"Yes, and also people are likelier to be mad at me and looking for things I'm doing wrong."

She hugs him.

Hug. 

"I can read books at home or at Afen's too, it's okay."

"I like having you with me at work. Keeping you out of secret meetings is careful enough all by itself, it's not a compromise between being careful and keeping you happy."

"Then you should bring me if you are not just going to have secret meetings the entire time."

"I have lots of meetings that are not secret at all!"

Giggle.

Aitim takes her to non-secret meetings. They are about an eccentric variety of things: diplomats, medical boards, social media oversight committees, some computer modelling people.

Why are there social media oversight committees? What do the computers model?

He's interested in whether someone can use them to model pollution in Biyan and potential emergency procedures. Social media sites require oversight because otherwise they might post content which Anitam or one of its allies desires to suppress.

Why do they want to suppress things?

"Occasionally someone who wants to draw attention to their political goals will murder a lot of people in the name of their cause. The news will talk about this endlessly, because they want to get as many viewers and readers and listeners as they can for advertising and talking about random horrible things like that is a good way to do it."

"Why is that a good way to do it?"

"Well, people are fascinated and scared and they want to hear all the news as it comes in and they'll keep refreshing the page for more news."

Nod. "But news isn't social media..."

"Well, news is disallowed from covering that kind of thing, and for a long time that was all we needed. But with the rise of social media, it doesn't matter if no reporters are reporting, people will still spread and share wild rumors after an event like that."

"How do you stop them?"

"We work with those companies to build tools that help us catch and filter posts that shouldn't be posted. But it's much harder than with news, because people will try to circumvent it and because there's so much to monitor."

Nod. "People could just go talk to each other if they really wanted, right?"

"Yes, of course. Making rules about what people can say would be really bad. But making rules about what they can expect a million people to see -"

"How does it work, not letting a million people see?"

"That's what I have been learning! We ask companies to build in the capabilities to make some of their posts less visible."

"...like they're greyed out or something?"

"No, like they are less likely to appear on other peoples' social media feeds."