There is no magic solution to preventing people from being people, but it’s still a good thing to not build systems that allow any entity with an internet connection to find, connect, and share content instantly to anyone and everyone all over the world.
Mark Zuckerberg has long held the belief that a more connected world is a better world - and 10 years ago, I was as optimistic as he was. Today, I know for a fact that connecting my grandpa to people in Russia paid a few hundred dollars a month by activists to spread FUD is a terrible idea.
Yes, email, chat, IMs, etc are also being abused - but they all have a certain amount of friction and properties that put them nowhere near the kind of scales that social networks enable.
You can only have one phone conversation at a time due to the nature of the medium, and when it’s over, it’s over - whereas partaking in a Facebook/Twitter thread will feed you an addictive slow drip of notifications over the next few days. People don’t really get their news (in the formal sense) by phone conversations, so media companies aren’t incentivized to flood you with phone conversations about increasingly controversial topics to keep you engaged to generate ad dollars. Because phone conversations are real time and decentralized, no entity can prevent anyone from saying a certain word or mentioning a certain event for instance, the way social networks can and have.
Email is an interesting one - sure there’s spams and scams, but it’s fairly non instantaneous, and the decentralized aspect means that no single entity can choose what emails people will see. Email users also don’t expect their email server to be injecting content in their email queue, or reordering their emails to try to get them to read things that will generate dollars for them. It has its flaws, but people just don’t feel manipulated by their email as a medium (although of course individual emails can manipulate people) .
Social media is just the perfect storm of tapping into human compulsions, a product controlled by a single company which seeks to derive profit above all else, misaligned free market incentives between platforms, advertisers and consumers, etc. This all makes for formidably harmful forces, and responding to the fact that these social networks have determining roles in genocides with vague platitudes such as “but they enable people to find loved ones and report crimes” comes across as a tad disconnected.
And avoiding censorship? Facebook, Twitter, etc cooperate with governments to enable censorship! If you want to avoid censorship, you are much better served by the broader, open, decentralized internet.
In case it isn’t clear, I’m a huge fan of the internet, email, instant messaging, message boards, and so on. Social networks in their current incarnation though are a very destructive virus for human culture.