People hold up their phones on July 17 as former U.S. president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives for the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis.ANGELA WEISS/Getty Images
Would we miss social media if it were gone? Is the world a better place for the smartphone having been invented? We have been conditioned to believe that new technology is always better, that innovation equals progress, or at any rate that what is must be: if technological change is not necessarily beneficial it is inevitable.
But what if that isn’t true? Can anyone, looking at the trail of wreckage left by social media – especially the combination of social media and smartphones, soon to be “enhanced” by artificial intelligence – say that it has been a net benefit to society?
Whether it is its capacity for spreading disinformation and hate, so visibly on display in Britain at the moment; or its manipulation by automated “bots,” thousands at a time, at the direction of malevolent state actors; or its role in radicalizing the vulnerable, offering them the comfort of an all-explanatory network of the like-minded; or its addictiveness, with the resulting social isolation and alienation; or its depressive effects on teenagers, taunted by unattainable body images, or by images of their own bodies, real (“revenge porn”) or fabricated (“deepfakes”); and all the rest of the miscellany of vileness one finds online, the conspiracy theories and pseudo-science, the tribalism and personal attacks, the mobbing of some for trivial sins against orthodoxy, even as out-and-out Nazis are enabled to find one another: can there any longer be a debate about social media’s baleful effects?
No doubt social media has its blessings, but can they begin to offset all of its many malignities? It has only been 20 years since Facebook was invented; 19 years since the advent of YouTube; 17 years since the first iPhone. Were our lives in any way poorer before then? Look at pictures taken, pre-social media, pre-smartphone, of crowds and parties: everyone present in the moment, talking to each other, looking at each other. They are disturbingly reminiscent of those pictures you see of life in Iran or Afghanistan, the people looking carefree and modern, before their descent into Islamist tyranny. Only the tyranny here is self-imposed.
A decade ago, such concerns might have been dismissed as another example of that age-old entertainment, the shock of the new. People said the same things about radio, we told ourselves, amused. Now it’s social media! The cauterizing phrase, “moral panic,” was deployed liberally. The logic seemed ironclad: If a thing that turned out to be benign was once the object of concern, then anything that is now the object of concern must also be benign.
But are social media/smartphones just the latest thing? Is it really to be claimed that a device or app that monopolizes people’s attention for hours out of every day – that they cannot look away from, not even as they are driving or walking down the street or dining with friends – is nothing new?
It is new. There’s never been anything like it. Not even close. The telephone allowed anyone to speak to anyone. Radio and television made it possible to broadcast from one location to millions. But with social media everyone can broadcast to everyone, everywhere, instantaneously, without intermediation, at zero cost. As if that were not enough, smartphones ensured all those broadcasters were also receivers, always on, the content pushed at them, endlessly scrolling down their screens, based on algorithms designed to entice, enrage and entrance them.
No previous medium of communication is remotely comparable, either in how information was produced or consumed. You could always stand on a street corner and yell, of course, but if you wanted to reach a mass audience you had to enlist others to help you. You had to persuade a publisher, first, that you were worth publishing, and the publisher employed others to look over what you had written – editors and fact-checkers and proofreaders and copysetters and so on – and then a printer had to be found to print it, and shops to sell it.
Likewise for radio and television: the station owners, the broadcast executives, the producers, studio hands and the rest, all had to sign on, in one way or the other, before you could send your program out to the world. All of these people had, as it were, skin in the game – businesses to run, reputations to protect. For good or ill, they served as “gatekeepers” to the public square, preventing material that was dangerous or offensive or just plain crazy from having access to a mass audience.
If nothing else, they slowed it down. It took time to publish or broadcast in those days, time in which to consider and reconsider a point of view, time to check if a statement were true, time to run it by the lawyers if need be. Equally, the reader or viewer had time to absorb the material they were being presented with, to ponder its significance, compare it with what they had previously read or seen. There was less of it, for starters. And it came from a relatively small number of sources they knew and trusted.
Compare that with what the information consumer is presented with today. A social-media post may have been scribbled in a few seconds. Out it goes – no research, no editing, no second thoughts, typically with no name attached – to be joined by thousands of others in the relentless stream of drivel assaulting the reader’s consciousness. It is impossible for anyone to take all this in, to sort the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, the sane from the insane.
And yet we try. The very attempt coarsens the taste, inflames the senses, addles the brain. Worse, it leaves the unwary with the dangerous illusion that they are well-informed. Once they might have deferred to recognized authorities. Now they are “doing their own research.” Soon they discover other, similarly intrepid researchers, and they find that their prejudices and prior convictions, so at odds with what they see in “the mainstream media,” are not theirs alone: They have the support and encouragement of others of like mind.
We’re simply not equipped for this, as a species. Whatever else might have changed, two things have not: the number of hours in a day, and the processing power of the human brain. We cannot possibly make sense of the universe, each of us all on our own, starting from scratch. We need to draw on the body of knowledge built by those who have gone before, experts whose work has been tested and critiqued by other experts. And we need time, to think about what we have read.
That is what the gatekeepers gave us: time, and space, a public square that was not cluttered with flat-earthers and neo-Nazis, a place where “reasonable people could differ.” Gatekeepers are in bad odour these days. But they are essential. Without them the marketplace of ideas becomes a shrieking cacophony, where no one can make themselves heard, or hear themselves think. I don’t want to say it always worked as it should. Doubtless the system also acted at times to suffocate voices and opinions that deserved a broader audience. But the greater the number and diversity of the gatekeepers, the more likely we are to find the right balance.
With social media, on the other hand, there are no gatekeepers. Or there have not been until now. The handful of dominant players in the field have forsworn any responsibility for what appears on their platforms, confusing freedom of speech with editorial judgment. But then, no one much trusts them to act as editors, either. The quasi-monopolies they enjoy make them seem like quasi-governments, raising freedom of speech fears despite their private owners. Or, perhaps, because of them: The faces of Big Tech – Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk – are so erratic, so maddened by money or power that they command zero public confidence.
The answer to this cannot be government regulation. That really would threaten free speech: even if neither Facebook or X (the former Twitter) existed 20 years ago, and even if we would arguably be better off without them, the fact is they do exist and millions of people rely on them as their primary means of communication.
What we need, rather, is a broader and better choice of gatekeepers. What we need is more competition. There is, of course, nothing stopping someone from starting up a social-media site. But we’ve seen what happens. After Elon Musk took over Twitter, and made it even worse – a thing no one thought possible – a number of putative rivals popped up. But they struggled to find an audience.
Why? The same reason Facebook and Twitter became so dominant in the first place: first-mover advantage, lock-in, network effect, call it what you will. In plain English: People read these sites because that’s where other people are posting, and people post on these sites because that’s where other people are reading. Leave Twitter, and you leave all that. So most people, however much they hated Twitter, didn’t.
How to fix this? Remove the lock-in. Force social-media platforms to open themselves to each other – that is, make them “interoperable.” So if you put up a post on one platform, it would appear on any other you designate. In effect, you could leave Twitter, or any other platform, and not leave your followers behind. The Canadian technology writer Cory Doctorow calls this “adversarial interoperability.”
All of a sudden, competition would become a reality. If a platform was doing a poor job, either because it was too restrictive of speech for your liking, or not restrictive enough, you could switch to another, without skipping a beat. Competition, and community standards, could reconstruct a functioning public square.
Some of the smaller platforms are already experimenting with this idea: they call it the “fediverse.” But to get the bigger players to join will require, yes, government regulation. But it is regulation in the service of making a market. Indeed, it is the only way to do so.
We can’t abolish social media. But we can fix it. What’s stopping us?