I used to think social media was good because thanks to them, governments couldn’t fabricate false narratives. But it turns out that they are still doing it.
I guess it depends exactly what you mean by “social media.”
If you mean the general ability for people to communicate over the internet with each other in a public way: No. It is unequivocally good for people to have more access to information and be able to communicate freely with people around the world. These kinds of developments in communication and information distribution technology have always lead to big, usually positive social changes. The prime example of this is the printing press. By greatly lowering the cost of mass producing books, it allowed more people to become literate and rather than relying on the church or other authorities handing down knowledge to them, they were able to read directly from the source as well as produce their own works. This can be considered a heavily contributing factor to the social movements that followed over the next few centuries, The protestant reformation, the enlightenment and the revolutions against feudalism that it inspired, etc.
Did people print books with misinformation? Yeah. Did governments print books which tried to reinforce their rule? Of course. Does that mean books were a mistake? You would have a really hard time convincing me that they were.
Similarly, social media has allowed us to get our information and talk to each other free of the old gatekeepers. Corporate news media used to be the only way to know what was going on in the rest of the world. They chose what to cover and how to frame that coverage. While you could learn some things from it, what they omit is often more important than what they report. Before liberating the camps, most Americans had no idea of the full extent of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Today, we see the cold hard reality of the genocide going on in Gaza and that has done much to shift people’s opinions on it and start to take more action.
Before social media, your ability to talk to people was pretty much limited by who was immediately around you or who you knew the phone number of. It’s hard to organize people like that. It’s hard to empathize with people far away who you’ve never met. The gov can easily stoke xenophobia because they were entirely in control of the way people perceived and interacted with that population. They could convince people that those people in some other country are all crazy people who hate us and hate freedom and wish to destroy us even to their own detriment. With social media, you can just talk to a lot of these people directly. You see that despite some cultural differences, they’re normal ass people like us who go about their lives just like us and want the same things as us. They watch the same movies as us. They play the same games as us and even play with us sometimes. It’s a lot harder to hate someone once you know them like that.
But now we reach the crux of the issue which is specifically talking about corporate social media. The profit incentive always leads to decisions which compromise the very purpose of the thing. Algorithms are a borderline necessity to manage the unfathomable amount of information uploaded to the internet every minute. However, personalized advertising and the mass surveillance that it requires can chill speech, warp what kinds of discussions and content go on these platforms, and corrupt search results and algorithmic recommendations. They can show things that are beneficial to advertisers, they can optimize around engagement to get people to spend more time scrolling through ads, creating addictions, they can optimize around negativity because people respond to that more than positive or neutral things, etc.
And that’s just the pure capitalist logic side of this. Obviously governments and other interest groups see the power of social media to shape perception of the world and they are terrified of losing their monopoly on “truth.” So they make use of it themselves or worse: They collaborate with the tech companies to mooch off their mass surveillance or tweak algorithms to guide conversations.
This unholy nexus of capitalist interests and government surveillance and propaganda IS a problem. I’m not entirely sure I would call it a “mistake” though. Most of these sites didn’t start out this way. They did the anti-competitive thing where they started out offering a good service at a low price (usually free) and as they gained a dominant market share, they slowly shifted to less user friendly policies. That plus the network effect made concentrating internet activity on these handful of sites less of a decision and more of an inevitability. What we do from here likely requires regulation. As much as I like the fediverse, it seems very unlikely that people will move en masse to networks that barely have any people or content. Of course such regulation can’t really be expected to solve the problems while our governments are controlled by capitalists. So there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
But I think despite all of that, they trend is broadly moving in the right direction. It might not seem like that if you look at our governments and corporations, but fascism is ultimately a reaction to the threat of popular will taking away the ruling class’s power and privilege. The very fact that we are seeing this backlash from the top means IT’S WORKING. We are getting closer to class consciousness. Like I said previously, humans have a negativity bias, so it can be easy to focus on the bad participants of the internet. However, the thing to keep in mind is that a lot of that is bots/astroturfing or people being duped by them and that algorithms focus on negative news and interactions to boost engagement, all of which create a warped sense of scale for how much of the internet is reactionary.
You need to understand all of that if you want to effectively utilize social media for all of the benefits it can provide.
russia’s propaganda game is bush league compared to the americans. you should see the amaze-balls industrial, world-wide scale of how the americans get their propaganda laundered through ngo’s like usaid and national endowment for democracy and then doles out in tiny pieces like dog pills in a dog treats on media platforms like reddit, facebook, wikipedia, cnn, npr, fox new, cbc, abc, bbc, le monde, der speigel, etc.
here’s the stanford/bowling-green detail of it: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/r/etd/search/10?p10_accession_num=bgsu1711480290212777&clear=10&session=112965025945105
Got a tor friendly version of that article?
does the link not work for you somehow?
EDIT: maybe you’re asking for an easier to understand version and the best i can do is this ai summary:
This dissertation, completed by Benjamin Thomason at Bowling Green State University in 2024, critically examines the role of US “democracy promotion” as a tool of empire, focusing on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Core Argument: Drawing on a critical Gramscian Marxist perspective, the author argues that the NED and USAID function as “engines of intellectual warfare” in US foreign intervention. They mobilize communications and organizational resources to reinforce elite hegemonic narratives, thereby facilitating neoliberal and neoconservative US foreign policy objectives abroad.
Methodology & Historical Context: The study traces how covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) media and civil society operations during the Cold War evolved into the institutionalized, “pseudo-overt” democracy promotion apparatus that served as a pretext and method for US interventionism after the Cold War.
Case Studies: To support its thesis, the dissertation examines several major US interventions since 1983, including:
The Contra War in 1980s Nicaragua Operation Cyclone in 1980s Afghanistan The 2000 overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in Yugoslavia The 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela The 2004 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti The 2014 Euromaidan events in UkraineSyria Focus: A dedicated chapter analyzes the US-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War from 2011. It details how USAID provided monetary, media, and civil society support to what the author characterizes as primarily sectarian, theocratic, and Salafi rebel groups opposing the Ba’athist government, demonstrating the “moderate rebel industry” and narrative-control infrastructure.
No. Capitalist control over social media was a mistake.
Yes.
Social media is a tool, as others have mentioned, but when you get down to brass tacks, everything is either a tool, food, or art.
It’s a tool very few are responsible enough to use properly, and that causes great harm when misused.
Letting the oligarch class take control over social media was like giving an angry toddler a handgun, except the toddler can be bribed to give up the gun with candy and the oligarchs never will.
In the end, I don’t feel it’s worth the trouble of keeping around.
No. It is a tool. Like all tools humans have created, we’ve decided to bash the working class over the head with it.
Unequivocally YES, humanity was much better off before. MySpace was ok, you could make a profile and link with other like minded people, but Facebook quickly turned everything to trash. Constant “sharing” of shit posts has been extremely detrimental to society. Now that it is largely populated and propagated by bots, it’s even more ruinous.
Nope. Capitalist social media was a mistake, as a corollary of capitalism being a mistake, itself a corollary of developing hierarchical and authoritarian societies being a mistake.
The Fediverse itself provides an imperfect but serviceable implementation of a liberatory social media. The fact that we are both speaking to each other on proletarian class-conscious (in particular, anarchist) servers demonstrates that social media can be useful to spread class-conscious perspectives, in particular anarchist perspectives in direct opposition to State control.
Aren’t capitalism and hierarchical societies in general a necessary stage of human development?
The indus valley civilisation was just as technologically advanced as ancient rome despite having a much lower population. If you are interested in the origins of hierarchy, LuckyBlackCat made a good video about that.
It’s very debatable, but I also think it’s not that relevant. The world doesn’t exist in a static, idealized form for all eternity. Things change over time through their interactions with other things. That’s at the core of dialectical materialism. It can be useful to analyze the past and how particular forms of social and economic arrangements influenced the development of human societies, but I don’t think it really says much about what we should be doing now. We don’t have the counterexample of a world that developed differently. All we can say is what happened. The world developed that way, for all the good and bad that came with it. But we don’t live in a world where most people are illiterate hunter gatherers or peasant farmers anymore. We need to analyze the reality we exist in as it is now without presuming that this represents some natural state.
Aren’t capitalism and hierarchical societies in general a necessary stage of human development?
My answer is no. Capitalism and hierarchical societies have achieved impressive things…in spite of their capitalism and hierarchy, not because of it. If our society went directly to anarchy, we would have been better off by now.
How do you see anarchy in the past (like, say, in ancient Rome)? And why do you think humanity went to hierarchy? Genuinely curious.
How do you see anarchy in the past (like, say, in ancient Rome)?
… Not to be contentious, but ancient Rome was not anarchy in any meaningful sense. Like not even the dictionary definition. Rome was pretty firmly lorded over by a State, and that State maintained the “”“order”“” of the ruling class for generations.
What anarchists mean by “anarchy” is a society without hierarchy. Some hunter-gatherer societies were surprisingly horizontal in their organization, but these societies were not, in general, anarchic, because they likely still had some hierarchies like sexism, in-group/out-group dynamics, and authoritarian social structures. We can look to the past for examples of specific horizontal and anti-authoritarian practices, but none of these societies were truly anarchic because they had not yet grasped the importance of abolishing all hierarchy.
Better (but imperfect) historical approximations of anarchy at scale were Revolutionary Catalonia and the Makhnovshcina.
And why do you think humanity went to hierarchy?
I think the big thing was agriculture. IMO, we were not psychologically prepared as a species to master agriculture so quickly. Some people were able to build up huge stockpiles of resources within a few generations. Once they got their power, they refused to give it up. Thus, the powerful structured our world around their whims over generations. Capitalism is the latest such scheme. Hierarchies maximize the variables authoritarians care about: control, domination, and abuse. It is only natural that abusers establish systems that best reward their kind.
To be clear, I’m absolutely not against agriculture. Quite the opposite! In my view, actively making sure that the fruits of humanity are equally available to all is necessary to break the feedback loop that enabled authoritarians to take power. But more generally: we need to bake horizontalness, autonomy, agency, and free association into all future systems and organizations from minute one.
How do you see anarchy in the past (like, say, in ancient Rome)?
… Not to be contentious, but ancient Rome was not anarchy in any meaningful sense.
Okay, I might have worded that bad. What I meant was how do you see historical societies that were hierarchical, like ancient Rome, going anarchical instead?
IMO, we were not psychologically prepared as a species to master agriculture so quickly.
So the problem is dismatch between psychological and material development?
Social media run by corporations based on algorithms designed to maximize engagement was a mistake. It may, however have been inevitable.
By that I mean I’m not sure a clever person with a time machine could go back 25 years and prevent it from having roughly the popularity and influence it does now even if someone with a quarter century of future knowledge tried to outcompete it with something that isn’t centralized or optimized for engagement. Those traits were evolutionary advantages over that time period.
social media was unavoidable. there’s just too much curiosity about the novelty. but yeah, it’s questionable today.
Social media was not a mistake, but unregulated social media was.
The whole incentive for businessman to ‘innovate’ in tech is to skirt around the law. We have had laws about theft for centuries, but now since its ‘digital’ theft we have to write new laws for some reason?
Just an example, but social media/tech unregulated is what got us here.
When governments tried to regulate digital stuff 30 years ago, we got anti-circumvention laws that let corporations put digital locks on everything that are illegal to break. It would be hard to convince me governments regulating social media 20 years ago would have been anything short of a disaster.
I doubt it would have been all that different, because those laws would have been written by the same capitalist class that runs corporate social media today.
Social media was not a mistake, but unregulated social media was.
You’re so right, the open source, non-profit threadiverse would be so much better if bourgeois states censored us.
I agree, the problem is the Sillicon Valley, VC-backed business model. If it was allowed to develop slower and less commercially, what would evolve would have been much less unhealthy for society
Social media was not a mistake, it’s a deliberate calculated attack on historical norms of communication and relationship building. A tool to make a deliberate shift from those with fewer but more meaningful relationships to drive change, to utilizing the power of minimally informed crowds turned into mobs that do your bidding.
Depends what you mean by social media.
Digital socialization is not necessarily bad.
Easy self-publishing at scale is not necessarily bad.
A marketplace for human attention, where products are optimized for “stickiness” and “eyeball-hours” is bad, but doesn’t necessarily need to be social media. (Buzzfeed comes to mind, and Ricki Lake before that.)
The social media that we ended up with is essentially a chokehold on the means of digital socialization, forcing users to perform for an audience instead of connecting to individuals, and capturing the economic value of that performance as an asset for the platform owners.
We could’ve ended up with something quite different.
Here’s a hot take though:
Products that are built under these conditions will inevitably tend towards a shape that reflects the logic of the market, and they continue to reflect that logic even when financial incentives are removed.
For instance, Lemmy is very Reddit-shaped, and therefore reflects some of the market logic behind Reddit, even after you stick it on the fediverse.
Edit: Barry’s Economics has an excellent video on exactly what sucks about the social dynamics baked into these platforms: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU
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I have the utopian hope that this is just a matter of circumstances… and how badly off they are. The majority is still doing so well that they can afford to be “apolitical.”
I share your pain, comrade. The American-NATO empire adeptly wields social media to manipulate narratives, because Big Tech has the backing of the state.
FYI The link you provided is related to an example of one such narrative, called Russiagate, which was/is an attempt by the American propaganda machine to censor dissident views by characterizing them all as the product of its official state enemies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F9QzXjUB10
Abigail busts some myths about social media and democracy
