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ARE You COMING To BED? ) TI CANT. THIS 1S IMPORTANT. WHAT? I J SOMEONE 15 WRONG ON THE INTERNET. / An couple of years, I'm more worried than I've ever been about the ability of governments to get big things done. We need governments to take action if we're going to make progress on challenges like avoiding a climate disaster or preventing the next pandemic. But declining trust makes it harder for them to be effective. If your people don't trust you, they're not going to support major new initiatives. And when a major crisis emerges, they're less likely to follow guidance necessary to weather the storm. This decline in trust is happening all over the world. The 2021 Edelman Trust Index shows worrying drops across the globe. Part of it is understandable: Any time you have a really big crisis like a pandemic, people look for someone to blame. Governments are an obvious target. But this trend toward less trust in government didn't start in 2020. The pandemic only made clearer what had already been happening. So, who or what is to blame? It's clear that increased polarization is a significant driver. This is especially evident here in the United States, although we're far from alone. Americans are becoming more divided and more deeply entrenched in their political beliefs. The gap between the left and the right is becoming a gulf that's harder and harder to bridge. There are many reasons for this growing divide, including a 24-hour news cycle, a political climate that rewards headline generation over substantive debate, and the rise of social media. I'm especially interested in understanding the latter, since it's the most technologically driven. (xkcd.com) Digital communication has profound benefits in terms of helping people collaborate, stay in touch, and share things with each other. But social media has played a huge role in spreading misinformation that makes people suspicious of their governments. Social media feeds have become so personalized that you don't see factual information if it doesn't align with your profile. I believe that governments need to regulate what you can and can't use social media for. In the United States, this topic has raised a lot of free speech questions. But the reality is that our government already has all sorts of norms around communication. You can't slander someone or trick them out of their money by promising something you don't deliver on. Network TV shows can't show explicit sex scenes or use certain profane language before 10 p.m., in case children are watching. These rules exist to protect people. So why couldn't our government create new rules to protect them from the most tangible harms created by social media? They wouldn't be easy to enforce, and we'd need public debate about exactly where the lines should be, but this is doable and really important to get done. A video falsely claiming that the COVID-19 vaccine makes you infertile should not be allowed to spread widely under the guise of being news.