How to fix Big Tech and Social Media

[Berkut]

Social media are no longer just corporations. They have become institutions. They structure the political debate. They relay ideas and vocabularies. Yet, we have instituted no claim on them - the way we have done so with justice, school, or even with the classical concept of "corporation". Because unlike classical corporations, social media create dynamic communities of dissent, and we haven't really had to deal with the emergence of these sorts of things for a long, long time.

I often think about things as systems.

I look at the information revolution and the rise of social media, and what I note is that these are profound changes in our economic and social fabric.

I know people say things like "Oh, this isn't really a change! There was biased media and polarization and lowest common denominator propaganda before!" And that is true. But it is true the same way someone could counter concerns about the danger of these new cars by pointing out that a car isn't really different from a horse, and horses and carriages kill people all the time! Or nuclear weapons are not really that different from conventional, why, more people died in the bombing of Tokyo then at Hiroshima!

Differences in scale matter, and create different needs for how society wants to engage in that technology. We have entire volumes of new regulations and rules to deal with cars that were never needed before we had cars. And yet, there is basically zero new real regulation on how social media and Google and Apple and all of them interact - we seem to have this idea that nothing really has changed, maybe because the new digital entities are, well...digital. It doesn't FEEL like something really new.

[The Minsky Moment]

It is a problem with social media but is it really a problem of social media?

It's always been true that people tend to associate with like-minded people and the resulting insularity can foster extremism and vulnerability to conspiracy theories.

...not really. Unless by always, you mean, only relatively recently, in an age of relatively increased mobility where certain people were entitled to voice their opinions relatively freely.

Always as in American political history which in the sense you mean is relatively recently.  Even small towns in America were penetrated by mass media well before the Civil War.

[The Minsky Moment]

Social media are no longer just corporations. They have become institutions. They structure the political debate. They relay ideas and vocabularies. Yet, we have instituted no claim on them - the way we have done so with justice, school, or even with the classical concept of "corporation". Because unlike classical corporations, social media create dynamic communities of dissent, and we haven't really had to deal with the emergence of these sorts of things for a long, long time.

The language in this passage ("they", "social media are . . .") is loose.  It's true that "social media" refers to much more than the corporate entities and managers that operate and control social media platforms; it's true that social media has assumed a powerful role in the way that people perceive the world and structure their lives.  But to use active tense verbs - "They structure the political debate. They relay ideas and vocabularies. " - glosses over the reality of what is happening. It wrongly implies the same kind of agency exercised the press barons of the old media world - from Hearst to Murdoch. Part of what makes social media so powerful and intoxicating is the delegation of content creation and distribution to users.  Admittedly that is within a framework (TOS, interface, design) created by the social media company, but that framework is an imprecise and indirect form of control.  The relative lack of regulation of social media is not due to American cultural techtoxication or even Washington gridlock - there is real interest and will to regulate that crosses party lines.  It is a recognition of the facts that old models of regulation don't easily apply and that the new models are still being developed.

[Oexmelin]

You are reading in my post something that isn't there, and impute singular agency when none was implied. Institutions structure debate, even when there are no singular will behind it. This is true of the 19th century press taken collectively, as it is of current social media. Facebook does things that go well beyond what Zuckerberg wants - even if what he wants does have much more of a singular impact than what you or I can have on Facebook. That language may lead to generalizations, but is not qualitatively different than the one we use as short-hand to refer to all sorts of other collective institutions, like state - without ever implying that there is a single will behind them all.

I agreed fundamentally with your point: we don't quite know what to do with social media. Maybe it's because it's new. But I suggested that part of the problem is that, unlike many of the more recent institutions (and generally unlike other corporations), is that they fundamentally create communities - and that is a political issue. Our current predicament is that this puzzle accompanies, or heightens a current (American) political crisis, but also a more generalized crisis of democratic legitimacy. We are at a loss as to how to deal with political crisis and legitimacy right now.
 

[Monoriu]

How different would this be if Facebook was a subscription service, and was not allowed to sell advertising at all?

I will not use it.  It is that simple.  I won't subscribe to anything where payment is needed. 

[Berkut]

How different would this be if Facebook was a subscription service, and was not allowed to sell advertising at all?

I will not use it.  It is that simple.  I won't subscribe to anything where payment is needed. 

So?

People say that like it is some kind of travesty.

Most services in life people have to choose whether or not to pay for it, and there is no presumption that it ought to be free.

If you choose not to pay for your cell phone, you don't have a cell phone.

Oh well.

[Berkut]

If society decides that access to social media is so important that everyone should have it, then society can subsidize the cost for low incomes, the same way we might do so for other "necessary" utilities.

[The Minsky Moment]

Taking away ad revenue eats into the profits of the social media companies, but it doesn't fix the problem of social insularity and virtual echo chambers.

[Sheilbh]

Of course for all the negative effects in the US and other rich countries - I think the risk for Facebook etc is sufficiently high that they have some degree of control and moderation in the relevant languages.

I think the biggest negative impacts of Facebook have been in Sri Lanka and Myanmar where Facebook has been directly linked to ethnic cleansing propaganda and encouraging violence against protesters. They are a huge internet provider in large parts of Africa. I think because those markets are not a focus for Facebook and they may not have local teams with appropriate language skills etc to actually police any content - that there's a risk that an American social media company will become the sort of RTLM of ethnic or political violence. It may not even be noticed at the time in HQ in the US but when people look back they will identify propaganda primarily travelling and being amplified on, for example, Facebook and WhatsApp.

In the UK we've also seen the rise of WhatsApp as a source for the really dark stuff in political campaigns - so misogyny, anti-semitism, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia - all stuff that may not be coming from the campaign but is going around WhatsApp a bit like chain emails in the late 90s. I believe the same has been observed in India as well.

[Berkut]

Taking away ad revenue eats into the profits of the social media companies, but it doesn't fix the problem of social insularity and virtual echo chambers.

It does not fix it, but it does remove the pressure for social media companies to use any means necessary to capture the attention of their users.

We don't have to solve ALL problems at once!

[Savonarola]

The term "Big Tech" covers a diverse selection companies which, if they do indeed need to be fixed, would require different fixes.  Even among social media platforms; individual platforms, I feel, would require different solutions.  Twitter, in my opinion, is the worst platform and has done the most harm in the real world.  Twitter facilitates the spread of misinformation and it rewards obnoxious and puerile behavior; (indeed if one is obnoxious and puerile enough, often enough, one can become President of the United States.)  This, I believe, is due to the brevity of the posting allowed, which do not allow for well thought out arguments.  Such a platform could be used for epigrams, of course, but the vulgar populace seems to have a taste for much coarser text.  It seems unfair, though, to punish the epigramists or haiku poets along with the bullies and ignoramuses.  Therefore, I propose we take everyone with over 100,000 followers on Twitter and put them on a proscription list (preferably written in Courier font.)  While this may net a few unfortunate innocent people, like Bentham I think that allowing thousands of guilty to go unpunished for the sake of one innocent is pushing principle too far.  In addition to the justice that would be served, this plan has many benefits; the most obvious is that by depriving the worst individuals their opportunity to reach a wide audience (or any audience) will certainly create a politer society and slow the spread of misinformation.  Even beyond the realm of social media there are benefits; as many wealthy celebrities and magnates have a large Twitter following, the sale of their goods would provide the government with a badly needed additional revenue stream.  This, in addition, would reduce income inequality; and, as elite schools could no longer rely on the proscribeds' generous grants, perhaps reduce the toxic impact of privilege, paving the way for a more egalitarian society.

[Berkut]

Step #1 for doing something about Twitter is just removing anonymity in most case. Allow it in exceptions that have to be individually approved. Every account must be linked to an actual person in some fashion.

And get rid of ads.

[Valmy]

The way Twitter works just results in its toxicity I think. Or at least that was my conclusion when I used it. Sometimes the media really is the message.

[The Brain]

The way Twitter works just results in its toxicity I think. Or at least that was my conclusion when I used it.

[DGuller]

Step #1 for doing something about Twitter is just removing anonymity in most case. Allow it in exceptions that have to be individually approved. Every account must be linked to an actual person in some fashion.

And get rid of ads.

I'm not saying it's not a good step, but I've lost quite a few IQ points accidentally reading people's comments on LinkedIn, and I rarely visit it.  If people can't keep their political idiocy to themselves on a professional site while posting under their real names, then at the very least it indicates that your idea is just a first step of many.