A tale of two social media
The ostensible post-Meta era so far is the best of times — and the worst.
I honestly find msyelf torn between optimism and pessimism about social media lately. I see tangible reasons to support either sentiment, really.
Social is certainly in greater flux now than it has been in a long time, perhaps since Facebook famously overtook MySpace in the early 2000s. Users are increasingly wary of platforms’ collection and usage of their data. And regulators are increasingly willing to reign in tech giants’ business practices, including greater vigilance regarding antitrust.
Those are ultimately the optimistic parts, in my opinion. They effectively create opportunities for upstarts like Farcaster, Nostr, Spoutible, and Mastodon to either gain a foothold for the first time or, in Mastodon’s case, get a second look from users after years of its developers plugging away. Heck, even trusty RSS, whose “death” has often been inaccurately reported, is in fact still very much alive and kicking.
That said, in terms of true mass reach and economic power, we must admit Meta’s hegemony isn’t truly broken yet. There is still much harm to real users that comes with that everyday. Plus we have the rising threat of AI deepfakes, including as potential weapons in state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.
There is also a curious problem I see playing out at both the giants and within some startups. It’s a gross misreading of what moderation is, why it’s absolutely necessary, and how it differs from censorship. (Think of pretty much anything Elon Musk has said on these topics since buying Twitter, for example.)
I’ve blogged at length about these distinctions previously. But to summarize: Most social platforms are ultimately private spaces, not true public commons, because they aren’t collectively owned.
Thus it really shouldn’t be considered some great moral affront to “free speech” for the owners of a private space to set some basic parameters around how it’s used, to enforce those rules, and to kick out bad actors if they deem it necessary. That’s all moderation is.
To put it a different way, there’s the Golden Rule that entrepreneur Anil Dash offered way back in 2011:
“If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault.”
That little maxim is still applicable as ever, I’d say. In fact, as some of last week’s headlines demonstrate, it seems the literal and figurative costs to social-media entrepreneurs for not kicking out assholes are piling up rapidly right now:
- French authorities arrested Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov. The BBC reports that police are investigating whether Telegram’s relatively lax approach to content moderation effectively enables criminal activity on the platform. Durov’s lawyer decried the arrest as “absoultely ridiculous” and an attack on free speech. Telegram’s TON token has plummeted more than 14% on the news.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s move to take Twitter private in late 2022 is now quantifiably the biggest money-losing deal for Wall Street’s investment banks since the 2008 financial crisis. The banks have been stuck holding more than $13 billion debt related to the buyout for nearly two years.
Yikes. Luckily, if those platforms don’t survive in a worst-case scenario, a lot of alternatives are still available to us.
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