brownpau on getting out of social mediaFive years ago in “Re-owning” I lamented that social media sites incentivized us to post our content to ephemeral walled gardens rather than our own web spaces. We spent years feeding our souls in short bursts to marketing data aggregators, in exchange for the momentary thrill of a fave or a retweet — or just because that was the online space where our family and friends had gone.
And then it got worse. These days posting to Twitter or Facebook feels more like being complicit in their own crimes of negligence against society as social media matures into a viral disinformation amplifier rather than an authentic communications medium.
He has an impressively long (and yet not even complete) list of links about the devastating effect of social media on nations around the world.
It's a handy reference. For me, a lot of reading about the harm that comes from social media has made it so that I sometimes splutter when I have to answer the question, "What's wrong with social media?" It's like answering "What's wrong with Trump?" A million reasons all get stuck in the same small door that is the part of my brain that controls sentence formulation.
I think the tl;dr version of why I got away is that they've built anxiety machines. They've quantified the things you say and have made you eager to see what numbers they get. And they use these numbers to get things in front of you that you'll react to. Whether it enriches you or makes you suffer doesn't matter. Whether the things are true or false doesn't matter. And while machine learning accelerates this, they don't need it to do this; you or your friends will share these compelling bits of content. It's part of the design.
As a result, people will get harassed and brigaded. People will act with a short fuse. People will doubt what's true and seek their own version of the truth. Trump and those like him will always win in those environments. The reason Nazis aren't kicked off of Twitter is because they create a lot of engagement. The people that agree with them engage. The people that don't agree with them will either engage with Nazi tweets or create their own threads about it that others engage with.
Whatever happens, Twitter increases MAU. You can tell Jack that he is shit and should get rid of the Nazis, but as long as you do it on Twitter, Twitter benefits.