Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack.
A lot of things suck right now. Social media definitely give us the ability to see that. Using your personal ideology to link correlations is not the same thing as finding causation.
There will be undoubtedly be some damaging aspects of social media, simply because it is large and complex. It would be highly unlikely that all those factors always aligned in the direction of good.
All too often a collection of cherry picked studies are presented in books targeting the worried public. It can build a public opinion that is at odds with the data. Some people write books just to express their ideas. Others like Jonathan Haidt seem to think that putting their efforts into convincing as many people as possible of their ideology is preferable to putting effort into demonstrating that their ideas are true. There is this growing notion that perception is reality, convince enough people and it is true.
I am prepared to accept aspects of social media are bad. Clearly identify why and how and perhaps we can make progress addressing each thing. Declaring it's all bad acts as a deterrent to removing faults. I become very sceptical when many disparate threads of the same thing seem to coincidentally turn out to be bad. That suggests either there is an underlying reason that has been left unstated and unproven or the information I have been presented with is selective.
I feel like regardless of all else, the fact of algorithmic curation is going to be bad, especially when it's contaminated by corporate and/or political interests.
We have evolved to parse information as if its prevalence is controlled by how much people talk about it, how acceptable opinions are to voice, how others react to them. Algorithmic social media intrinsically destroy that. They change how information spreads, but not how we parse its spread.
It's parasocial at best, and very possibly far worse at worst.
I have wondered if it's not algorithmic curation per-se that is the problem, but personalised algorithmic curation.
When each person is receiving a personalised feed, there is a significant loss of common experience. You are not seeing what others are seeing and that creates a loss of a basis of communication.
I have considered the possibility that the solution might be to enable many areas of curation but in each domain the thing people see is the same for everyone. In essence, subreddits. The problem then becomes the nature of the curators, subreddits show that human curators are also not ideal. Is there an opportunity for public algorithm curation. You subscribe to the algorithm itself and see the same thing as everyone else who subscribes sees. The curation is neutral (but will be subject to gaming, the fight against bad actors will be perpetual in all areas).
I agree about the tendency for the prevalence of conversation to influence individuals, but I think it can be resisted. I don't think humans live their lives controlled by their base instincts, most learn to find a better way. It is part of why I do not like the idea of de-platforming. I found it quite instructional when Jon Stewart did an in-depth piece on trans issues. It made an extremely good argument, but it infuriated me to see a few days later so many people talking about how great it was because Jon agreed with them and he reaches so many people. They completely missed the point. The reason it was good is because it made a good case. This cynical "It's good if it reaches the conclusion we want and lots of people" is what is destroying us. Once you feel like it is not necessary to make your case, but just shout the loudest, you lose the ability to win over people who disagree because they don't like you shouting and you haven't made your case.
It's increasingly discussed in traditional media too so let's toss out that first line glib dismissal.
More and more people declaring it's net-negative is the first step towards changing anything. Academic "let's evaluate each individual point about it on its own merits" is not how this sort of thing finds political momentum.
(Or we could argue that "social media" in the Facebook-era sense is just one part of a larger entity, "the internet," that we're singling out.)
I did not consider it a glib dismissal, and I would not consider traditional media an appropriate avenue to litigate this either. Trial by media is a term used to describe something that generally think shouldn't occur.
The appropriate place to find out what is and isn't true is research. Do research, write papers, discuss results, resolve contradictions in findings, reach consensus.
The media should not be deciding what is true, they should be reporting what they see. Importantly they should make clear that the existence of a thing is not the same thing as the prevalence of a thing.
>Academic "let's evaluate each individual point about it on its own merits" is not how this sort of thing finds political momentum.
I think much of my post was in effect saying that a good deal of the problem is the belief that building political momentum is more important than accuracy.
>It's increasingly discussed in traditional media too so let's toss out that first line glib dismissal.
Traditional media is the absolute worst possible source for anything related to social media because of the extreme conflict of interest. Decentralised media is a fundamental threat to the business model of centralised media, so of course most of the coverage of social media in traditional media will be negative.
Unfortunately most of what people understand as "social media" is not decentralized, and most of the biggest names on Substack in particular come directly out of "traditional media", which is exactly why it's not a real alternative. Substack is just another newspaper except now readers have to pay for every section they want to read.
The difference between traditional and social media is not just technical. Traditional media hosts a profession (journalism) with a code of ethics, editorial oversight, minimal standards, a mission of truth-seeking. It's easy to be cynical but those things have generally served us well. The Substack jungle is not a good replacement.
I wish to quibble with you on this as there is a love/hate relationship between the conventional media and social media.
The mainstream media have several sources, including the press releases that get sent to them, the newswires they get their main news from and social media.
In the UK the press, in particular, the BBC, were early adopters of Twitter. Most of the population would not have heard of it had it not been for the journalists at the BBC. The journalists thought it was the best thing since the invention of the printing press. Latterly Instagram has become an equally useful source to them and, since Twitter became X, there is less copying and pasting tweets.
The current U.S. President seems capable of dictatorship via social media, so following his messages on social media is what the press do. I doubt any journalist has been on whitehouse.gov for a long time, the regular web and regular sources have been demoted.
> More and more people declaring it's net-negative is the first step towards changing anything.
I accept that "net-negative" is a cultural shorthand, but I really wish we could go beyond it. I don't think people are suddenly looking at both sides of the equation and evaluating rationally that their social media interactions are net negative.
I think what's happening is a change in the novelty of social media. That is, the the net value is changing. Originally, social media was fun and novel, but once that novelty wears away it's flat and lifeless. It's sort of abstractly interesting to discuss tech with likeminded people on HN, but once we get past the novelty, I don't know any of you. Behind the screen-names is a sea of un-identifiable faces that I have to assume are like-minded to have any interesting discussions with, but which are most certainly not like me at all. Its endless discussions with people who don't care.
I think that's what you're seeing. A society caught up in the novelty, losing that naive enjoyment. Not a realization of met effects.
"net-negative" sounds like a rigidly defined mathematically derived result but it's basically just a vibe that means "I hate social media more than I like it."
I'm struggling to understand your point, especially since the conclusion you posit is rather glib and dismissive.
Net-negative is not quantifiable. But it is definitely qualifiable.
I don't think you have to think of things in terms of "hate it more than I like it" when you have actual examples on social media of children posting self-harm and suicide, hooliganism and outright crimes posted for viewership, blatant misinformation proliferation, and the unbelievable broad and deep affect powerful entities can have on public information/opinion through SM.
I think we can agree all of these are bad, and a net-negative, without needing any mathematic rigor.
My point is that "More and more people declaring social media net-negative" doesn't mean anything, and it certainly isn't a valid "first step towards changing anything" because it isn't actionable.
>I don't think you have to think of things in terms of "hate it more than I like it" when you have actual examples on social media of children posting self-harm and suicide, hooliganism and outright crimes posted for viewership, blatant misinformation proliferation, and the unbelievable broad and deep affect powerful entities can have on public information/opinion through SM.
Sure, and then there's plenty of children not posting self-harm and suicide, hooliganism and outright crimes posted for viewership, and plenty of information and perfectly normal, non-harmful communication and interaction. "net-negative" implies there is far more harmful content than non-harmful, and that most people using social media are using it in a negative way, which seems more like a bias than anything proven. I can agree that there are harmful and negative aspects of social media without agreeing that the majority of social media content and usage is harmful and negative.
There a lot of money in social media, literally hundreds of billions of dollars. I expect the case against it will continue to grow, like the case against cigarettes did.
I will say this, and this is anecdotal, but other events this week have been an excellent case study in how fast misinformation (charitably) and lies (uncharitably) spread across social media, and how much social media does to amp up the anger and tone of people. When I open Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or any of the smaller networks I see people baying for blood. Quite literally. But when I talk to my friends, or look at how people are acting in the street, I don't see that. I don't see the absolute frenzy that I see online.
If social media turns up the anger that much, I don't think it's worth the cost.
>There a lot of money in social media, literally hundreds of billions of dollars. I expect the case against it will continue to grow, like the case against cigarettes did.
I don't think it follows that something making money must do so by being harmful. I do think strong regulation should exist to prevent businesses from introducing harmful behaviours to maximise profits, but to justify that opinion I have to believe that there is an ability to be profitable and ethical simultaneously.
>events this week have been an excellent case study in how fast misinformation (charitably) and lies (uncharitably) spread across social media
On the other hand The WSJ, Guardian, and other media outlets have published incorrect information on the same events. The primary method that people had to discover that this information was incorrect was social media. It's true that there was incorrect information and misinformation on social media, but it was also immediately challenged. That does create a source of conflict, but I don't think the solution is to accept falsehoods unchallenged.
If anything education is required to teach people to discuss opposing views without rising to anger or personal attacks.
> I don't think it follows that something making money must do so by being harmful.
My point isn't that it's automatically harmful, simply that there is a very strong incentive to protect the revenue. That makes it daunting to study these harms.
> On the other hand The WSJ, Guardian, and other media outlets have published incorrect information on the same events. The primary method that people had to discover that this information was incorrect was social media.
I agree with your point here too, and I don't think the solution is to completely stop or get rid of social media. But, the problem I see is there are tons of corners of social media where you can still see the original lies being repeated as if they are fact. In some spaces they get challenged, but in others they are echoed and repeated uncritically. That is what concerns me - long debunked rumors and lies that get repeated because they feel good.
> If anything education is required to teach people to discuss opposing views without rising to anger or personal attacks.
I think many people are actually capable of discussing opposing views without it becoming so inflammatory... in person. But algorithmic amplification online works against that and the strongest, loudest, quickest view tends to win in the attention landscape.
My concern is that social media is lowering people's ability to discuss things calmly, because instead of a discussion amongst acquaintances everything is an argument is against strangers. And that creates a dynamic where people who come to argue are not arguing against just you, but against every position they think you hold. We presort our opponents into categories based on perceived allegiance and then attack the entire image, instead of debating the actual person.
But I don't know if that can fixed behaviorally, because the challenge of social media is that the crowd is effectively infinite. The same arguments get repeated thousands of times, and there's not even a guarantee that the person you are arguing against is a real person and not just a paid employee, or a bot. That frustration builds into a froth because the debate never moves, it just repeats.
>My point isn't that it's automatically harmful, simply that there is a very strong incentive to protect the revenue. That makes it daunting to study these harms.
The problem is that having an incentive to hide harms is being used as evidence for the harm, whether it exists or not.
Surely the same argument could be applied that companies would be incentivised to make a product that was non-harmful over one that was harmful. Harming your users seems counterproductive at least to some extent. I don't think it is a given that a harmful approach is the most profitable.
> The problem is that having an incentive to hide harms is being used as evidence for the harm, whether it exists or not.
No, the incentive to hide harm is being given as a reason that studies into harm would be suppressed, not as evidence of harm in and of itself. This is a direct response to your original remark that "Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack."
Potential mechanisms and dynamics that cause harm are in the rest of my comment.
> Harming your users seems counterproductive at least to some extent.
Short term gains always take precedence. Cigarette companies knew about the harm of cigarettes and hid it for literally decades. [0] Fossil fuel companies have known about the danger of climate change for 100 years and hid it. [1]
If you dig through history there are hundreds of examples of companies knowingly harming their users, and continuing to do so until they were forced to stop or went out of business. Look at the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic [2], hell, look at Radithor. [3] It is profitable to harm your users, as long as you get their money before they die.
There's a concerted assault on social media from the powers that be because social media is essentially decentralised media, much harder for authoritarians to shape and control than centralised media. Social media is why the masses have finally risen up in opposition to what Israel's been doing in Gaza, even though the genocide has been going on for over half a century: decentralised information transmission allowed people to see the reality of what's really going on there.
The last week has taken me from “I believe in the freedom of online anonymity” to “Online anonymity possess a weight that a moral, civil society cannot bear.”
I do not believe humans are capable of responsibly wielding the power to anonymously connect with millions of people without the real weight of social consequence.
The strongest counterpoint to that is the intense chilling effect that zero anonymity would have on political dissent and discourse that doesn't match the status quo or party line. I feel that would be much more dangerous for our society than occasionally suffering the consequence of some radicalized edge cases.
In that instance, the anonymity is treating the symptom and not the root cause of the problem you fear. The actual problem is a society that does not tolerate dissent.
You might live in an extremely free country and have no fear about political prosecution but still fear social prosecution.
If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend. Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.
>If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend.
So you want your friend to be able to anonymously express their racism while being able to hide it from you? I can't imagine advocating for that as a desired goal rather than a negative side effect.
>Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.
If we are talking about a society level problem, I think it is a little silly to think a society as toxic as this hypothetical one could be saved by anonymous internet posting.
For the record, I'm not as against anonymous posting as the person who started this specific comment thread, I just think this line of argument is advocating for a band-aid over bigger issues.
I think we should operate on the premise that no society in the history of humanity has tolerated dissent and none ever will. So treating the symptom is all we can do. It's the basis of why privacy is necessary in any respect.
The rational tolerant society you imagine is so far fetched we don't even pretend it can exist even in fantasies.
Anonymity has no real impact on this. People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily.
I'd argue if all it took was people saying some mean things anonymously to change your opinion, then your convictions weren't very strong to begin with.
> People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily.
I disagree with "just as readily" (i.e. most of the most heinous things are indeed bots or trolls).
Also, I imagine that without the huge amount of bots and anonymous trolls, the real-name-accounts would not post as they do now - both because their opinions are shaped by the bots AND because the bots give them the sense that many more people agree with them.
IMO it's a bit of mental gymnastics to think that anonymity has to do with this, when extremist narratives always come attached with a memorable full name and a face.
I would replace "it doesn't help a bit" with "it doesn't solve the problem". My casual browsing experience is that X is much more intense / extreme than Facebook.
Of course, the bigger problem is the algorithm - if the extreme is always pushed to the top, then it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 0.001% - the a big enough pool, you only see extremes.
What a bizarre conclusion given the multiple high profile individuals and politicians who overtly and directly called for violent oppression and civil war against their political enemies on the last week.
We don’t have a moral or civil society anyway; we can’t even prosecute Trumps numerous illegal actions (even when convicted!). Can’t get the Epstein files. Can’t even point out Charlie Kirk was not a great person (while politicians said nothing about the school shooting the same day), and where it’s legal to kill 40,000 of us a year due to poor medical coverage so we can prop up the stock.
I’m not sure, given the moral dystopia we currently inhabit, what positive benefit would accrue from removing online anonymity?
Social media would be entirely different if there were no monetization on political content. There's a whole lot of ragebaiting/engagement-farming for views. I don't know how to filter for political content, but it's worth a shot. People are free to say whatever they want, but they don't need to get paid for it.
Strangely I never see political content on YouTube. Maybe the algorithm worked out quickly I'm simply not interested. Whereas twitter/mastodon/bluesky are awash in it, to the point of making those platforms pretty unusable for me.
I guess the difference is that YouTube content creators don't casually drop politics in because it will alienate half their audience and lose revenue. Whereas on those other platforms the people I follow aren't doing it professionally and just share whatever they feel like sharing.
Huh, I often have the reverse sentiment with a lot of books: this should have been a blog post. There's often a good intro which lays out the thesis, but each chapter is way too long, spelling out details that are obvious or superfluous.
Every school should spend a month on just how insane the events running up to the JFK assassination were. A US marine defecting to the USSR, then defecting back to the US, then shooting a right wing general turned politician, before finally killing the US president and being killed on live TV.
Without social media, we'd be left with mainstream media, which is a very narrow set of channels that those in power can control. Despite rampant censorship on social media, it's still the best way to circumvent propaganda and give people a voice.
Social media is full of more propaganda than any main stream new source I've seen. Most people find a type of propaganda they like more on social media since one can tailor one's propaganda interests more, but in my experience all mainstream social media platforms are black holes of disinformation far worse than the mediocrity peddled by mainstream media.
Full anonymity in social media should not be allowed. It becomes a cover for bad actors (propagandists, agents, disinformation, bots, age-inappropriate, etc.) It doesn’t have to be a full identity, but knowing your user metadata is open during interactions can instill a sense of responsibility and consequence of social action. As in real life.
Looking at any random fullrealname Facebook account will disabuse you of this notion. People will tie vile shit to their identities without a second thought.
Rather than sacrifice the cover that anonymity grants vulnerable people, journalists, and activists, I think we should come at this issue by placing restrictions on how social media platforms direct people to information. The impulse to restrict and censor individuals rather than restrict powerful organizations profiting from algorithmic promotion of the content you deem harmful is deeply troubling.
The first step here is simple: identify social media platforms over some size threshold, and require that any content promotion or algorithmic feed mechanism they use is dead-simple to understand and doesn't target individuals. That avoids the radicalization rabbithole problem. Make the system trivial and auditable. If they fail the audit then they're not allowed to have any recommendation system for a year. Just follows and a linear feed (sorting and filtering are allowed so long as they're exposed to the user).
To reiterate: none of this applies if you're below some user cutoff.
Q: Will this kill innovation in social media? A: What fucking innovation?
Real life needs full anonymity too. Not everywhere, but it's critical to have some.
For instance a political vote needs to be anonymous. Access to public space typically is (you're not required to identify to walk the street) even if that anonymity can be lifted etc.
Real life is complex, and for good reasons, if we want to take it as a model we should integrate it's full complexity as well.
We, consumers online, are sliced and diced on every single dimension possible in order to optimize our clicks for another penny.
As a side benefit, when you do this enough, the pendulum that goes over the middle line for any of these arbitrary-but-improves-clicks division builds momentum until it hits the extremes. On either side-- it doesn't matter, cause it will swing back just as hard, again and again.
As a side benefit the back and forth of the pendulum is very distracting to the public so we do not pay attention to who is pushing it. Billions of collective hours spent fighting with no progress except for the wallets of rich ppl.
It almost feels like a conspiracy but I think it's just the direct, natural result of the vice driven economy we have these days
Huh. I'm on a few discords. They're very easy and obvious to use, and I really enjoy them. And because they are generally well divided by channel, it's easy to avoid the bits you don't want.
It's more specific than social media. It's engagement maximizing (read: addiction maximizing) algorithms. Social media wasn't nearly as bad until algorithmic engagement maximizing feeds replaced temporal or topic based feeds and user-directed search.
Two people walk past you on the street. One says "hi," and the other strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken. Which one maximizes engagement?
A politician says something sane and reasonable. Another politician mocks someone, insults someone, or says something completely asinine. Which one maximizes engagement?
This is why our president is a professional troll, many of our public intellectuals are professional trolls, and politics is becoming hyper-polarized into raging camps fixated on crazy extremes. It maximizes engagement.
The "time on site" KPI is literally destroying civilization by biasing public discourse toward trash.
I think "trash maximizes engagement" should be considered an established fact at this point. If you A/B test for engagement you will converge on a mix of trolling, tabloid sensationalism, fear porn, outrage porn, and literal porn, and that’s our public discourse.
I really hate the narrative that social media has increased polarization knowing that my still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow south where they were literally separated from society because of the color of their skin.
The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.
As someone whose grandparents endured Jim Crow, I largely agree in the sense that social media did not create America’s divides. Many of the divides in American society are very old and are very deep, with no easy fixes.
Unfortunately algorithmic social media is one of the factors adding fuel to the fire, and I believe it’s fair to say that social media has helped increase polarization by recommending content to its viewers purely based on engagement metrics without any regard for the consequences of pushing such content. It is much easier to whip people into a frenzy this way. Additionally, echo chambers make it harder for people to be exposed to other points of view. Combine this with dismal educational outcomes for many Americans (including a lack of critical thinking skills), our two-party system that aggregates diverse political views into just two options, a first-past-the-post election system that forces people to choose “the lesser of two evils,” and growing economic pain, and these factors create conditions that are ripe for strife.
Unfortunately algorithmic social media is one of the factors adding fuel to the fire
Saying social media fans the flames is like saying ignorance is bliss. Mainstream media (cable news, radio, newspapers, etc) only gives us one, largely conservative, viewpoint. If you're lucky, you'll get one carefully controlled opposing viewpoint (out of many!). As you say, our choices are usually evil and not quite as evil.
Anger is not an unreasonable reaction when you realize this. When you realize that other viewpoints exist, the mainstream media and politicians are not acting in anyone's best interest but their own, there really are other options (politically, for news, etc.). Social media is good at bringing these things to light.
There are no easy fixes to the divides you're talking about, but failing to confront them and just giving in to the status quo, or worse, continuing down our current reactionary transcript, is probably the worst way to approach them.
So there wasn’t enough fuel in the fire when marauding Klansmen were hanging Black people?
It was the current President of the US that led a charge that a Black man running for President wasn’t a “real American” and was a secret Muslim trying to bring Shari law to the US and close to half of the US was willing to believe it.
This was before social media in the northern burbs of Atlanta where I had to a house built in 2016. We didn’t have a problem during the seven years we lived there. But do you think they were “polarized” by social media in the 80s?
That’s just like police brutality didn’t start with the rise of social media. Everyone just has cameras and a platform
The radio didn't create the divide, and it wasn't the sole factor in the genocide, but it engrained in the population a sense of urgency in eliminating the Tutsi, along with a stream of what was mostly fake news to show that the other side is already commiting the atrocities against Hutus
When the genocide happened, it was fast and widespread: people would start killing their own neighbors at scale. In 100 days, a million people were killed.
The trouble with social media is that they somehow managed to shield themselves from the legal repercussions of heavily promoting content similar to what RTLM broadcast. For example, see the role of Facebook and its algorithmic feed in the genocide in Myanmar
Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack.
A lot of things suck right now. Social media definitely give us the ability to see that. Using your personal ideology to link correlations is not the same thing as finding causation.
There will be undoubtedly be some damaging aspects of social media, simply because it is large and complex. It would be highly unlikely that all those factors always aligned in the direction of good.
All too often a collection of cherry picked studies are presented in books targeting the worried public. It can build a public opinion that is at odds with the data. Some people write books just to express their ideas. Others like Jonathan Haidt seem to think that putting their efforts into convincing as many people as possible of their ideology is preferable to putting effort into demonstrating that their ideas are true. There is this growing notion that perception is reality, convince enough people and it is true.
I am prepared to accept aspects of social media are bad. Clearly identify why and how and perhaps we can make progress addressing each thing. Declaring it's all bad acts as a deterrent to removing faults. I become very sceptical when many disparate threads of the same thing seem to coincidentally turn out to be bad. That suggests either there is an underlying reason that has been left unstated and unproven or the information I have been presented with is selective.
I feel like regardless of all else, the fact of algorithmic curation is going to be bad, especially when it's contaminated by corporate and/or political interests.
We have evolved to parse information as if its prevalence is controlled by how much people talk about it, how acceptable opinions are to voice, how others react to them. Algorithmic social media intrinsically destroy that. They change how information spreads, but not how we parse its spread.
It's parasocial at best, and very possibly far worse at worst.
I have wondered if it's not algorithmic curation per-se that is the problem, but personalised algorithmic curation.
When each person is receiving a personalised feed, there is a significant loss of common experience. You are not seeing what others are seeing and that creates a loss of a basis of communication.
I have considered the possibility that the solution might be to enable many areas of curation but in each domain the thing people see is the same for everyone. In essence, subreddits. The problem then becomes the nature of the curators, subreddits show that human curators are also not ideal. Is there an opportunity for public algorithm curation. You subscribe to the algorithm itself and see the same thing as everyone else who subscribes sees. The curation is neutral (but will be subject to gaming, the fight against bad actors will be perpetual in all areas).
I agree about the tendency for the prevalence of conversation to influence individuals, but I think it can be resisted. I don't think humans live their lives controlled by their base instincts, most learn to find a better way. It is part of why I do not like the idea of de-platforming. I found it quite instructional when Jon Stewart did an in-depth piece on trans issues. It made an extremely good argument, but it infuriated me to see a few days later so many people talking about how great it was because Jon agreed with them and he reaches so many people. They completely missed the point. The reason it was good is because it made a good case. This cynical "It's good if it reaches the conclusion we want and lots of people" is what is destroying us. Once you feel like it is not necessary to make your case, but just shout the loudest, you lose the ability to win over people who disagree because they don't like you shouting and you haven't made your case.
It's increasingly discussed in traditional media too so let's toss out that first line glib dismissal.
More and more people declaring it's net-negative is the first step towards changing anything. Academic "let's evaluate each individual point about it on its own merits" is not how this sort of thing finds political momentum.
(Or we could argue that "social media" in the Facebook-era sense is just one part of a larger entity, "the internet," that we're singling out.)
I did not consider it a glib dismissal, and I would not consider traditional media an appropriate avenue to litigate this either. Trial by media is a term used to describe something that generally think shouldn't occur.
The appropriate place to find out what is and isn't true is research. Do research, write papers, discuss results, resolve contradictions in findings, reach consensus.
The media should not be deciding what is true, they should be reporting what they see. Importantly they should make clear that the existence of a thing is not the same thing as the prevalence of a thing.
>Academic "let's evaluate each individual point about it on its own merits" is not how this sort of thing finds political momentum.
I think much of my post was in effect saying that a good deal of the problem is the belief that building political momentum is more important than accuracy.
>It's increasingly discussed in traditional media too so let's toss out that first line glib dismissal.
Traditional media is the absolute worst possible source for anything related to social media because of the extreme conflict of interest. Decentralised media is a fundamental threat to the business model of centralised media, so of course most of the coverage of social media in traditional media will be negative.
Unfortunately most of what people understand as "social media" is not decentralized, and most of the biggest names on Substack in particular come directly out of "traditional media", which is exactly why it's not a real alternative. Substack is just another newspaper except now readers have to pay for every section they want to read.
The difference between traditional and social media is not just technical. Traditional media hosts a profession (journalism) with a code of ethics, editorial oversight, minimal standards, a mission of truth-seeking. It's easy to be cynical but those things have generally served us well. The Substack jungle is not a good replacement.
I wish to quibble with you on this as there is a love/hate relationship between the conventional media and social media.
The mainstream media have several sources, including the press releases that get sent to them, the newswires they get their main news from and social media.
In the UK the press, in particular, the BBC, were early adopters of Twitter. Most of the population would not have heard of it had it not been for the journalists at the BBC. The journalists thought it was the best thing since the invention of the printing press. Latterly Instagram has become an equally useful source to them and, since Twitter became X, there is less copying and pasting tweets.
The current U.S. President seems capable of dictatorship via social media, so following his messages on social media is what the press do. I doubt any journalist has been on whitehouse.gov for a long time, the regular web and regular sources have been demoted.
> More and more people declaring it's net-negative is the first step towards changing anything.
I accept that "net-negative" is a cultural shorthand, but I really wish we could go beyond it. I don't think people are suddenly looking at both sides of the equation and evaluating rationally that their social media interactions are net negative.
I think what's happening is a change in the novelty of social media. That is, the the net value is changing. Originally, social media was fun and novel, but once that novelty wears away it's flat and lifeless. It's sort of abstractly interesting to discuss tech with likeminded people on HN, but once we get past the novelty, I don't know any of you. Behind the screen-names is a sea of un-identifiable faces that I have to assume are like-minded to have any interesting discussions with, but which are most certainly not like me at all. Its endless discussions with people who don't care.
I think that's what you're seeing. A society caught up in the novelty, losing that naive enjoyment. Not a realization of met effects.
"net-negative" sounds like a rigidly defined mathematically derived result but it's basically just a vibe that means "I hate social media more than I like it."
I'm struggling to understand your point, especially since the conclusion you posit is rather glib and dismissive.
Net-negative is not quantifiable. But it is definitely qualifiable.
I don't think you have to think of things in terms of "hate it more than I like it" when you have actual examples on social media of children posting self-harm and suicide, hooliganism and outright crimes posted for viewership, blatant misinformation proliferation, and the unbelievable broad and deep affect powerful entities can have on public information/opinion through SM.
I think we can agree all of these are bad, and a net-negative, without needing any mathematic rigor.
My point is that "More and more people declaring social media net-negative" doesn't mean anything, and it certainly isn't a valid "first step towards changing anything" because it isn't actionable.
>I don't think you have to think of things in terms of "hate it more than I like it" when you have actual examples on social media of children posting self-harm and suicide, hooliganism and outright crimes posted for viewership, blatant misinformation proliferation, and the unbelievable broad and deep affect powerful entities can have on public information/opinion through SM.
Sure, and then there's plenty of children not posting self-harm and suicide, hooliganism and outright crimes posted for viewership, and plenty of information and perfectly normal, non-harmful communication and interaction. "net-negative" implies there is far more harmful content than non-harmful, and that most people using social media are using it in a negative way, which seems more like a bias than anything proven. I can agree that there are harmful and negative aspects of social media without agreeing that the majority of social media content and usage is harmful and negative.
There a lot of money in social media, literally hundreds of billions of dollars. I expect the case against it will continue to grow, like the case against cigarettes did.
I will say this, and this is anecdotal, but other events this week have been an excellent case study in how fast misinformation (charitably) and lies (uncharitably) spread across social media, and how much social media does to amp up the anger and tone of people. When I open Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or any of the smaller networks I see people baying for blood. Quite literally. But when I talk to my friends, or look at how people are acting in the street, I don't see that. I don't see the absolute frenzy that I see online.
If social media turns up the anger that much, I don't think it's worth the cost.
>There a lot of money in social media, literally hundreds of billions of dollars. I expect the case against it will continue to grow, like the case against cigarettes did.
I don't think it follows that something making money must do so by being harmful. I do think strong regulation should exist to prevent businesses from introducing harmful behaviours to maximise profits, but to justify that opinion I have to believe that there is an ability to be profitable and ethical simultaneously.
>events this week have been an excellent case study in how fast misinformation (charitably) and lies (uncharitably) spread across social media
On the other hand The WSJ, Guardian, and other media outlets have published incorrect information on the same events. The primary method that people had to discover that this information was incorrect was social media. It's true that there was incorrect information and misinformation on social media, but it was also immediately challenged. That does create a source of conflict, but I don't think the solution is to accept falsehoods unchallenged.
If anything education is required to teach people to discuss opposing views without rising to anger or personal attacks.
> I don't think it follows that something making money must do so by being harmful.
My point isn't that it's automatically harmful, simply that there is a very strong incentive to protect the revenue. That makes it daunting to study these harms.
> On the other hand The WSJ, Guardian, and other media outlets have published incorrect information on the same events. The primary method that people had to discover that this information was incorrect was social media.
I agree with your point here too, and I don't think the solution is to completely stop or get rid of social media. But, the problem I see is there are tons of corners of social media where you can still see the original lies being repeated as if they are fact. In some spaces they get challenged, but in others they are echoed and repeated uncritically. That is what concerns me - long debunked rumors and lies that get repeated because they feel good.
> If anything education is required to teach people to discuss opposing views without rising to anger or personal attacks.
I think many people are actually capable of discussing opposing views without it becoming so inflammatory... in person. But algorithmic amplification online works against that and the strongest, loudest, quickest view tends to win in the attention landscape.
My concern is that social media is lowering people's ability to discuss things calmly, because instead of a discussion amongst acquaintances everything is an argument is against strangers. And that creates a dynamic where people who come to argue are not arguing against just you, but against every position they think you hold. We presort our opponents into categories based on perceived allegiance and then attack the entire image, instead of debating the actual person.
But I don't know if that can fixed behaviorally, because the challenge of social media is that the crowd is effectively infinite. The same arguments get repeated thousands of times, and there's not even a guarantee that the person you are arguing against is a real person and not just a paid employee, or a bot. That frustration builds into a froth because the debate never moves, it just repeats.
>My point isn't that it's automatically harmful, simply that there is a very strong incentive to protect the revenue. That makes it daunting to study these harms.
The problem is that having an incentive to hide harms is being used as evidence for the harm, whether it exists or not.
Surely the same argument could be applied that companies would be incentivised to make a product that was non-harmful over one that was harmful. Harming your users seems counterproductive at least to some extent. I don't think it is a given that a harmful approach is the most profitable.
> The problem is that having an incentive to hide harms is being used as evidence for the harm, whether it exists or not.
No, the incentive to hide harm is being given as a reason that studies into harm would be suppressed, not as evidence of harm in and of itself. This is a direct response to your original remark that "Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack."
Potential mechanisms and dynamics that cause harm are in the rest of my comment.
> Harming your users seems counterproductive at least to some extent.
Short term gains always take precedence. Cigarette companies knew about the harm of cigarettes and hid it for literally decades. [0] Fossil fuel companies have known about the danger of climate change for 100 years and hid it. [1]
If you dig through history there are hundreds of examples of companies knowingly harming their users, and continuing to do so until they were forced to stop or went out of business. Look at the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic [2], hell, look at Radithor. [3] It is profitable to harm your users, as long as you get their money before they die.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/ntr/article-abstract/14/1/79/104820... [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/09/oil-companies... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor
There's a concerted assault on social media from the powers that be because social media is essentially decentralised media, much harder for authoritarians to shape and control than centralised media. Social media is why the masses have finally risen up in opposition to what Israel's been doing in Gaza, even though the genocide has been going on for over half a century: decentralised information transmission allowed people to see the reality of what's really going on there.
The last week has taken me from “I believe in the freedom of online anonymity” to “Online anonymity possess a weight that a moral, civil society cannot bear.”
I do not believe humans are capable of responsibly wielding the power to anonymously connect with millions of people without the real weight of social consequence.
The strongest counterpoint to that is the intense chilling effect that zero anonymity would have on political dissent and discourse that doesn't match the status quo or party line. I feel that would be much more dangerous for our society than occasionally suffering the consequence of some radicalized edge cases.
[delayed]
In that instance, the anonymity is treating the symptom and not the root cause of the problem you fear. The actual problem is a society that does not tolerate dissent.
You might live in an extremely free country and have no fear about political prosecution but still fear social prosecution.
If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend. Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.
>If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend.
So you want your friend to be able to anonymously express their racism while being able to hide it from you? I can't imagine advocating for that as a desired goal rather than a negative side effect.
>Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.
If we are talking about a society level problem, I think it is a little silly to think a society as toxic as this hypothetical one could be saved by anonymous internet posting.
For the record, I'm not as against anonymous posting as the person who started this specific comment thread, I just think this line of argument is advocating for a band-aid over bigger issues.
I think we should operate on the premise that no society in the history of humanity has tolerated dissent and none ever will. So treating the symptom is all we can do. It's the basis of why privacy is necessary in any respect.
The rational tolerant society you imagine is so far fetched we don't even pretend it can exist even in fantasies.
Anonymity has no real impact on this. People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily.
I'd argue if all it took was people saying some mean things anonymously to change your opinion, then your convictions weren't very strong to begin with.
> People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily.
I disagree with "just as readily" (i.e. most of the most heinous things are indeed bots or trolls).
Also, I imagine that without the huge amount of bots and anonymous trolls, the real-name-accounts would not post as they do now - both because their opinions are shaped by the bots AND because the bots give them the sense that many more people agree with them.
IMO it's a bit of mental gymnastics to think that anonymity has to do with this, when extremist narratives always come attached with a memorable full name and a face.
You're right. It's the weakest who are the most susceptible to demagoguery.
They're unfortunately not much more capable of responsibly connecting with people non-anonymously, I'd say.
See examples like finding someone's employer on LinkedIn to "out" the employee's objectionable behavior, doxxing, or to the extreme, SWATing, etc.
Yeah. People use their real identities on Facebook, and it doesn't help a bit.
> it doesn't help a bit.
I would replace "it doesn't help a bit" with "it doesn't solve the problem". My casual browsing experience is that X is much more intense / extreme than Facebook.
Of course, the bigger problem is the algorithm - if the extreme is always pushed to the top, then it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 0.001% - the a big enough pool, you only see extremes.
what happened?
Why is that? Some irony as well that you're posting anonymously. Are you comfortable giving us your identification right now?
What a bizarre conclusion given the multiple high profile individuals and politicians who overtly and directly called for violent oppression and civil war against their political enemies on the last week.
We don’t have a moral or civil society anyway; we can’t even prosecute Trumps numerous illegal actions (even when convicted!). Can’t get the Epstein files. Can’t even point out Charlie Kirk was not a great person (while politicians said nothing about the school shooting the same day), and where it’s legal to kill 40,000 of us a year due to poor medical coverage so we can prop up the stock.
I’m not sure, given the moral dystopia we currently inhabit, what positive benefit would accrue from removing online anonymity?
I think to be clear that’s “The case against algorithmic*” social media”, the kind that uses engagement as a core driver.
Social media is a cancer on our society. It is both the asbestos and cigarettes of our generation.
Social media would be entirely different if there were no monetization on political content. There's a whole lot of ragebaiting/engagement-farming for views. I don't know how to filter for political content, but it's worth a shot. People are free to say whatever they want, but they don't need to get paid for it.
they get paid in political power that's why it's so ragebait driven
Strangely I never see political content on YouTube. Maybe the algorithm worked out quickly I'm simply not interested. Whereas twitter/mastodon/bluesky are awash in it, to the point of making those platforms pretty unusable for me.
I guess the difference is that YouTube content creators don't casually drop politics in because it will alienate half their audience and lose revenue. Whereas on those other platforms the people I follow aren't doing it professionally and just share whatever they feel like sharing.
These question-begging, click-bait something-is-something-other-than-you-think posts are something less entertaining than the poster thinks.
The author could have made the same points without using words like “polemicizing”, “putative”, and “epistemic”.
Yup. Soon as I read:
> I am going to focus on the putative political impacts of social media
I closed the tab.
Yeah I closed it when I saw the size of the scroll bar. If you need 100k words to make your point write a book.
Huh, I often have the reverse sentiment with a lot of books: this should have been a blog post. There's often a good intro which lays out the thesis, but each chapter is way too long, spelling out details that are obvious or superfluous.
I blame the school system for posts like this.
Every school should spend a month on just how insane the events running up to the JFK assassination were. A US marine defecting to the USSR, then defecting back to the US, then shooting a right wing general turned politician, before finally killing the US president and being killed on live TV.
That's not including what else was happening at the time. The Cuban missile crisis, kids being shown cartoons like: https://youtu.be/IKqXu-5jw60?si=vGwEEJFw9XLoawyp and on and on.
Society is always one day away from anarchy and we best remember that when we start talking about reshaping because of the current fad.
Without social media, we'd be left with mainstream media, which is a very narrow set of channels that those in power can control. Despite rampant censorship on social media, it's still the best way to circumvent propaganda and give people a voice.
Its still propaganda just from Russian and Chinese bots.
> it's still the best way to circumvent propaganda and give people a voice.
I think it can amplify propaganda but still give people a voice, which is better than no voice I think
The idea of social media reducing net propaganda is a wild take.
Social media is full of more propaganda than any main stream new source I've seen. Most people find a type of propaganda they like more on social media since one can tailor one's propaganda interests more, but in my experience all mainstream social media platforms are black holes of disinformation far worse than the mediocrity peddled by mainstream media.
Full anonymity in social media should not be allowed. It becomes a cover for bad actors (propagandists, agents, disinformation, bots, age-inappropriate, etc.) It doesn’t have to be a full identity, but knowing your user metadata is open during interactions can instill a sense of responsibility and consequence of social action. As in real life.
Looking at any random fullrealname Facebook account will disabuse you of this notion. People will tie vile shit to their identities without a second thought.
Rather than sacrifice the cover that anonymity grants vulnerable people, journalists, and activists, I think we should come at this issue by placing restrictions on how social media platforms direct people to information. The impulse to restrict and censor individuals rather than restrict powerful organizations profiting from algorithmic promotion of the content you deem harmful is deeply troubling.
The first step here is simple: identify social media platforms over some size threshold, and require that any content promotion or algorithmic feed mechanism they use is dead-simple to understand and doesn't target individuals. That avoids the radicalization rabbithole problem. Make the system trivial and auditable. If they fail the audit then they're not allowed to have any recommendation system for a year. Just follows and a linear feed (sorting and filtering are allowed so long as they're exposed to the user).
To reiterate: none of this applies if you're below some user cutoff.
Q: Will this kill innovation in social media? A: What fucking innovation?
Real life needs full anonymity too. Not everywhere, but it's critical to have some.
For instance a political vote needs to be anonymous. Access to public space typically is (you're not required to identify to walk the street) even if that anonymity can be lifted etc.
Real life is complex, and for good reasons, if we want to take it as a model we should integrate it's full complexity as well.
Kiwifarms is an obvious object lesson in why anonymity online is necessary, and hardly the only one.
My main case against at this point is that everything you post will be accessible by "bad" AI
We, consumers online, are sliced and diced on every single dimension possible in order to optimize our clicks for another penny.
As a side benefit, when you do this enough, the pendulum that goes over the middle line for any of these arbitrary-but-improves-clicks division builds momentum until it hits the extremes. On either side-- it doesn't matter, cause it will swing back just as hard, again and again.
As a side benefit the back and forth of the pendulum is very distracting to the public so we do not pay attention to who is pushing it. Billions of collective hours spent fighting with no progress except for the wallets of rich ppl.
It almost feels like a conspiracy but I think it's just the direct, natural result of the vice driven economy we have these days
I used to be disappointed in myself that I didn't understand Discord well enough to use it.
Now I'm glad I never understood it well enough to use it.
Huh. I'm on a few discords. They're very easy and obvious to use, and I really enjoy them. And because they are generally well divided by channel, it's easy to avoid the bits you don't want.
It's more specific than social media. It's engagement maximizing (read: addiction maximizing) algorithms. Social media wasn't nearly as bad until algorithmic engagement maximizing feeds replaced temporal or topic based feeds and user-directed search.
Two people walk past you on the street. One says "hi," and the other strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken. Which one maximizes engagement?
A politician says something sane and reasonable. Another politician mocks someone, insults someone, or says something completely asinine. Which one maximizes engagement?
This is why our president is a professional troll, many of our public intellectuals are professional trolls, and politics is becoming hyper-polarized into raging camps fixated on crazy extremes. It maximizes engagement.
The "time on site" KPI is literally destroying civilization by biasing public discourse toward trash.
I think "trash maximizes engagement" should be considered an established fact at this point. If you A/B test for engagement you will converge on a mix of trolling, tabloid sensationalism, fear porn, outrage porn, and literal porn, and that’s our public discourse.
I really hate the narrative that social media has increased polarization knowing that my still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow south where they were literally separated from society because of the color of their skin.
The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.
As someone whose grandparents endured Jim Crow, I largely agree in the sense that social media did not create America’s divides. Many of the divides in American society are very old and are very deep, with no easy fixes.
Unfortunately algorithmic social media is one of the factors adding fuel to the fire, and I believe it’s fair to say that social media has helped increase polarization by recommending content to its viewers purely based on engagement metrics without any regard for the consequences of pushing such content. It is much easier to whip people into a frenzy this way. Additionally, echo chambers make it harder for people to be exposed to other points of view. Combine this with dismal educational outcomes for many Americans (including a lack of critical thinking skills), our two-party system that aggregates diverse political views into just two options, a first-past-the-post election system that forces people to choose “the lesser of two evils,” and growing economic pain, and these factors create conditions that are ripe for strife.
Unfortunately algorithmic social media is one of the factors adding fuel to the fire
Saying social media fans the flames is like saying ignorance is bliss. Mainstream media (cable news, radio, newspapers, etc) only gives us one, largely conservative, viewpoint. If you're lucky, you'll get one carefully controlled opposing viewpoint (out of many!). As you say, our choices are usually evil and not quite as evil.
Anger is not an unreasonable reaction when you realize this. When you realize that other viewpoints exist, the mainstream media and politicians are not acting in anyone's best interest but their own, there really are other options (politically, for news, etc.). Social media is good at bringing these things to light.
There are no easy fixes to the divides you're talking about, but failing to confront them and just giving in to the status quo, or worse, continuing down our current reactionary transcript, is probably the worst way to approach them.
So there wasn’t enough fuel in the fire when marauding Klansmen were hanging Black people?
It was the current President of the US that led a charge that a Black man running for President wasn’t a “real American” and was a secret Muslim trying to bring Shari law to the US and close to half of the US was willing to believe it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0
This was before social media in the northern burbs of Atlanta where I had to a house built in 2016. We didn’t have a problem during the seven years we lived there. But do you think they were “polarized” by social media in the 80s?
That’s just like police brutality didn’t start with the rise of social media. Everyone just has cameras and a platform
But we made progress away from that and now we've regressed back towards it recently, aided by social media.
> The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.
And a consequence of this is that some people’s perspective of the scale of the nation’s hostilities is limited to the last 5 years or so.
One of the factors that led to the Rwandan genocide was the broadcast of the RLTM radio station
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#Radio_station...
The radio didn't create the divide, and it wasn't the sole factor in the genocide, but it engrained in the population a sense of urgency in eliminating the Tutsi, along with a stream of what was mostly fake news to show that the other side is already commiting the atrocities against Hutus
When the genocide happened, it was fast and widespread: people would start killing their own neighbors at scale. In 100 days, a million people were killed.
The trouble with social media is that they somehow managed to shield themselves from the legal repercussions of heavily promoting content similar to what RTLM broadcast. For example, see the role of Facebook and its algorithmic feed in the genocide in Myanmar
https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
It's insane that they can get away with it.
And there wasn’t a history of genocide of other before then? Hitler in Germany and the mass murder in Tulsa in 1921 didn’t need social media.
History has shown people don’t need a reason to hate and commit violence against others.
People don’t need guns to kill, either, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t make for more effective weapons.
The article mentions this. It tries to argue the significance of that platform.
Man, blah, blah, blah...
That article needs to have about 80% of the words cut out of it.
When the author straight up tells you: I'm posting this in an attempt to increase my subscribership, you know you're in for some blathering.
In spite of that, personally I think algorithmic feeds have had a terrible effect on many people.
I've never participated, and never will...
Number 3 will shock you!
What a shame that these clickbait headlines make it to the front page.
Looking at this very comment section the author may have a point.