To Minimize the Damage

In the famous Arabic play “The School of Misbehavers,” the school inspector stops to inform a student’s father that his son had stolen a car belonging to the head of the Anti-Car Theft Authority—meaning the person responsible for preventing theft had himself been robbed!

Search social media platforms, and you will find an astonishing amount of lies and deception. Yet you will also discover websites and programs whose purpose is to expose lies. At the moment you believe you have found what you were looking for—that you have finally found help in uncovering falsehoods—you will realize that these very programs and sites, which we claim detect lies, have themselves been hacked and have become yet another hub for spreading deception. Moreover, there are other programs and websites that expose the lies of the sites and programs that claim to detect lies.

Thus, every time you feel certain that you are approaching the truth, you discover how far you are from it, and how you have become a pawn in the hands of those who control social media. If the inventors and developers of artificial intelligence had known that social media would turn it into a tool for lying and deception, they would have decided to ban it and restrict its use to scientific research only.

We are facing a major quagmire called social media. Many countries have become aware of this trap and enacted laws that regulate and limit minors’ access to these platforms in order to protect society. These laws were adopted based on lawmakers’ conviction that these platforms cause significant harm to minors, and that this harm often extends beyond individual damage to encompass broader societal harm.