Instead of debating whether social media platforms should or shouldn't have silenced the president, and what their role was in inciting the crowds to "insurrection", shouldn't we be discussing instead how to completely remove them from the political sphere? Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries. Social media platforms should never have been allowed to become the arbiters of democracy.
back
13 comments
Bollocks. Look up Hearst, or "yellow journalism" or the Spanish-American War.
Modern social media does it faster but it's no different than the newspaper empires of yesteryear.
Sometimes, a difference in magnitude can become a difference in kind.
The speed, algorithms, engagement, etc of modern social media is entirely unprecedented, and makes it an entirely new problem we have to deal with.
this post gets it.
We are in bad shape if the best defense one can give of the current media is to call it a more efficient version of the worst period in modern journalistic history.
We're in bad shape. But that was quite true: yellow journalism is exactly the same as what we've got. History repeats.
The old newspaper empires typically operated at the national level, rather than global level (even the Wolff/Reuters/Havas telegraph cartel operated within specific geographical boundaries). Similarly, for-profit companies with quasi-governmental powers operated within specific spheres of influence, plus they were more overt in their powers, e.g. the East India Company had a royal charter giving it the ability to wage war within their territories. Social media platforms, on the other hand, have been directly implicated in bloodshed and interfering with democratic elections all over the world for years, e.g. the Arab Spring and ensuing civil wars, foreign bot farms influencing election results, etc., all under the guise of being innocuous platforms e.g. for sharing funny cat pictures. Not suggesting they should be banned, and I don't think we should just give up and say it is too hard a problem to fix. Just finally accept that social media platforms are dangerous weapons, and treat them as such. Many countries already have good legislation around mixing politics and conventional media, we just need the the legislation to catch up with new media before too much further damage is done.
It’s the speed and reach that’s the problem.
They said the same thing about the printing press.
It's not the speed or the reach.
It's the virality and the engagement algorithms that boost reactionary content.
They've weaponized dopamine.
Arguably the curation and format, and perhaps the incentives. Twitter optimized for angry reactions and misunderstandings, deliberately, to drive clicks. Lately more traditional media does the same thing.
Also the East India Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
100% agree with this perspective: "history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes"
The number of voices on twitter is the rhyme: Hearst and a small number of people controlled the message back then. Twitter bears responsibility, but they are ultimately not editorializing everybody all the time.
Reading this, I think it's worth quoting Hannah Arendt. At this point in history, her words are deafening relevant:
> “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
The failure of Twitter isn't active editorializing or the lack thereof.
The failure of Twitter is to not provide the necessary affordances in its design, its functionality, its business model, its values, its policies, its mission and its vision that allows a userbase of over a billion people to self-govern itself in a way that helps prevent what happened yesterday.
... and that's absolutely, undeniably a failure to think about the consequences of the product that Twitter has pushed into the world for the past 15 years.
... and it's not only a failure. It's a failure lost in it's own pure and utter banality.
Twitter isn't free of from criticisms. It's not a force of nature or the universe that disrupted lives in unfortunate ways. It's a product designed with a clear intent by humans for other humans. And therein lies the responsibility of Twitter, and everyone who provides a soapbox for others, to which it should be held accountable.
History doesn't repeat itself unless we repeat - remember, reflect, rehash, re-tell - history. And we do that from a place of empathy and understanding. Everything else is inconsequential.
There are no ways to separate political from non political discourse. You can only remove social media from the political sphere by removing social media, period.
You could, however, try to develop a legal and moral framework for acceptable social media behavior (meaning the way the network itself works, not users' behavior). The particularities that make extreme content rise to the top should be banned/discouraged, rather than embraced in the race for engagement.
Social media makes information available instantly everywhere and there is always someone wanting to believe any speech.
If there is someone wanting to believe the earth is flat and triangular you will find him fast now. What could take months with massive people gatherings and paper press 100 years ago it can be done within minutes now.
Instead of banning maybe educating people on how to consume information could be a way to start. I guess it is almost impossible to educate everybody but it has empirically worked for me and my close environment, after years of educating some of my older relatives I have been able to at least make them read the links before sharing them.
> There are no ways to separate political from non political discourse
Most large companies (especially in regulated industries) have strict social media policies, e.g. preventing employees from performing company business via their personal social media accounts, with penalties for serious breaches being disciplinary action up to and including dismissal, i.e. it is possible to separate company business from non-company business. Why not the same for those working in the political sphere?
Because typically you want politicians engaged socially with their electorate?
Businesses fear liability. Governments should be built on it.
Sure, you can ban politicians from engaging in social networks, but that's far smaller proposal than removing the connection between social media and politics.
Taking twitter away from congressmen won't stop superpatriotsforbaldeagles.ru from distributing political propaganda, or random people being fed extreme media each inside their bubble.
The issue is inflammatory content spreading like wildfire, and direct intervention from politicians themselves is just tiny drop in the ocean.
> Why not the same for those working in the political sphere?
What does this actually mean? Are you trying to ask politicians not to engage in politics? News organisations? Billionaires? Foreign intelligence services? Asking for legal restrictions on who's allowed to speak about what?
There are ways to limit the influence, such has prohibiting elected officials from maintaining "official" accounts where they announce and do the public's business on the social media platforms.
Also making some of the support the social media platform clearly have for some candidates as "in kind" political contributions.
>removing social media, period
This is even better, how do we do that instead?
The world would be a better place if FB and Twitter did not exist. People often ask when and where did it go wrong, well it went wrong when Twitter and FB came into existence.
They both cause more problems than they solve.
> Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries
Newspapers has this power before. Arguablying more so as there are Twitter alternatives and people can move platforms quickly as we saw with reddit and thedonald.win
I guessing it was easier to control before as there were narrow corridors of power to owners/govt.
But social media companies insist they are NOT newspapers - if they were, special rules would apply due to implied editorial control.
I think their different enough from newspapers to need specific regulations.
Striking the right balance could easily take 20+ years, but social media is here to stay.
>Newspapers has this power before.
Correct, and it was recognized how important their role was, there were/are laws specifically covering what they could say about political subjects, whether they had to grant opposing views a platform, etc.
None of that exists for the newer platforms today.
Personally, I wish Twitter was one audio-only party line.
Two minutes of listening to a million people yelling their thoughts in real rime would reveal exactly what is happening there - and what a complete waste of time it is.
That’s gotta be pretty cheap to implement, if the Twitter API Terms of Service would allow that kind of thing.
Is that much different in the end from Tiktok or Instagram?
> Instead of debating whether social media platforms should or shouldn't have silenced the president, and what their role was in inciting the crowds to "insurrection", shouldn't we be discussing instead how to completely remove them from the political sphere?
No.
> Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries.
Yeah, that's really not true, even if you specifically limit it to media firms (e.g., Hearst at its height), and ignore, e.g., extractive/colonial firms like oil companies, United Fruit Company, and the various East India Companies, and also ignore much of history before the modern period, when there was no real public/private distinction, and the things we now think of as public functions were overtly private property rights exercised, quite often, for personal profit.
> Social media platforms should never have been allowed to become the arbiters of democracy.
They aren't the arbiters of democracy, only of their own platforms. Just like other media companies.
> Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries.
Newspapers have always had this power, the difference now is it's on the internet instead of print. Once TV's became common place the evening news also had this power. This has always been how things worked the difference now is the reach is larger and the turnaround time is faster.
Sorry but how exactly are you going to enforce that?
It’s like saying we should not have let news to be carried over the internet.
Im paraphrasing but theres this principle in aviation that every rule is paid for in blood or something to that effect. The same is often brought up with regards to automotive safety and really anytime engineering meets public safety, but I digress.
Point being is that the social media experiment and the wild west days of the internet writ large has run its course. We’ve had our fun and money has been made and lost and made again and again and again and the writing is on the wall I’m afraid.
If history is any evidence the gravy train is about to come to a glaring and disastrous end. Legislation will be passed, examples will be made by the powers at be and society will look back through the lens of history at these past 30-40 years as a cautionary tale.
To your point: There is already a huge body of law that exists that would not take much retooling to apply. Held back by the voluminous pedantic arguments entertained ad nauseam. However the blood is there in droves and now the powers at be have had the chaos special delivered on a silver platter. Its one thing for us to comment and argue in the safe confines of our little luxury bubbles the internet provides, its another thing to watch in casual horror when the death toll numbers get so large as to be incomprehensible to many and then continue those same arguments to no effect. But make no mistake reality is what refuses to go away when you choose to stop believing in it and the reality is that for the first time as of yesterday the powers at be have had their bubbles burst as a result of their collective negligence and blood has been delivered as a direct result to their door.
As if 350k people dead isn't enough, theres a tyrannical despot once again guilty of treason on national tv for all to see that this time has literally instigated a coup with blood on congress floors as a result. Fueled specifically by social media and the internet. Sure things may have seemed ephemeral and hard to legislate before because hey its the internet and its on a cute little screen, but no more.
I expect the laws to be written, applied and enforced the same way they always have been. And I expect the piles of anti- trust cases to encounter not much friction now and as for social media... i expect that it will be fine as long as it doesn't get too big and crosses that pernicious threshold where it ever again is able to be a real threat to the powers at be.
They all can have a website! And send emails!
I think his point isn't that politics are being discussed on a private platform, it's that the most up-to-date, official communication channel of the President is an account on a private social network instead of on government-owned infrastructure.
> shouldn't we be discussing instead how to completely remove them from the political sphere?
I don't think so. The analogy that comes to mind is the idea of letting kids play outside. People try to justify today's overprotective culture by bringing up things like cars (they existed back in the 70s too) or candy-wielding abductors (really?) or whatever, but the overall theme is this pervasive idea that we can't handle scary things (be it the outdoors or media megacorps) and therefore we should be artificially shielded from them.
Instead, wouldn't it be better to teach critical thinking in school such that when you're faced with the realities of the world, you have at least some preparation? The idea of imparting civic responsibility principles from a young age seems to work well for example with classroom cleaning duties in Japan.
I think there are many more cars on the road today, and I suspect they are more dangerous to pedestrians (new cars are generally more powerful, so tend to accelerate to dangerous speeds on small streets. Not to even start on smartphones).
Your analogy is strange because our society has opted to punish parents for letting kids play outside unsupervised the way they themselves did, while in the case of social platforms, it has opted for individual responsibility and no sanctions. Unless you’re saying we went wrong with the kids and now we should not do the same for adults. In which case I would say that letting kids play unsupervised is an individual risk but speech and organizations have large and exponentially spreading emergent effects, so if you have the profit motive you’re going to end up with certain, shall we say, exacerbated divisions in this country.
Critical thinking is taught in schools. When I think back far enough to my daughter's elementary school education, teachers were trying to develop it by at least 4th grade (9-10yo). Starting the next year, she had classes in civics that continued through to high school (14-18yo) where she is now. As I write this comment, her world history class is discussing yesterday's events in DC in a point/counter-point fashion.
Despite the effort to develop critical thinking skills, a small but not insignificant number of students parrot what they watch on questionable news outlets.
No need for scare quotes around insurrection dude, this fits the textbook definition
To be fair a couple of those platforms are being prosecuted for anti-trust issues. It's kinda weird how the final straw was over VR periphals rather than corporate takeover of the public square but I guess the US just has weird priorities
The problem is the choices of individuals. It's not appropriate to blame a third party for the actions of an individual. If you riot or destroy something it is your fault and your fault alone. This is a major problem for our country, it's easier to be a victim than to take responsibility, and there is an entire subset of our population (the woke left) that supports this attitude.
> privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence
They are simply a middle man between foreign agencies and domestic users. Foreign countries really do exploit all those platforms for their own interests.
self hosting is the solution, everyone already got a computer and internet connection.
IPv6 solves the NAT & CGNAT problems.