The social internet was never designed to prioritize the accuracy of information. It was built to maximize engagement, often at the expense of truth. To address this, we need leaders who not only understand the fundamental difference between engagement and accuracy but who are also willing to pioneer platforms that prioritize factuality, transparency, and user empowerment over addictive metrics.

We need to partner with psychologists, social scientists, economists, and tech leaders to redesign the systems that shape our collective understanding, consensus, and belief-formation, ensuring they foster accuracy, inclusivity, and resilience to information threats from malicious actors, domestic or abroad.

Collective wisdom is already the antidote to the centralization of information. Social media has accelerated the decay of mainstream media and local news because legacy sources fail to leverage the full potential of decentralized knowledge. Centralized press houses with human sources are a vestige of a world without efficient conduits of information. A diverse and distributed group always knows more than a centralized few—on every topic. Harnessing this wisdom is essential for the future of the internet, and an unavoidable hurdle in rebuilding trust and resilience in our information ecosystems.

Engagement ranking is not a solution to the challenges of information; it’s a short-term plunder of user attention. By optimizing for the same metrics as their competitors, tech leaders have at best stagnated and at worst colluded, failing to rise to the challenge our nation faces. Instead, they use their ad-driven business models as excuses to neglect the information consumer, prioritizing profit over the critical need for innovation in how information is delivered, verified, and consumed.

Technology should amplify human wisdom, not dictate it or interpret it.

The rapid advancement of AI and algorithmic decision-making has sidelined human judgment and nuance in favor of machine-generated narratives that pull from biased training methods and opaque datasets, further exacerbating the centralization of knowledge, information, and interpretation.

This trend risks reducing humanity’s ability to critically engage with any new information, as the effort to verify only increases. To safeguard the integrity of human knowledge and culture, we must design platforms that put human agency at the forefront—tools that remove AI from inference and interpretation, and delegate machine intelligence only to utilitarian tasks like increasing the efficiency of the flow of human-sourced information. AI should be used like a telephone that connects you to others; it should not be the person on the other end of the line talking to you.