I've thought long about this and can only think of one way to regulate them. I would propose that people are allowed x degrees of separation. As a regular user I can only go n+2 connections. After that the content is not seen no matter how popular. It will kill virility but should reign in stupidity being broadcast. To increase your separation score you must merit it with a reason and stick to it.
Historically I've avoided expressing my views on abolishment but now people are trying to develop fear-mongering strategies around decentralization, so here I am back at abolition. I'd love to find a happy medium but I don't think it's possible. Social media companies, search companies, national news (who is dependent on social media for income), politicians (who are dependent on social media for likes and shares), and law enforcement working in coordination to do an arbitrarily good thing (disrupt the flow of misinformation) was both eye opening and terrifying. These tools can be used for good but they're also the keystone tools of autocracy and are used largely for reasons that require interpretation and narrative following.
My point is that we don't need these kind of problems. We have space exploration ahead of us, major advancements in technology are still needed, and we need a continuum of people who are willing to work together despite whatever differences they may have ideologically and otherwise. I don't think limiting scope or killing virility will achieve these ends.
Since we disagree, and I imagine there are many people with the same opinions as both you and me, why not make it opt-in, so you only encounter social media if you choose to make an account, and then still only see it if you go to it and/or install it intentionally? Wait, that's how it is now...
I deleted Instagram months ago and I have friends that have routinely told me that profile is still up, just in a limited capacity. How is this opt-in?
An even better example of it's non-opt-in nature is that I went as far as to ban all social media via my VPN and router. The result was unexpected when looking at American news, it often quotes from and derives sources from social media. Reading news articles that were mostly Twitter statements or reactions made it hard to discern what the articles were even about in the first place.
Did you temporarily disable your account instead of deleting it? Deletion appears to only be available from web/mobile web, which is not great but deletion is only three steps. [1]
1) You're saying social media isn't opt in because they're tracking users off of their social media platform. This doesn't have anything to do with social media, but rather the pages you're going to have chosen to use a service provided by Facebook to track users. They could use another behavior targeting service, but chose Facebook's.
2) You're saying Instagram deletion didn't work. It sounds like you deactivated it instead of deleted it. I haven't heard this be an issue (it'd be widely reported if it were)
3) You're saying it's not opt-in because people refer to it in the news. In that case, nothing is opt-out because people have the right to refer to anything they want. Making this opt-out would mean censoring other people from saying things online or referring to things online, because of your views.
2. I have already answered this. I deleted it. I'm happy to share the email that shows I deleted it, not deactivated. I additionally deleted my data as well, so I have two emails to share if you so desire.
3. There are websites that do this and it's not considered censoring. Reddit regularly has rules against doxxing or naming as well as proper attribution. People have gone as far as to setup bots and alerts to remove information or give proper attribution. This idea is not revolutionary and your presentation of it is maximalist at best.
I think the issues you're describing don't have anything to do with the social media service aspect, but more like bad practices of an online company. So I'd agree we should push for online tech companies to fix many issues, including security issues and offsite tracking and proper attribution, etc.
But I don't believe in your original argument that we should abolish social media, because a lot of people want to use social media and it's not your right to stop them.
> But I don't believe in your original argument that we should abolish social media, because a lot of people want to use social media and it's not your right to stop them.
I'm happy to give up decentralization or abolishment if someone can find a way to ensure that social media is treated like the extension to free speech that it is, that privacy is ensured strongly, and that virality is a thing of the past.
It’s not great for anyone in your address book or photos that didn’t opt in.
Secondly, they purposely set up a walled garden such that you can't see some things unless you make an account. Like say, the thousands of businesses with no website but only a Facebook presence. Or reading political discourse directly from politicians on Twitter. Or, as is very often noted, the easiest place to get support from companies seems to be on social media.
The latter isn't really easy to solve. One can say who cares, don't join then. But it can put you at certain disadvantages.
Why do they have a responsibility to 'reign in stupidity' in the first place? Who gets to decide what's stupid and what's not?
I understand removing illegal content. I understand providing guidelines around content that may not be acceptable for minors. I understand removing (or compartmentalizing) content that is "off topic" (such as a platform dedicated to eSports not wanting traditional sports content). But every attempt that can be made to 'reign in stupidity' means censorship of one form or another and will inevitably be abused.
I really wonder if it will do that. Probably not.
That's an absolutely terrible idea. For example, I doubt you and I are two degrees away. I would have never seen this.
I doubt I have two degrees of separation from most of the interesting content posted on this site.
Well, then, you'd never have seen this terrible idea, and nor would basically anyone else. So, the terrible idea, paradoxically, works, by keeping people from seeing terrible ideas!
At the end of the day we've all expanded our minds a bit.
For those with open minds, it's allowed them to learn new things from people far away with very different ideas.
It can do that, but that can also backfire because the current social media platforms aren't trustworthy or transparent.
Advertising, "influencers", fake likes, bots, and all of that let small fringe groups amplify and normalize their ideas, so when open minded people come along, they see thousands of likes and hundreds of people promoting some idea, and they can get the impression it's a much more popular or common idea than it really is.
In other words, social media makes it very easy for a vocal minority to push their views on people, and it's nearly impossible for other users to discover when that's happening.
How do you know that? Civil rights and protest movements in general have traditionally not relied on social media or even digital communication of any sort. Couldn't the mechanisms once employed to organize activists still work today? The answer is yes, they can. I know for a fact the Baptist church down the street from me participated in organizing many of the protests in my city this summer.
I'm not so sure about that. That kind of policy would definitely put the breaks on uncoordinated viral peer-to-peer spread, but that just might lead to resurgence of coordinating organizations acting as clearinghouses for such things.
That could be good, at least in places with decent civil liberties, since I believe broadcast speech is bit like code: it's better when there's some peer review and sanity checks before it's distributed.
People often retort that no one cares about decentralization, well we're going to find out if that's really true over the rest of the decade.
As a thought experiment, what if the degrees of separation were less rigidly enforced, but people's "power of voice" decays the further it goes from those who directly follow them, resulting in a similar result? Then for every user, there's a probability they'll see or not see a given post (significantly reducing as the degree of separation increases). Clearly this isn't ideal and there's compounding factors (if you have 3 friends share it, should that probability be additive?)
Share rate limits in WhatsApp led to people imploring others to copy paste fake news to share it to others, so clearly this isn't as simple as limiting normal shares.
Prior to the Internet, all communication included substantially larger amounts of friction. Broadcasting your opinion required acquiring TV, Radio, or Newspaper time/space. Sure there were low cost alternatives like standing in the public square and shouting your beliefs, but that is a far cry from tweeting out something hateful from the comfort of your couch while you eat pizza and watch unlimited streaming video content.
The friction was both a drag on productivity AND a safety mechanism to prevent mass spread of inaccurate or low quality content. I feel like the Internet removed all of that friction which is great in many cases, but particularly bad for accuracy of information. It's like the gossip that used to spread through towns by word of mouth, can now become truth within days just by going viral. And once enough people hear the same thing, isn't it now true?
Perception is reality. Just look to the divisions in the world. Each side when talking amongst themselves has one truth while the opposing side has a completely different one. Doesn't matter which truth is accurate when both sides are unified in their belief that it is their side's story that is correct.
Friction is necessary, to at least slow the contagion of inaccurate information. Right now the incentives are misaligned. Viral content that makes the consumer feel good provides the most economic return for companies like Google and Facebook. While the system is setup to reward this, how could you expect a profit seeking business to do anything else but optimize for it?
I don't think this is correct. I remember a bunch of outlets from the seventies and eighties which had all of: far reach, inaccurate and low quality content. It was just restricted to few influential people with enough money. I think this is the reason why social media are fought that hard: these people lose their influence (not that I am fond of social media). The past was not that rose as we like to paint it.
In general, the reduction in communication friction is THE big advance brought about by the Internet. Instant, effortless, and basically free communication for everyone everywhere.
Businesses like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are economically incentivized to push as hard as possible to get you to consume and create more so that they can show more ads. That means that when a video catches the attention of 50 people long enough to show an ad, then they can quickly encourage the spread of that video very rapidly to maximize that attention grabbing clip.
Nowhere in that equation is there an evaluation of the benefit/harm of that content to the end user. The evaluation is solely on whether it grabs attention. Because the product now being sold is human attention and its being bought by advertisers. The humans being influenced have no say and don't actually reap any gains from the transaction.
Car wrecks are attention grabbing and slow down traffic even the other side of the highway as people gawk. But of course they are not great for anyone....UNLESS you somehow have a business model that makes more money when there are more car wrecks. What happens then?
Just recently the Spiegel (a somewhat reputable weekly journal in Germany) had a series of completely or partial made up stories. The maker was able to place them because they fit so well into Spiegel's narrative. Such that (almost) nobody asked questions.
We are lied to from all sides.
I learned from those days that you had to be careful as what you read on a forum was highly likely (at least in some circles where expertise is limited, the topic is complicated, and questions are plentiful) to be plain nonsense, or pseudo science.
On the other hand though, the increase in friction arguably reduces the scale of the problem you cite - making it financially based is far from ideal, but it at least reduced the breadth of the problem space to some extent.
Absent the centralised media of old, broadcast simply wasn't an option in the past - at best you could try to multicast by shouting in the corner of a bar at as many friends as you could muster, or stand in the street and talk to groups of people.
Unicast was scalable and easily accessible - just pick up the phone, or write a letter. But the average person probably couldn't gain access to a significant multicast group without first gaining the "backing" of their group. And they could then attempt to grow from there. Clearly that's far from perfect as echo chambers are an issue today as well! But it does feel to me like the lack of friction, coupled with nearly instant access to a global, un-namespaced platform, and the ability to broadcast, has just removed a little too much friction. I guess the big challenge is working out how to add enough appropriate friction to improve the situation. Or do we need to revert to a more namespaced internet again?
To an extent I think the big digital platforms already do this, just in a non transparent way, to try to curate the most engaging and click-worthy content, rather than the most thought provoking.
Virility is great if social contagions are assumed benign. I think that's an assumption many no longer make.
You have the right to speak, not the right to be heard.
If government prevents people hearing you speak, that's a pretty serious curb on freedom of association.
Nothing says you have to be broadcast or promoted and nothing says you can impose on people who don't want to hear you, but the government telling people they can't talk to certain other people is not the same thing.
Also, in another comment you said "This is also great for hiding and suppressing organization of social uprising. This would have totally suppressed all the BLM content this summer."
Is this sarcasm and you are contradicting yourself or do you actually think it would have been great to suppress BLM organization and protests?
Courts apply laws to new technology all the time. And in this situation, it is very obvious that the courts would rule government restrictions on social media, that make it illegal for people to broadcast on social media, would be unconstitutional.
> What can we try then
Well we can't ban people from using social media, or for broadcasting to many people. That would very obviously be unconstitutional.
How do you define this? Seems impossible to define and easy to circumvent.
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By your own definition, I wouldn't be able to see or respond to your content since we're likely separated by more than two degrees.
You just killed the whole dating app industry. And job boards. And regional marketplaces.
It would be better to be able to manage your own feed, things like chronological order, filtering, etc.