X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

Of course there is a but coming! When twitter launched, I immediately felt like Twitter itself was a distillation of a fascistic impulse: the idea that a curt and pithy phrase, stripped of nuance, is not only a superior way to communicate, but the only way to communicate. (I'm using "fascistic" here not to incite, but for lack of a better term: I think everyone has an impulse towards the safety of political simplicity, and that modern democracy is founded on complexity, i.e. lots of opinions, lots of checks and balances, lots of persuasive argument required to achieve things). I feel that the very structure of throttled meaning is what made Twitter in particular such a platform for mass outrage and negativity.

Fast foward a decade, and the twitter model of simplicity is now the normal mode of discourse on social media. If something is not a few seconds long, its reach is quite limited. This means that simple things, like propaganda, are easier to articulate, and complex things that acknowledge the subtlety of actual life get buried.

Taken out of political context, a good example is videos of altercations between people (fights, arguments, etc) that become viral. As a viewer, I almost immediately feel outrage and righteous anger against the perceived victim of the altercation. But sometimes some context comes to light: the perceived victim is actually the aggressor, or the situation is much more complicated than it seemed. Putting this back in the political context, I see quick videos getting passed around that do a similar thing: take an event quite out of context in order to manufacture outrage against a particular group. Of course there is a word for this: propaganda.

I'm not a technological doomer: I'm quite intrigued as to what is happening, and my impulse is not to shackle it. But what I'm witnessing is that propaganda (or otherwise, events taken out of context) spread like lightning on social media, and I am sympathetic to attempts by platforms to somehow provide context or moderation to that spread. The mob mentality is real. I share the Mayor's concern about Twitter, because even though it was a sewer from the start, in my estimation, by its platformization of epistemological constraint, the fact that it is walking back attempts to staunch the spread of its own demons is concerning.

I do think a healthy public debate in a functioning, free speech democracy, is essential to its lifeblood. But for that debate to function, it must be done in good faith, and with some shared understanding of truth and context. While I see that happening in some places on social media, it's generally on well moderated forums in which people accept that bad faith arguers will be banned.

Like I said I don't have a clear sense of the solution to all this. State sponsored propaganda was all too effective before social media, and I can see social media undermining the monopoly of the state on the dissemination of that propaganda. But perhaps the pendulum will swing too far to the other side, where blatant bad faith, grassroots propaganda, and untruth successfully steer public opinion.