Knives out for Big Social Media
Tower of Babel, Twitter takeover, E.U. Digital Services Act, Section 230, algorithms, business models, content moderation, mob dynamics, and other fun stuff
One can think of social media as the top layer of the semiconductors / computer / internet / smartphone / apps stack. Arguably, social media apps are having the most profound effect on societies. These effects have been studied and discussed for a few years already. Elon Musk's bid to purchase Twitter and E.U. Digital Services Act stirred the pot and moved the discourse from "how awesome / awful social media is" to "what to do about it." This note is my attempt to summarize, structure, and comprehend the discourse. Comments and discussions are very welcome.
Let's enumerate accusations leveled against major social media platforms, look at the causes of these problems, and review the proposed solutions.
Indictment
The list is long. Social media platforms:
profited from violations of intellectual property law
destroyed journalism in general and local media in particular
wracked our attention and destroyed productivity
caused mental health crisis among teenagers
polarized societies
brought populists to power
They
create monopolistic "walled gardens" and extract exorbitant monopolistic rent
hog talent and capital – in Peter Thiel's words, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."
promote hate speech and other bad behavior; create a toxic online environment where harassment mobs proliferate
are infested with bots
spread disinformation by state actors, conspiracy theorists, trolls, and dimwits
allow malign foreign influence
facilitate cancel culture
are destroying democracy
Quite an indictment! And I probably missed a few grievances.
Do note that the accusers tend to argue about the evils of social media on... Twitter and Facebook. So yes, I think there is an element of a moral panic here. Researchers point out that:
"Fake news" existed long before the internet and print media were quite good at the high art of clickbait. Here is a great explainer cartoon.
We should differentiate between state-directed disinformation (foreign and domestic), commercial advertising scams, and legitimate reporting presented in radical and/or sensational terms to boost engagement.
It's very difficult to measure the impact of social media on politics or mental health. The methodology for doing this is still immature. The existing body of research convincingly identified correlation, but causation is less clear.
It's worth noting that the ever-vigilant Chinese Communist Party sensed the dangers of the internet long before the West woke up to the dark side of social media. Many CCP concerns are about political control, but some overlap with what we worry about. Anyhow, China had its army of censors long before Facebook and Youtube got their armies of content moderators.
Causes
A lot of smart people spent a lot of time figuring these out. Here is my take on what I've read and heard, mainly from the sources below.
Product-centric explanations
It's clear that the ad-based business model is a big part of the problem. "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product," and incentives matter! We have the best product minds developing functionality optimized for engagement and viral spread. These effects are well researched: platforms promote clickbait and radical discourse; their content prioritization algorithms are biased towards conflict…
Note that some prioritization is all but inevitable for products with a newsfeed. Who has the time to scroll through all the posts if you have over, let's say, a hundred contacts to follow? So algorithmic amplification is an essential aspect of all major social media platforms.
Importantly, in the U.S., Section 230 protection absolved social networks of liability for the content they host and prioritize.
Still, all mainstream social media platforms always have some form of content moderation. 4chan and 8chan demonstrate what happens without it. The problem is that moderation is often heavy-handed, opaque, and arbitrarily applied. This has undermined the public trust in the platforms' ability to do it fairly. In general, content moderation is not an engineering problem. More on that later.
Other aspects of product design that make things worse:
Low friction user interfaces whip up quick and thoughtless reactions
Twitter's 280 chars limit encourages simplistic views (threads notwithstanding)
Viral mechanics enable the fast spread of information and turbocharges memes
Anonymity tempts bad behavior
Some of these are easy to fix, given the right incentives. Other problems are not easy at all. Here are a couple of examples:
Opening a social graph API to researchers and software developers sounds like a good idea... until you get Cambridge Analytica. Apparently, APIs are simpler when dealing with computers rather than people.
Requiring real-world identity may discourage bad behavior, but anonymity is essential for disenfranchised people and dissidents in authoritarian countries.
Standard-based interoperable protocols/APIs may promote competition and innovation but slow down innovation – email, messaging, and calendar protocols that stagnated many years ago. Also, standards don't always prevent industry consolidation – just three large providers serve most emails in the U.S.
Few people keep the illusion that content moderation is easy.
Social science explanation
To quote sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, "the real problem of humanity is we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology. A positive exponential future will depend on how effectively that trio handles society".
Jonathan Haidt, the author of "The Righteous Mind" and "The Coddling of the American Mind", recently published a thought-provoking essay on the subject that stirred a lively debate. He draws a broad-brush picture, using the story of the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for what happened to America in the 2010s:
It's been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it's a story about the fragmentation of everything. It's about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It's a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families. Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country's future—and to us as a people.
He blames social media:
Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.
According to Haidt, the first wave of social media platforms
made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable... Early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvements—from the Postal Service through the telephone to email and texting—that helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties.
But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations... They became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will."
Thus "social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting".
Next, Facebook and Twitter added product functionality promoting viral dynamics – "Like", "Share", and "Retweet" buttons.
Shortly after its "Like" button began to produce data about what best "engaged" its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a "like" or some other interaction, eventually including the "share" as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
And bang! This encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics. "The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking."
Haidt contrasts this design with the design of... the U.S. Constitution:
The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
He compares social media to a dart gun:
A mean tweet doesn't kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one's own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It's more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities... Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds, not just in politics but in business, the arts, academia, and elsewhere... However, the warped "accountability" of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.
The dart guns of social media
give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens;
give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority;
by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process
When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don't get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.
The result – well, see the Indictment section above. Haidt concludes his analysis:
In the 20th century, America's shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together. In the 21st century, America's tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.
Ouch! "Public square" of public debate is destroying the "tower" of society...
Renée DiResta points out that part of the problem is that
The public-square metaphor places wholly unrealistic expectations on what social media is, or should be. We have never had even a national public square, let alone a global one, because communities and cultures differ on what norms and values should shape their common spaces.
In other words, technology (communications) ran too far ahead of societal norms and institutions. This happened before – decades of European religious wars followed the invention of printing press.
Solutions
It feels like people are getting serious about dealing with social media externalities. Some solutions being discussed are by governments, others – by the industry; some are strategic, others are tactical.
E.U. Digital Services Act will expand governments' powers to restrict content that promotes terrorism, child sex abuse, hate speech (defined in broad terms), disinformation, commercial fraud, and other speech that poses problems for individual safety or democratic society. Texas's new social media law is a clumsy attempt to solve the content moderation problem. Californian and other U.S. state legislatures are working on their own social media regulations... Many voices call for a review of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, that gives social media platforms immunity from liability for user-generated content. One argument that I found convincing is that algorithmic prioritization is similar to editorial control and thus should negate Section 230 protections.
Major social media platforms are fiddling with their algorithms trying to preserve the cash cows while pacifying both the Left and the Right... And Elon Musk is buying Twitter. This brought Twitter into the focus of discussions.
The importance and potential of Twitter
Twitter is important despite being much smaller than Facebook, Youtube, or Instagram. This is due to the fact that it has become a global public square. Unlike NYT, WSJ, or Washington Post, Twitter is free and multilingual, and its audience is much bigger than of any traditional media outside of China.
Twitter, like Instagram, follows a broadcast model: posts are public by default, and anyone can follow anyone. Unlike Instagram, its default medium is text and links. If Instagram is about aspiration, Twitter provides information. And its speed and information density are unparalleled.
It turns out that Twitter's social graph is extremely valuable. It reflects users' broad interests better than other platforms. Moreover, it's a pretty good tool for discovering sources of near real-time information. Here is Ben Thompson's explanation:
What is valuable is that social graph: while Facebook understands who you know, Twitter, more than any other company, understands what its users are interested in. That is, in theory, much more valuable; said value is diminished by the fact that Twitter just doesn't have that many users, relatively speaking; the users it has, though, are extremely influential, particularly given the important of Twitter in media, tech, and finance. For this group Twitter is completely irreplaceable: there is no other medium with a similar density of information or interest-driven network effects.
This, by extension, drives Twitter's cultural impact: no, most people don't get their news off of Twitter; the places they get their news, though, are driven by Twitter.
Twitter's influence is cultural and political. Twitter greatly sped up the dissemination of information and disinformation – and therefore changed the methods of the scientific and political discourse. Reporters, politicians, and scientists feel obligated to be on Twitter. Twitter makes its impact in real-time. It has a sort of "natural monopoly" on these public square debates. Note that this gives it a degree of social responsibility that a private company would not otherwise have – when Twitter bans someone, it becomes a freedom of speech issue. And Twitter is subject to the other problems that we've discussed earlier.
Elon Musk's move, predictably, caused quite a controversy that I'm happy to skip here mostly, will list just a few strong opinions that resonated with me:
A single person owning one of the most important internet communication protocols is a bad idea, but maybe it can be a bridge to something better.
For Musk, Twitter is now a potentially undervalued financial asset, a political asset, and a marketing tool.
Musk is a strong leader for a critical infrastructure company.
He is a brilliant troll super-user.
Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers.
I like this take by Mike Solana:
Elon is a values-driven ideologue who instantiates his values in the form of companies, which usually succeed. We've seen him realize his goals, or tremendous efforts towards them, in payments, energy, and space. Now, the man has set his mind to speech.
And here is Elon Musk's own stated rationale for acquiring Twitter:
Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.
Opinions on how to realize the Twitter potential
Many people wish Elon Musk the best of luck – and volunteer lots of opinions. Here is my synthesis of the ideas that I found interesting, starting with the most strategic/radical.
Radical decentralization
A number of people are dreaming about a decentralized, perhaps blockchain-based, version of Twitter – open, publicly controlled, with permanent/indestructible content and multiple options for content moderation and prioritization. Web3 nirvana… They argue that this is highly desirable for a core communications protocol of the internet and cite successful DNS, HTTP, POP, IMAP, and such cases.
Partitioning Twitter, Twitter as a protocol
Ben Thomson spelled out this idea in his Stratechery newsletter: Start by splitting Twitter into two companies. One company would be the core Twitter service; it will own the social graph. The other company would run all of Twitter's own apps and the advertising business. The Twitter service company would open up its API to any other company interested in building a client. Clients would pay for the right to access the Twitter service and social graph. They would monetize their products in whatever way they see fit. They could sell ads, pursue a subscription model, accept donations... Clients would be free to implement their own moderation policies for different audiences/preferences and geographies/ages/regulations.
Related idea – allow third-parties create content curation services for Twitter clients – filter, newsfeed, etc. Some of these could be commercial, others – open source. This would be somewhat similar to third-party email spam filters. Moreover, Albert Wenger proposed to "give a Section 230 like protection to companies in return for providing a complete set of enduser APIs. In other words, require Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. to be fully programmable in order to have their liability limited."
This would mean Twitter opening up a new protocol for the internet — the notifications and identity protocol. Unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company. This would also mean competition-induced innovation. And it would solve the thorny problem of who decides what we see by undoing the centralization of that power and subjecting decisions to market forces. Sounds good to me!
But... To remind the history, Twitter started as a protocol, with many third-party clients competing and innovating. But Twitter couldn't find a business model without a client, so it decided to go with ads and killed off its budding ecosystem. In general, the industry hasn't really figured out how to monetize application-level protocols.
Business model
Motivation matters, and ad-based businesses have incentives misaligned with their users’ interests. Many people believe that it's critical that a custodian of the public square doesn't fall into that trap.
Content moderation
Content moderation is (a) necessary and (b) hard. So far, all major social media platforms have failed one way or another. But it can be done. Wikipedia, with its decentralized model, is a great example. Email spam filters are another example of decentralized moderation.
Jim Rutt, an expert on moderating online communities, recently wrote up a primer on content moderation. Here is my digest:
We should differentiate between decorum (behavior) moderation and content moderation. Most people want relatively strict decorum rules so long as they are enforced evenhandedly.
Strong and sensible decorum moderation makes a wide and free marketplace of ideas more practical. It's the name-calling, flaming, mob harassment, and other kinds of personal attacks that make discussion of controversial issues so difficult and ugly online. Failure to enforce decorum leads to the "heckler's veto," whereby vicious personal attacks from dissenters make discussion so painful that reasonable people are driven away.
Most communities ban direct threats of violence, violations of user privacy, advocacy of the more serious varieties of criminal or terroristic behavior, and libelous defamation. Many communities ban inherently dangerous content, such as how to make bombs or poisons. There is relatively little controversy about the need for this kind of content moderation.
Things get controversial around the subset of content moderation based on "point-of-view."
Musk could start by telling his critics that he supports careful and coherent decorum rules and that they will be applied in an evenhanded manner. He could add that Twitter will engage in limited and specific content moderation of illegal or inherently dangerous content but will back away from the inevitably biased (and expensive) game of point-of-view moderation so that the platform can become the open and fair marketplace of ideas we need.
Building trust in any moderation scheme requires a significant increase in precision, transparency, and a real right of appeal. All acts of moderation other than warnings should be appealable to a human.
He also suggested:
The platform should move away from easily obtained anonymity and require either real name I.D. or pseudonymous I.D. that limits one account to one real person and guarantees a "proof of humanity" behind all accounts.
Provide a marketplace of open-source feed algorithms provided by third parties
Sounds very sensible to a layman!
Other suggestions
Jonathan Haidt (here and here):
Add viscosity to content sharing. One specific suggestion making the rounds is limiting retweets to two levels. Limiting the number of retweets per day per user is another viscosity proposal.
Require "KYC." (IMO, this is controversial – disenfranchised minorities and dissidents in authoritarian countries need anonymity.) But it's possible to have a strong and anonymous identity linked to reputation, ideally – portable. Haidt proposed to make user verification a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.)
Compel the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers
Reduce the damaging effects of social media on children by delaying entry
Human-scale lies: Make it almost impossible to do anything on Twitter without specific human action. Verify that every account is controlled by a human. Slow all 'write' actions down to work at human speed.
Make it indestructible
Free the curation: Have the algorithms transparently compete across multiple dimensions: engagement, happiness, revenue, etc. Let users pick which curators they want.
Noah Smith proposed to give people more power to moderate their own threads:
replies by blocked users should be dropped from the thread view
customize who can reply to their tweets – add a "custom" option, where I can select a few people with whom I want to discuss something
allow people to opt out of being quote-tweeted (add friction)
implement the Dislike button
The public has plenty of ideas. Let's hope that Elon Musk has enough money, focus, and goodwill to follow through!
In the meanwhile, this little research convinced me of Twitter's potential. So I'll be more active there, mainly as a listener. You can follow me at @dstavisky.
Further reading
The death of the newsfeed, by Benedict Evans - 2018-04-03
The Social Media Triangle, by Albert Wenger - 2020-04-29
How to fix Twitter, by Noah Smith - 2021-11-29
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, by Jonathan Haidt - 2022-04-11
Elon Musk Is Fighting for Attention, Not Free Speech, by Renée DiResta - 2022-04-14
Back to the Future of Twitter, by Ben Thompson – Stratechery , 2022-04-18
The future of Twitter, by Benedict Evans [podcast] – 2022-04-18
Musk and Moderation, by Jim Rutt - 2022-04-27
What should Elon do with Twitter? by Phil Libin - 2022-04-28
Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation on government surveillance, Elon Musk, and free speech [podcast] - 2022-04-28
Jimmy Wales: What Wikipedia Got Right About Social Media [podcast] - 2022-04-29
Three Dubious Claims About Social Media, by James O'Malley - 2022-05-13