Social Media Over time, most social media platforms have substantially increased their governance efforts, often through the use of AI tools that play a central role in combatting disinformation, fraud, and other kinds of deception. But it’s an ongoing battle. Facebook, for example, now regularly takes down more than one billion fake accounts per quarter. So even if we tried to prohibit broad democratic access to AI tools, fraud and deception challenges would persist. To me, the most effective and most equitable path forward involves thinking about new approaches rather than hard-to- enforce bans. As I described in the Journalism chapter, I think “flooding the zone with truth” is one key way to combat dis- information. On a similar note, I think we’ll start to see social media par- ticipants, and especially social media creators, develop and implement new ways to verify their status as human beings. Platforms themselves will likely participate in this process, continuing and expanding on their early efforts to establish real identity. How exactly this will play out I’m not sure. It just strikes me that, as the logical consequence of living in a world where AI tools can convincingly simulate human expression, actual humans will seek ways to convey that they are corporeal beings. In short, they will flood the zone with their humanity. If you’re thinking that maybe this sounds like a lot of trouble to go through just to enable a world where hustle bros fill the web with spam and SEO content, it’s important to always keep two key facts in mind. 103