a piece of music in an unusual key; make a collage; watch Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers;

tell someone you care about them using other words; get into lipograms; learn to ride one of those "backwards bikes." Anyway, you get the idea. Suggestions welcome.