Obviously everyone has different opinions on the matter, but I’m beginning to suspect that the Venn diagram of the two sides of this debate has a lot of overlap in the middle. It seems we’ve entered an era where it’s trendy to despise social media platforms regardless of what they do or don’t do. Cynicism reigns supreme in the public discourse about social media platforms.
Everyone seems to carve out an exception for their preferred platform, though. Twitter users mock Facebook and brag about deleting their FB accounts. Redditors mock Twitter users. Hacker News comments are frequently self-congratulatory for “quitting” other social media platforms and so on.
Ironically, the more we hear about social media platforms, the more people seem to forget that these are really driven by concerning underlying social issues. Why are so many people willingly subscribing to the people peddling misinformation in the first place? It’s hardly limited to one platform. The prevailing narrative that a handful of engineers are shaping the thoughts of the nation by manipulating “the algorithm” to emphasize divisive content ignores the fact that people seem more eager than ever to engage with it. Some times I suspect that what the social media cynics really want is for us to return to a time when the communicating on the internet was only accessible to the few of us who were willing and able to figure it out. Now that the genie is out of the bottle and everyone can access global communication with ease, we need to accept that these are societal problems, not just the side effects of a few engineers tweaking algorithms.
It’s also time that we start expecting people to take some responsibility for their own social media usage. We’ve spent so much time blaming “the algorithm” that people now treat social media as an uncontrollable black box or even an addictive drug. It’s time we normalized things like muting the friends you don’t want to see in your feed, unfollowing people who rile you up, and otherwise curating the content we all consume. Contrary to what I read online, it’s trivially easy to tune my Facebook feed and use social media responsibly. However, we never hear about responsible use. It’s always just “delete your Facebook account” or other extreme measures that don’t work for grandma who really just doesn’t want to miss out on photos from family. It’s time we start educating people on responsible use instead of preaching social media abstinence as the only solution.