We’re getting the social media crisis wrong
▻https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis
My explanation of what is happening is this. We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation - that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one. Explaining it is going to require some words. Bear with me.
The fundamental problem is this: we tend to think about democracy as a phenomenon that depends on the knowledge and capacities of individual citizens, even though, like markets and bureaucracies, it is a profoundly collective enterprise. That in turn leads us to focus on how social media shapes individual knowledge, for better or worse, and to mistake symptoms for causes.
So what can we do to ameliorate this problem? Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better collective means of thinking.
To understand the particular success and failure modes of democracy, it is better not to focus on individual citizens, but on democratic publics. Democracy is supposed to be a system in which political decisions are taken not by kings, or dictators, but by the public, or by representative agents that are responsible to the public and can be removed through elections or similar. In principle, then, the public is the aggregated beliefs and wants of the citizenry as a whole.
The problem is that we have no way to directly see what all the citizens want and believe, or to make full sense of it. So instead we rely on a variety of representative technologies to make the public visible, in more or less imperfect ways. Voting is one such technology
Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media in ways that lower the odds that democracy will be a problem solving system, and increase the likelihood that it will be a problem creating one.
The example that really made me think about how this works has nothing much to do with democracy or political theory. It was the thesis of an article published in Logic magazine in 2019, about Internet porn. The article’s argument is that the presentation of porn - and people’s sense of what other people’s sexual interests are - is shaped by algorithms that respond to the sharp difference between what people want to see and what people are willing to pay for. The key claim:
a lot of people .. are consumers of internet porn (i.e., they watch it but don’t pay for it), a tiny fraction of those people are customers. Customers pay for porn, typically by clicking an ad on a tube site, going to a specific content site (often owned by MindGeek), and entering their credit card information. … This “consumer” vs. “customer” division is key to understanding the use of data to perpetuate categories that seem peculiar to many people both inside and outside the industry. … Porn companies, when trying to figure out what people want, focus on the customers who convert. It’s their tastes that set the tone for professionally produced content and the industry as a whole.
The result is that particular taboos (incest; choking) feature heavily in the presentation of Internet porn, not because they are the most popular among consumers, but because they are more likely to convert into paying customers. This, in turn, gives porn consumers, including teenagers, a highly distorted understanding of what other people want and expect from sex, that some of them then act on. In my terms, they look through a distorting technological lens on an imaginary sexual public to understand what is normal and expected, and what is not. This then shapes their interactions with others.
Something like this explains the main consequences of social media for politics. The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.
The resulting problems are not primarily problems of disinformation, though disinformation plays some role. They are the problems you get when large swathes of the public sphere are exclusively owned by wannabe God-Emperors. Elon Musk owns X/Twitter outright. Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta through a system in which he is CEO, chairman and effective majority owner, all at the same time. What purports to be a collective phenomena; the ‘voice of the people;’ is actually in private hands; is, to a very great extent shaped by two extremely powerful individuals.
Musk and Zuckerberg are different individuals, with different relationships to their platforms. I expect that the distortions that they impose on their publics will be quite different too.
Again: none of this is brainwashing, but it is reshaping public debate, not just in the US, but in the UK, Europe and other places too. People’s sense of the contours of politics - what is legitimate and what is out of bounds; what others think and are likely to do and how they ought respond - is visibly changing around us.
That poses some immediate questions. Can democracy work, if a couple of highly atypical men exercise effective control over large swathes of the public space? How can that control be limited or counteracted, even in principle? What practical steps for reform are available in a democracy shaped by the people who you want to reform out of power?
It poses some more general questions too. If you want to work towards a better system of democracy, which is both more stable and more actually responsive to what people want and need, how do you do this? It is easy (I think personally, but I am biased too) to see what is wrong with the public at X/Twitter. It is harder to think clearly about what a healthy public would look like, let alone how to build one.
