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The case against social media is stronger than you think

arachnemag.substack.com

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Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#81

Post by Lerc »

solid_fuel wrote: post #72
Lerc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The problem is that having an incentive to hide harms is being used as evidence for the harm, whether it exists or not. Surely the same argument could be applied that companies would be incentivised to make a product that was non-harmful over one that was…

> The problem is that having an incentive to hide harms is being used as evidence for the harm, whether it exists or not. No, the incentive to hide harm is being given as a reason that studies into harm would be suppressed, not as evidence of harm in and of itself. This is a direct response to your original remark that "Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litiga…

>No, the incentive to hide harm is being given as a reason that studies into harm would be suppressed, not as evidence of harm in and of itself. This is a direct response to your original remark that "Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack."

That seems like a fair argument. I don't think it means that it grants opinions the weight of truth. I think it would make it fair to identify and criticise suppression of research and advocate for a mechanism by which such research can be conducted. An approach that I would support in this area was a tax or levy on companies with large numbers of users that could be ear-marked for funding independent research regarding the welfare of their user base and on society as a whole.

>Short term gains always take precedence.

That seems a far worthier problem to address.

>If you dig through history there are hundreds of examples of companies knowingly harming their users

I don't deny that these things exist, I simply believe that it is not inevitable.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#82

Post by timeon »

stevage wrote: post #35
xnx wrote: post #17

Social media would be entirely different if there were no monetization on political content. There's a whole lot of ragebaiting/engagement-farming for views. I don't know how to filter for political content, but it's worth a shot. People are free to say whatever they want, but they don't need to get paid for it.

Strangely I never see political content on YouTube. Maybe the algorithm worked out quickly I'm simply not interested. Whereas twitter/mastodon/bluesky are awash in it, to the point of making those platforms pretty unusable for me. I guess the difference is that YouTube content creators don't casually drop politics in because it will alienate half their audience and lose revenue. Whereas on those other platforms the p…

Interesting, I do not see politics on Mastodon, while YouTube recommends me not just random politics, but conspiracy theories about politics.

On Mastodon, those I follow do not post about politics and if they do it is hidden behind content warning.

YouTube is probably location based as I have no account there and that type of content is relatively mainstream where I live.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#83

Post by armchairhacker »

Llamamoe wrote: post #13
Lerc wrote: post #11

Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack. A lot of things suck right now. Social media definitely give us the ability to see that. Using your personal ideology to link correlations is not the same thing as finding causation. There will be undoubtedly be some damaging aspects of social media, simply because it is large and complex. It would be hi…

I feel like regardless of all else, the fact of algorithmic curation is going to be bad, especially when it's contaminated by corporate and/or political interests. We have evolved to parse information as if its prevalence is controlled by how much people talk about it, how acceptable opinions are to voice, how others react to them. Algorithmic social media intrinsically destroy that. They change how information sprea…

No doubt the specific algorithms used by social media companies are bad. But what is "non-algorithmic" curation?

Chronological order: promotes spam, which will be mostly paid actors. Manual curation by "high-quality, trusted" curators: who are they, and how will they find content? Curation by friends and locals: this is probably an improvement over what we have now, but it's still dominated by friends and locals who are more outspoken and charismatic; moreover, it's hard to maintain, because curious people will try going outside their community, especially those who are outcasts.

EDIT: Also, studies have shown people focus more on negative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias) and sensational (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salience_(neuroscience)#Salien...) things (and thus post/upvote/view them more), so an algorithm that doesn't explicitly push negativity and sensationalism may appear to.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#85

Post by foxglacier »

slg wrote: post #62
NoahZuniga wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might live in an extremely free country and have no fear about political prosecution but still fear social prosecution. 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.

>If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend. So you want your friend to be able to anonymously express their racism while being able to hide it from you? I can't imagine advocating for that as a desired goal rather than a negative side effect. >Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly agains…

I live in a society as toxic as that. It's New Zealand. One of the minor parties currently in government aims to undo systemic racism. However, the popular opinion is that they are the racists because of that. I don't dare tell people that I voted for them because I'll be judged as a racist by some of my family members and loose friends. If I say it on the local internet groups, others will be hostile to me for it. Anonymity helps people to speak up about these issues.

How do we solve those bigger issues when we live in an emperor's new clothes society? Wait for children who haven't learnt the rules to point them out?

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#86

Post by nathan_compton »

Lerc wrote: post #11

Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack. A lot of things suck right now. Social media definitely give us the ability to see that. Using your personal ideology to link correlations is not the same thing as finding causation. There will be undoubtedly be some damaging aspects of social media, simply because it is large and complex. It would be hi…

All this is good except that to achieve any kind of actual political action in this actual universe in which we live, we must use rhetoric. Asking people to be purely rational is asking them to fail to change anything about the way our culture works.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#87

Post by nathan_compton »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #78
jacobedawson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strongest counterpoint to that is the intense chilling effect that zero anonymity would have on political dissent and discourse that doesn't match the status quo or party line. I feel that would be much more dangerous for our society than occasionally suffering the consequence of some radicalized edge cases.

Well, perhaps people should think twice before stirring the pot. Maybe the incentive to get your 20 seconds of fame by making some snappy comment on a public figure's post is part of what's driving incivility online.

I actually don't think incivility per se is the problem. The problem is that social media encourages us to be inauthentic because we all subconsciously cater to the gaze, both courting its attention and terrified of it at the same time. This is way worse than people being rude.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#88

Post by mallowdram »

The missing link to our epistemic collapse is language. The acceleration of language, which is arbitrary, accelerates language distortion. The contagion on social media is merely a symptom of the disease of language.

“Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades” https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2102061118

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#89

Post by scarface_74 »

gdulli wrote: post #65
scarface_74 wrote: post #7

I really hate the narrative that social media has increased polarization knowing that my still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow south where they were literally separated from society because of the color of their skin. The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.

But we made progress away from that and now we've regressed back towards it recently, aided by social media.

Exactly when did we make progress? In 2008 - before social media really took off how much of the population was a yelling that a Black man wasn’t a “real American” and was a “secret Muslim”?

Before then we had the “Willie Horton ads”. Not to mention that Clinton performatively oversaw the electrocution of a mentally challenged Black man to show that he was tough on crime.

https://jacobin.com/2016/11/bill-clinton-rickey-rector-death...

Yes I know that Obama was also a champion of laws like the defense of marriage act. We have always demonized other in this country. It was just hidden before.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#90

Post by ivewonyoung »

bluebarbet wrote: post #69
alisonatwork wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately most of what people understand as "social media" is not decentralized, and most of the biggest names on Substack in particular come directly out of "traditional media", which is exactly why it's not a real alternative. Substack is just another newspaper except now readers have to pay for every section they want to read.

The difference between traditional and social media is not just technical. Traditional media hosts a profession (journalism) with a code of ethics, editorial oversight, minimal standards, a mission of truth-seeking. It's easy to be cynical but those things have generally served us well. The Substack jungle is not a good replacement.

> Traditional media hosts a profession (journalism) with a code of ethics, editorial oversight, minimal standards, a mission of truth-seeking

Which traditional media outlets follow those things nowadays? Genuine question, looking for information and news to consume.

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