(no subject)

[catsittingstill]

I have spent way too much of the day poking the internet, and specifically getting involved in twitter and FB fights.

Republicans are being awful to one of my friends who is running for County Commission and it makes me mad.  Neo-Nazis are orchestrating a pile-on on one of the folks I followed on Twitter and that makes me mad.

I am beginning to wonder if social media was, on balance, a colossal mistake, both for society at large and for me personally.  But is it possible to undo or even meaningfully resist the harm social media does by coordinating and extreme-izing Republicans without using social media myself?

If it weren’t for social media I’d never have learned about trans people.  I’d never have heard of the Women’s March, and the Women’s March probably wouldn’t have happened.  I likely would not have assisted in GOTV efforts in nearby cities and states.  I’d have very little contact with fellow filkers.

I dunno

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I have wondered the same as you. I love epistolary connections, but ugh, the evils people use social media for.

[gorgeousgary]

I feel like social media as a general tool is not inherently bad. However, it appears the algorithms used by FB, Twitter, etc. are demonstrably problematic and directly contributing to both promoting the loudest, most extreme voices and enabling the spread of misinformation.

There's also the lack of guardrails in terms of content moderation, enforcing TOS, etc. on the various apps/services and the lack of solid legal avenues for a target to go after their harassers. Which of course gets into the whole debate over where the limits on First Amendment protections are, or whether there should even be any short of perhaps direct threats of violence to another party.

No such thing as a free lunch (or Internet)

[tigertoy]

tl;dr social media good, Facebook bad

I don't see see social media itself as a bad thing. I remember the days when LiveJournal (and LiveJournal was social media before the term came into use) was my online community and I appreciated being able to stay in touch with people I saw so seldom in person. It was still possible to for it to become a time vampire, but still a net positive.

The problem we have today is not that Facebook et al. exist, it's the way they are run. Like all of the "free" content on the net, the price we all pay is dire, even though it isn't in dollars. These services are not forums for social interaction, they are ad delivery platforms. We users are not customers. We are the product the advertising business. Their customers are marketers and their service is selling the product (our attention) to their customers (whoever is buying the ads). All of the development of the platforms, from the beginning of the plan to make money with marketing, was designed to increase sales of their product (that's us, remember) to their customers (the marketeers). To do that, they sought to increase the amount of the product -- more users spending more time on the platform --and the value of the product. They pursue these goals by identifying what keeps us scrolling and what content we engage with. The more they can learn about us, the more they can manipulate us into scrolling through feeds curated to keep us riveted, allowing them to identify the most effective places to put ads for specific customers (higher quality product), allowing them to extract more money from each of their customers.

The only way they care at all about the quality of the user experience is the extent to which it can keep us addicted, scrolling more, hoping for more likes. The only thing that limits what they will amplify is that they avoid material that will actively make people so upset with the platform itself that they use it less, or in the rare (at least in the US) material that will get them into actual trouble with authorities, where trouble means a net loss of revenue. Even long after they discovered that making people angry with each other is very effective for keeping them engaged with the platform -- more effective than making them feel good or learn about new things or understand reality. Misinformation, lies, conspiracy theories, outright disinformation -- carefully targeted of course -- make people spend more time, attention, and emotional engagement on the platform, ready to see more ads that are more likely to resonate with them. The fact that it's actively harmful to us, individually and collectively, matters not a whit. The way they're destroying our society by splitting us into two groups at war with each other, groups that have come to care no more about society as a whole than the companies themselves, only makes them smile as they take more money to the bank. Certainly they will publicly wring their hands and promise to try to do better, but all they actually do is to twist the public's desire to limit the harm into regulation meant to harm their smaller competition.

That last claim is rather extreme and demands explanation. Here it is. The giant companies with their huge AI structures have a good idea what we're saying in our posts. They can tell what posts will cross a line and have to be stopped before they can be seen, but the technology that does that is huge, complex, and expensive. A small competitor, whether a startup trying to break into their monopoly or a forum only used by a small group with some niche interest, has no chance of matching their automatic system. A small platform can't pay for such and has no option but to rely on its own users to keep anyone from seeing an offensive post (whether legitimately offensive, or disingenuously identified as good lawsuit bait. Such a platform has to rely on moderators (usually unpaid) screening content before it can be seen by users, or hope that users flagging troublesome content as soon as they see it will be good enough. The first gums up the works of a genuine conversation -- making the small competitor a less attractive place -- while the second is a crap shoot, just hoping a single disgruntled user or opportunistic troll won't put them out of business.

In general, this -- doing harm to society in general to make money -- is what unchecked capitalism does. Rocks roll downhill, and profit is gravity to business. Facebook et al. could change their trumpeted algorithms to spread less incendiary, more true material and suppress the fuel that has America on fire. It could actually expose people to material that gently challenges their world view instead of pushing it farther from reality. This would reduce writer's dopamine rush of seeing the like number go up and up on their maximally controversial posts. But it would also leave people less addicted to doom scrolling, more able to, for example, do work, or to do research on other sites and back up their opinions with some facts. They could do this -- they have the ability -- but they never will because it's contrary to their fundamental nature as for profit big businesses making their money with marketing.

An alternative form of social media could exist that depended solely on subscription revenue from the users. The problem is that social media only becomes meaningful when people start using it because their friends are using it, creating a spiral of growth. No matter how wonderful it is, a paid service would have a very tough climb getting past people's disastrous but unquestioned belief that "free" Internet content is free.

I can see where social media needs to be. I can't see how to get there.