Social media as a decoupled virtual public space can't both exist and protect our individual rights and the implicit dependencies that culminate in retaining a certain level of rational thought, at least not at the same time.<p>Any communications platform that allows a many to one interaction, with the ability to obscure the source (you), is a danger to democracy.<p>By raising the noise floor, or manipulating sentiment in a inconsistent way, in such platforms, you can manipulate on a grand scale individual perception by distorting reflected appraisal. Its a fundamentally harmful and destructive process.<p>You do also however need anonymity at the same time, and there must be cost. Competing interests guarantee that this will never be possible in a centralized system. The feedback relationship which is distorted, and distorts itself, will run off the rails.<p>Human moderation doesn't scale, and AI moderation can't determine unique meaning, and hallucinates, distorting reflected appraisal in the process, isolating (through punishment), and removes agency.<p>We need to appropriately secure our communication platforms from these subtle but corrupting outcomes that are brittle and lack resiliency measures.