I'm the same, and I take it a step further: I personally believe that the push to associate emotional triggers with words, phrases, and news events to the point where seeing someone else "say the Wrong Thing" causes anything resembling emotional distress, is the most powerful weapon of social destruction in use today. The solution to "toxicity" on social media isn't better moderation, better filtering, better banned words and phrases lists... it's being able to see 280 characters on the screen, representing ideas you wholeheartedly disagree with, and not get worked up about it as your eyes move to the next thing on the list and you go about your life as usual. Sadly, the current structure of things incentivizes the former behavior and disincentivizes the latter. Corporations (especially news corporations) and politicians see no problem with conditioning people on a mass scale, and few people seem to question the narratives being spun all around them instead of just blindly believing whatever their social sphere agrees with.
I have a better idea, why not just un-invent violence and scarcity? Then social media will be wonderful because bad things will no longer exist in the world.
Social media is not the cause of toxicity. It's a mirror for it, albeit a collection of various distorted mirrors that many people aggressively manipulate.
People were shitty to each other on usenet and bulletin boards, people were shitty to each other via broadcast media, people were shitty to each other via newspapers, and people have been shitty to each other in person.
People have tribal tendencies and some tribes are more aggressive than others. Sometimes you have to choose between different tribal affiliations because conflict is happening whether or not you want it to. We are living in one such period and the internet (like many previous iterations of communication technology) is having an accelerative effect.
While your points are true, they are a really poor defense of social media. There are plenty of toxic behaviors that we possess, which we are aware of, and legislate for. We have a pretty well founded baseline for what things are dangerous to us physically, but have not yet codified what is dangerous for us socially or psychologically. Social media is dangerous in these modes.
Eventually we will recognize what an utterly destructive thing our current crop of social media platforms are, and in hindsight they will seem insane things that our descendants will shake their heads about.
I agree that we can't effectively manipulate the environment to eliminate the hazard, but I also worry that we can't effectively strengthen people to make them immune to the hazard either.
A common thread through all human history is people being misled on-mass. Before social media we were slaves to the tabloid headlines. Before widespread papers we were slaves to the pulpit. Etc.
For the last 10 years social media has been the tabloid but personalised. Outrage = engagement so the algorithms have pushed outrage, and personalized in the sense that they have searched for the thing that outrages each of us individually.
I fear that the next 10 years of social media is very basic generative stuff being tabloid with intimacy. By turning into your friend in how they communicate with you, they get engagement x10.
The way to change someones mind is through intimacy.
And humans are suckers for it. We can't strengthen the masses against outrage, and we can't strengthen the individual against intimacy.
I understand the reaction to this maybe-slightly-over-simplistic statement, but there's definitely a conversation to be had about defanging at least the most the toxic effects of social media. Unfortunately we're still in the "gold rush" era of social media, societal health be damned.
I would say that weaponization of outrage for the purposes of accomplishing goals is what's ruining lives. I've seen it happen. Seems like it's the new innovation.
We didn't used to have mechanisms for so efficiently manipulating populations in distributed ways, before. Social media's got a lot to answer for. I had to quit it, myself. I'm sure it's still a huge pile of bad-faith and manipulativeness, but I can't justify trying to keep track of how bad it's become.
For someone who talks so much of loathing social media, they seemingly do very little to avoid it.
Acknowledging the technology is basically poison at scale, maybe remove it from your life so you do not suffer the same brainrot as the masses.
The great Naval once wrote: Be weary of anything that uses the word "social".
Social Media is conditioning people to discuss moral crusades, launch moral crusades, and dwell on moral crusades. Humans are being conditioned to write and say things that inspire anger towards the opposition, because that is the best approach to getting likes, upvotes, and subscribes. Poison for your mind.
I've long held the opinion that Twitter and Facebook are just content in the medium, a bit like complaining about Sky, CNN or Fox on TV without looking at television itself and the impact it had on communication.
The internet has brought communication to everyone that travels at incredible speed. This has the effect of causing emotive responses, rather than reasoned. Requires no effort at all to respond, and encourages the toxicity you describe. What gains most traction are those posts that are the most emotive. It used to be "if it bleeds, it leads", but I suspect these days it's more akin to "emotion deserves promotion".
Speed carries a number of other implications. For example, it allows a cheap, steady stream of constant information that can be completely irrelevant at best to you, plus it's information about which you often can do nothing about, except hit the reply button. This can only make things worse, because people feel powerless except in this superficial way.
The other effect is the quantity of information, and it's impossible now for a user of the internet to wade through it, or even validate it without incredible effort. Our current techniques for filtering that information is essentially populist individualism: we rely on what other people have liked, linked to, or shared, but at the same time, read what is presented to us based on our previous interactions.
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that I perhaps pessimistically feel that these things are fundamentally baked into the medium, in much the same way that Neil Postman felt entertainment was intrinsically baked into television. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there are solutions to these things. Not sure what they are myself.
It doesn't take perfect stoicism not to react with anger and nausea to every expression one encounters on social media. Most people aren't that sensitive.
Social media is not a toxin of any sort. To call it "toxic" is a metaphor that expresses the revulsion that people feel for the idiocies that social media channels have uncovered.
So I do disagree with the liberty of the metaphor in this case.
Social media is the business of providing channels of communication to people in exchange for some lucrative data. Other businesses do this too (television, radio, newspapers).
I am not at all a proponent of social media. The discourse is broken by petty, idiotic exchanges. The signal-to-noise ration is far too low and the sophisticated advertising techniques have become a form of surveillance that I reject.
But petty, idiotic exchanges have always existed. So have ignorant people, propaganda, gullible people, and fanatics. They can meet in basements, in taverns, in temples, in arenas... The fundamental problem is failing education and social disorder.
It takes great liberty of metaphor to compare social media to a real toxin. I share people's dislike of social media. But I will look back on the past decade and not blame any of the social-media companies for the idiocy of people who should know better through public education.
It is nothing less than exhausting to watch how people who frequent various types of social media have been driven to devolve into the worst humanity has seen in a long time short of causing physical harm to each other. I have watched as a couple of local FB groups that I used to just monitor for local information go down to the gutter on almost every single post.
People who live locally and send kids to some of the same schools say the most vile things imaginable to each other. I have no clue if they realize they are doing so with their full identity on display to the world (a lot of people have no sense of privacy settings and so their entire FB profile and posts are there for the world to see).
I am convinced that this has played a part in the insane behavior we have witnessed during the protests of the last several weeks. I have no problem with protests of any kind and for any reason. It's important to be heard. However, when the behavior turns criminal, with destruction of property, private or public, violence beatings and full-on anarchy, well, there is no society on earth and across history where that is considered legal or even acceptable behavior. Even stuff like invading restaurants and yelling at people with megaphones inches away from their ears.
It's only a matter of time until those on the receiving end of this behavior respond with equal or greater (likely greater) brutality. Where do we go from there?
Notice that I am not taking any sides here. These statements apply to all players in this sick game, regardless of affiliation.
And then you have politicians and professional manipulators pinging segments of the population into resonance every day in support of political goals. Political goals, BTW, don't necessarily align with what is good for a country or a region. All they align with is being elected, reelected, obtaining or maintaining power. They could not care less about any of us.
And so, the internet, that thing that most of us thought would bring forth a new age of enlightenment is being weaponized in unimaginable ways. If there was a bill to shutdown Facebook and Twitter tomorrow I would vote for it ten times if I could. As I have said in other posts, they should be shutdown until they can prove their algorithms stop driving people into dark caves of hatred and outrage. That's all they do.
The have optimized their platforms to shove someone into whatever it is they are looking for deeper and harder, without regards for what the content can be. No problem if you are researching home remodeling or how to sail, huge massive problem if you are clicking through political crap (which is usually negative and hateful) and end-up in a deep dark cave of hatred. I've written before about a couple of members of our family who have been driven so far and deep into these caves (one on the left, the other on the right) that it is now impossible to pull them out. It's a drug, and we are powerless against it.
I am for small government. Definitely. However, there are cases where use of force through government is justified. I believe this to be one such case. These companies need to be put on hold until they become good citizens of the world and that needs to happen very soon.
These are the same word games that got us tired arguments like "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Looking only at people as individuals limits you to seeing first-order effects. The insidious effects of social media come about because large scale algorithmic optimization has found high leverage points for influencing society. While that's ultimately a consequence of individual people, you can't solve many complicated problems using a lens that can't see higher-order effects.
People seem to be fundamentally incompatible with social media, much in the same way they're incompatible with bullet wounds and drug addictions. Blame-passing word games just get us farther from taking that truth and starting to fix the world.
I like your wording on this - outrage cycle. I agree that social media algorithms promote that, which is why I have largely withdrawn from twitter, facebook, and instagram. They're nowhere near representative of my real life social networks. While platforms like instagram have the capability to keep friends connected and inspire people, they've turned into toxic waste sites.
That said, their effect on society hasn't been limited to raging twitter tirades. Companies, governments, and other institutions seem to be bending the knee to their outrage, which has led to not only our cancel culture, but to things like the CHOP situation which went on for far too long. Leaders are scared of making the mob angry.
Everyone focuses so much on censorship but nobody focuses on the opposite, that is - what does social media promote by default.
Well, this is what they promote: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 . They promote content that results with engagement since thats most profitable for them, above all else. It just so happens that emotional fake novelty spreads the most and leads to maximum engagement.
Optimizing for engagement above all else is what has lead to that unhealthy, toxic environment. Monsters have been created, and they are out of control. It doesn't matter who social media companies ban, or what was actually tweeted: if there is a way to interpret it in the most emotionally charged, exciting way, it will eventually be reinterpreted that way, just like a game of broken telephone.
I agree with hermitwriter here. Currently I'm not at all convinced somebody can claim that all of these negative effects wouldn't have existed if we had a morally correct social media platform instead.
This might sound rude and doesn't add much to the conversation, but this issue can't be fixed unless you "fix" people.
We can be eloquent, humanitarian, calm and polite, but the reality is that we can also be cruel, vindictive little animals that seek out to ruin everyone's day. There is no fixing social media because our nature doesn't allow it, and you can fix the business aspect, but not how the users utilize it, unless you restrict them to the point we can't call it a social media platform anymore.
TL:DR Fixing human nature isn't going to happen. The more popular a platform is, the more positive and negative voices you'll have in the platform, and we all know that we linger and give more attention to the negative more so than the positive.
Respectfully, the issue i see with bluesky and at is that it’s solving a problem no casual user really cares about solving. And jack hasnt been particularly great at solving the issue social media suffers from these days: toxicity. Facebook, twitter, instagram, reddit are all ridden by toxicity. Give us a place where nana and that weird cousin can socialise without risking being radicalised one political way or another, cant be misinformed and cant be scammed. On twitter i follow strictly science, book writer, game dev, and tech topics yet politics and identity issues are always creeping in. Angry mobs of glorified nobodies and their followers toxify.every.single topic. So instead of solving protocols please solve the quality of content and emotion. We need to fix the habits social media helped create instead of creating new ghettos.
Capture the beauty of life not the garbage of it. Look at human psychology and see what else other than anger can increase engagement and what algorithms can create a better culture. There is more than that emotion that can drive growth. I refuse to believe we are all angry shits, we can do better.
In such a polarized emotionally charged environment, some people are unable to emotionally segregate world news from their personal and professional lives.
These people have become paralyzed and unable to function normally. They allow world events to bleed into every conversation, and feel obligated to support their side and ostracizing anyone that disagrees - further isolating them in their bubble.
I think that social media has increased society's emotional surface area to world events. We no longer isolate 30-60 minutes per day to watch balanced reports on the 6 o'clock news - now it's all the time, hyperbolic, and often deceptive.
Our emotions are being weaponized - and November is going to be a real wake-up call where we will see the magnitude of disruptive power that these polarized social media messages can wield.
I think there's a larger point in what he said. Basically all current social media ends up optimizing for creating outrage, spawning mobs, less thoughtful discussion and more vitriolic arguments, etc. It's becoming a real concern to me that this is going to drive us into some kind of civil war or something if we don't find some way to check it.
The outrage seems to be like a drug. Nothing generates engagement quite like it, even if it's toxic in the long-term. So all social media platforms that embrace it grow bigger until they become near-monopolies, and all that don't so far have had a hard time growing userbases, making money, and generally fade into irrelevance.
It would be a real service to society IMO if we could find a way to somehow generate enough engagement and energy to challenge the big players without the outrage culture.
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