The promise of social media
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The promise of social media
November 28, 2022
I’ve been studying social media for 16 years.
I think what Charlene Li and I observed back then is still true.
People want to connect with friends.
People want to connect with strangers with whom they share an interest.
People want to engage intellectually with strangers. Or at least, they used to.
Back when blogs were the epicenter of social media, these things all applied.
These connections are powerful, taken together. People with like interests form movements. They are formidable in groups. The Arab Spring proved that social media could remake the world.
Now the epicenter of social media is corporate. Facebook. Instagram. YouTube. Twitter.
Platforms are, or must make themselves, referees, or else social media devolves into trolling and disinformation and, at worst, doxxing and violence.
Elon Musk purports to support the idealistic view of social media for Twitter.
Just a note to encourage people of different political or other views to engage in civil debate on Twitter.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2022
Worst case, the other side has a slightly better understanding of your views.
Unfortunately, there is no way to put this particular genie back into its bottle.
You open things up, the trolls run wild. You allow violators back on the platform, and they feel there will no longer be a penalty for harassing people.
You shut down the people that you claim are “woke,” you tilt the debate.
When your CEO takes political positions, it’s hard to believe his platform will remain neutral.
Truth is no longer an absolute, there are no definitive sources. No wonder so many journalists are deserting Twitter.
Game over?
I wonder if it is even possible to have a mode of social media interaction that:
- Is free.
- Is available to everyone.
- Has enough freedom to be interesting.
- Has enough control to prevent the worst of trolling, nastiness, and violence.
- Has few enough ads to be tolerable.
It seems as if the same algorithms that are necessary to target ads and encourage interaction are subject to subversion for evil purposes. Nastiness invites “engagement.”
Every popular place curdles into evil.
Social media used to be a nice neighborhood. I miss that.
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4 responses to “The promise of social media”
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I feel that it should be possible – though I think the financial part is hard. Here is why: there are some costs to run social media, even if it’s just the infrastructure and network costs to run it. But added to that, there are probably also some costs for design and development and operating the platform (though much of that can be opensource). However, the expensive thing is content moderation – either expensive in people’s time, or wages, or technical development.
So it seems to me that if the platform is free, then the advertising needs to pay for those things – and the big question is whether that adds up.
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I was big advocate for social media as a way to help level the playing field in the same way I believe websites have done. That is, what you can see and hear isn’t controlled by a few large entities. It seems now we find ourselves back in a similar situation with large entities writing the rules that govern what we see and hear. Only now those shadow voices that once were on the fringe have an outsized presence.
I now feel free social media may be a pact with the devil. What used to be simply having to endure commercials has morphed into those algorithms that drive interaction that drive revenue. Sensational, outrageous, conspiracy-driven and unfortunately just hate-filled content get more “engagement” than other content. Trump’s lies about the election, immigrants and all the rest is one huge example but there are many others. I for one would be happy to pay for an ad-free, well managed twitter-like service in the same way I’m willing to pay for ad-free streaming services.
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