The Case Against Social Media Is Stronger Than You Think

Propaganda and ideology were a major part of the Nazi rise to power.

Marx, Engels, and Mussolini were all in the newspaper business. Jean-Paul Marat's newspaper was very influential in promoting the French reign of terror, including some claiming he's directly responsible for the September Massacres. Nationwide propaganda were major priorities day one to Lenin and after him in Soviet Russia.

Similarly with the Cambodian genocide, Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, etc.

Propaganda even played a big role in Julias Caesar's campaign against the Gauls some 2 millenia before social media.

Why are people who call themselves "progressive" so obsessed with events from half a century ago?

>The racists have always been in power.

It amazes me how quickly people forgot that we had 8 years of Obama. That was a lot more recent than racial segregation.

>the disparity between sentencing for the same crimes

The vast majority of this disparity seems to go away when you control for arrest offense, criminal history, etc.: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1985377

>The Supreme Court said you can’t use race as a basis for college admissions. But you can use it as a basis for arresting someone.

Well yeah, if someone fits the description of a criminal suspect, why not?

>Fox News is the most popular news network and isn’t part of social media.

When's the last time Fox News advocated for segregation or laws against interracial marriage?

IMO you've been making some very handwavey arguments which are collapsing important distinctions.

In any case... you can see from Table 13 in this PDF (page 13) that the rate of black-on-white crime is over 3x the rate of white-on-black crime: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv23.pdf

This isn't something which happened 60 years ago. This is data from 2023. It's more recent / greater in magnitude than most of the points you've been making. So, would it be fair to conclude that black people in the US are hostile to the "other", akin to the conclusion you made in your original comment?

Doesn't this already happen to some extent, with content being classified into advertiser-friendly bins and people's feeds being populated primarily by top content from within the bins the algorithm deems they have an interest in?

> Once you feel like it is not necessary to make your case, but just shout the loudest, you lose the ability to win over people who disagree because they don't like you shouting and you haven't made your case.

To some extent, this is how human communication always worked. I think the biggest problem is that the digital version of it is sufficiently different from the natural one, and sufficiently influenceable by popular and/or powerful actors, that it enables very pathological outcomes.

If users chose who to follow this is hardly a problem. Also classical forums dealt with spam just fine.

This is exactly why it's a problem. It doesn't even matter whether the algorithm is trained specifically on negative content. The result is the same: negative content is promoted more because it sees more engagement.

The result is more discontent in society, people are constantly angry about something. Anger makes a reasonable discussion impossible which in turn causes polarisation and extremes in society and politics. What we're seeing all over the world.

And the user sourced content is a problem too because it can be used for anyone to run manipulation campaigns. At least with traditional media there was an editor who would make sure fact checking was done. The social media platforms don't stand for the content they publish.

Message boards have existed for a very long time, maybe you're too young to remember, but the questions you're raising have very obvious answers.

They're not without issues, but they have a strong benefit: everyone sees the same thing.

You start with almost nothing on a given platform but over time you build up a wide variety of sources that you can continue to monitor for quality and predictive power over time.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

Net-negative is not quantifiable. But it is definitely qualifiable.

I don't think you have to think of things in terms of "hate it more than I like it" when you have actual examples on social media of children posting self-harm and suicide, hooliganism and outright crimes posted for viewership, blatant misinformation proliferation, and the unbelievable broad and deep affect powerful entities can have on public information/opinion through SM.

I think we can agree all of these are bad, and a net-negative, without needing any mathematic rigor.

The mainstream media have several sources, including the press releases that get sent to them, the newswires they get their main news from and social media.

In the UK the press, in particular, the BBC, were early adopters of Twitter. Most of the population would not have heard of it had it not been for the journalists at the BBC. The journalists thought it was the best thing since the invention of the printing press. Latterly Instagram has become an equally useful source to them and, since Twitter became X, there is less copying and pasting tweets.

The current U.S. President seems capable of dictatorship via social media, so following his messages on social media is what the press do. I doubt any journalist has been on whitehouse.gov for a long time, the regular web and regular sources have been demoted.

Summaries with links here. https://socialmediavictims.org/effects-of-social-media/

It's really not hard to confirm this.

The problem isn't that "building political momentum is more important than accuracy", it's that social media is a huge global industry that pumps out psychological, emotional, and political pollution.

And like all major polluters, it has a very strong interest in denying what it's doing.

Largely I don't think the media has been dictating anything. They've just been reporting on the growing body of evidence showing that social media is harmful.

What you'd call "trial by media" is just spreading awareness and discussion of the evidence we have so far which seems like a very good thing. Social media moves faster than scientific consensus, and there's a long history of industry doing everything they can to slow that process down and muddy the waters. We've seen facebook doing exactly that already by burying child safety research.

A decade or more of "Do thing, say nothing" is not a sound strategy when the alternative is letting the public know about the existing research we have showing real harms and letting them decide for themselves what steps to take on an individual level and what concerns to bring to their representatives who could decide policy to mitigate those harms or even dedicate funding to further study them.

I don’t know how I’d state or prove a single underlying reason why most vices are attractive-while-corrosive and still, on the whole, bad. It feels like priests and philosophers have tried for the whole human era to articulate a unified theory of exactly why, for example, “vanity is bad”. But I’m still comfortable saying gambling feels good and breaks material security, lust feels good and breaks contentment (and sometimes relationships), and social media feels good and breaks spirits.

I certainly agree that “social media” feels uncomfortably imprecise as a category—shorthand for individualized feeds, incentives toward vain behavior, gambling-like reinforcement, ephemerality over structure, decontextualization, disindividuation, and so on; as well as potentially nice things like “seeing mom’s vacation pics.”

If we were to accept that social media in its modern form, like other vices, “feels good in the short term and selectively stokes one’s ego,” would that be enough of a positive side to accept the possibility for uniformly negative long-run effects? For that matter, and this is very possible—is there a substantial body of research drawing positive conclusions that I’m not familiar with?

Few hot-button social issues are resolved via research, and I'm not sure they should be. On many divisive issues in social sciences, having a PhD doesn't shield you from working back from what you think the outcome ought to be, so political preferences become a pretty reliable predictor of published results. The consensus you get that way can be pretty shoddy too.

More importantly, a lot of it involves complex moral judgments that can't really be reduced to formulas. For example, let's say that on average, social media doesn't make teen suicides significantly more frequent. But are OK with any number of teens killing themselves because of Instagram? Many people might categorically reject this for reasons that can't be dissected in utilitarian terms. That's just humanity.

My point isn't that it's automatically harmful, simply that there is a very strong incentive to protect the revenue. That makes it daunting to study these harms.

> On the other hand The WSJ, Guardian, and other media outlets have published incorrect information on the same events. The primary method that people had to discover that this information was incorrect was social media.

I agree with your point here too, and I don't think the solution is to completely stop or get rid of social media. But, the problem I see is there are tons of corners of social media where you can still see the original lies being repeated as if they are fact. In some spaces they get challenged, but in others they are echoed and repeated uncritically. That is what concerns me - long debunked rumors and lies that get repeated because they feel good.

> If anything education is required to teach people to discuss opposing views without rising to anger or personal attacks.

I think many people are actually capable of discussing opposing views without it becoming so inflammatory... in person. But algorithmic amplification online works against that and the strongest, loudest, quickest view tends to win in the attention landscape.

My concern is that social media is lowering people's ability to discuss things calmly, because instead of a discussion amongst acquaintances everything is an argument is against strangers. And that creates a dynamic where people who come to argue are not arguing against just you, but against every position they think you hold. We presort our opponents into categories based on perceived allegiance and then attack the entire image, instead of debating the actual person.

But I don't know if that can fixed behaviorally, because the challenge of social media is that the crowd is effectively infinite. The same arguments get repeated thousands of times, and there's not even a guarantee that the person you are arguing against is a real person and not just a paid employee, or a bot. That frustration builds into a froth because the debate never moves, it just repeats.

The actions of several democratic governments is evidence that there is enough popular support for these actions to argue for a broader trend. And before you try for a gotcha, I am well aware that a democratic government can enact regulations without a direct vote proving that a majority of people support such an action. But inasmuch as a government reflects the will of the governed, etc etc etc.

The bans might be unfounded or well founded, you might agree with them or not, but clearly the idea that social media might be bad has spread beyond substack

It shows it's not just a debate on substack though

I would replace "it doesn't help a bit" with "it doesn't solve the problem". My casual browsing experience is that X is much more intense / extreme than Facebook.

Of course, the bigger problem is the algorithm - if the extreme is always pushed to the top, then it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 0.001% - the a big enough pool, you only see extremes.

If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend. Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.

The rational tolerant society you imagine is so far fetched we don't even pretend it can exist even in fantasies.