It goes without saying that social media is causing irreparable harm to the fabric of our society.
To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
I agree that social media is a net negative, but want to also point out that before social media it was the mainstream press and TV have been shaping society for decades. Things like buying a used car from Nixon or fighting in Vietnam etc are all mainstream press impact.
I like to think that contrary to this modern idea of media bias that the “mainstream” media as you label it has been a net benefit to society. Journalists used to challenge authority in democracies and bring out truth. It’s a lot more difficult now due to social media polluting the information space.
"This sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media"
... say the local TV presenters parroting an identical script from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates 193 TV stations in the USA, covering 40% of US households
You'd be mad to think that consolidated control of information, the endgame of "mainstream" media, is of benefit to society.
"Mainstream" media is financed either directly by very rich individuals, who then use their control of the thing they own (even just by controlling its hiring policies, to give like-minded people a voice) to spam their own agenda on the populace, or a generic money-making enterprise that then deals with less-affluent people who want to spam the populace (advertisers).
Touche. But you miss that not all social media (e.g. blogs and forums, instant messaging) are "social media platforms".
Also, the trick doesn't work with social media platforms in the same way. Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, where is it now? He didn't get the same control and power he got when he bought The Times and The Sun and could tell the staff who wrote the content what to say to their passive readers.
Do you think this doesn't happen in other countries?
Just to give an example from the UK of "state" media, the nominally independent BBC has to answer to a board, and to the regulator Ofcom. But in 2021, Boris Johnson installed Richard Sharp (Tory pary donor, Rishi Sunak's old boss) as the head of the board, and Robbie Gibb (Theresa May's head of communication) as a member, and attempted to rig the selection of the head of Ofcom, even though he's not legally allowed to do that. He still tried it. He "let it be known" he wanted Paul Dacre (former Daily Mail editor) be head of Ofcom. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/63982/boris-john...
They are all at it, to try and control public opinion and gatekeep what is seen and not seen.
Sure, but on the whole I'd argue outside of tabloids there are still real journalists doing real journalism and trying their best to hold people to account.
The thing is, the internet was supposed to democratise, but it's ended up centralising (and therefore distorting) discourse
A good example is publishing: until relatively recently, books were how most knowledge was distributed, and publishers were able to gatekeep it
Back in the 1990s, one of the promises of the internet, was that it could break this stranglehold. The argument was that instead of 10-ish major publishers, we could have ten billion
What we've ended up with is 5 or so major platforms. Their algorithms now distort, not only the distribution of information, but the production of knowledge itself (click chasing)
An argument I'm sympathetic to, is that the internet hasn't just been a neutral medium, but has actually accelerated this centralisation
The other aspect is the shrinking role of non commercial institutions, like public sector broadcasters, universities, scientific orgs. These entities had their own biases and groupthink. But they added diversity to the media landscape and helped set useful norms
> To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
As usual the problem is the commoner idiot, not the group of sociopaths that now have the means to astroturf their agendas efficiently.
Especially puzzling since this submission is about exactly the latter.
> We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
Think harder then.
The village idiot could move and reinvent himself as a respectable fellow. Basically, pre-digital we naturally had different personas; there was no Panopticon that could ever hope to know all our associations. Digital tools have changed that. And inventing the fiction of “one single persona” to tie back to what you said five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago, is a terrible idea, and I would argue (based on intuition) very unnatural.
To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.