Social media delenda est
During the Ferguson protests after the judicial murder of Michael Brown, I was on Twitter for hours on end, posting, retweeting, sharing. I remember saying something like this: "This is why social media is important. Without it, we wouldn't see what's happening."
Fast forward ten years, and the landscape is far different.
Trolls. Bots. No moderation. Disinformation and lies proliferating. Social media being used to foment division, unrest, stochastic terrorism.
In 2014, I thought social media was the way to a more open, more democratic society. No more.
What the past ten years have shown is that whatever utopian moment social media presented was soon subsumed by malign actors, both state-based and private. A tool as powerful as that was not going to be left unmolested by the malefactors of power and wealth. They would subvert it, corrupt it, and turn it to the dark.
I look at the person I was ten years ago, and I shake my head. Not in shame. Not in embarrassment. Solely in sadness.
Just like the early promise of the internet was subverted by those malefactors of wealth and power, so was social media. It became a playground for social manipulation. Buddhists—BUDDHISTS—in Burma were rallied to kill, rape, and expel their Rohingya Muslim neighbors via Facebook. And Facebook did nothing. This has been repeated the world over. People of violence have used social media to inflame and organize. And the platforms they use have done nothing to stop them. Because these are commercial enterprises, and all engagement adds to the bottom line.
I'm a man of a certain age. I cut my teeth on the internet in a time where we thought it would change the world for the better. But it was corrupted quickly. What capitalism knows how to do all too well is to spot an opportunity for profit, seize it, and crowd out anything which doesn't serve that profit motive.
Social media is no different. Facebook, originally, was limited to university students. Then Mark Zuckerberg, who stole the idea for the site, saw his chance for wealth and power, and slowly, methodically, turned it into the agent for chaos which it now is. And Twitter. The rot did not set in with Elon Musk. Twitter was already problematic under Jack Dorsey's stewardship. But it is no secret that Musk's taking over of the site has turned it into nothing but a sewer of hate.
Mass social media is a cancer on the world. It doesn't uplift. It degrades. In its quest for profit, it will elevate anything which brings it that profit. And nothing brings engagement like hate, vitriol, and fear. Far from uplifting the better angels of our nature, its raw financial calculus cares nothing for that. Whatever increases the stock price is what it will promote. And if it that is hate, well, a man has to make a dollar.
The unchecked capitalist profit motive will leave the world a desert. And social media is the most visible manifestation of that. Social media is the canary in the coal mine for the death of a civilized society. Profit cares nothing for what the world will be like in ten, twenty, or thirty years. It cares only for the next quarterly report. Any benefit social media still provides is dwarfed by its cost.
Social media must die for society to survive.
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