The problems with social media

Robert Tracinski writes at The Federalist,

...So the blogs were mostly outcompeted. A few of the best and most interesting blogs became full-fledged online publications, but a lot of the small, quirky, one-person amateur bloggers moved onto social media. That turned out to be a big mistake, because the era of social media has recentralized the media. Instead of a million blogs—what Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame called an “Army of Davids“—we now have a social media economy mostly controlled by three big companies: Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

So we get shadowbanning, arbitrary Twitter suspensions, and Twitter throttling the traffic of people they don’t like and controlling what articles you can tweet links to. We traded the old mainstream media gatekeepers for new, worse, less publicly accountable gatekeepers in Silicon Valley—a new breed of pinch-nosed Puritans with pink hair, piercings, and tattoos, who will shut us down if we don’t use the right pronouns.

The point is not that this is censorship and they should be regulated. The only thing worse than social media controlled by petty tyrants in Silicon Valley is social media controlled by petty tyrants in Washington DC. In any case, regulation is unnecessary. These platforms have power and influence because we gave them power and influence. The moment enough of us stop doing it, they turn into MySpace.

The role of social media as the new ideological gatekeepers is just part, although the leading part, of our overall dissatisfaction with their product. There is the damage they are doing to the attention spans and social lives of teens who are growing up on them. There is the phenomenon of the Twitter mob and the way social media is responsible for gamifying moral outrage, where readers score points and level up by getting people fired, often based on nothing more than rumors and mass hysteria.

Then there are the awful economics for actual producers of content. Social media companies are designed to profit off our free labor while they treat us like garbage. For example, I have 11,000 Twitter followers, but I don’t know who they are or have any independent way of contacting them. In effect, I have spent years building up a mailing list for Twitter, not myself. What kind of raw deal is that?

So, what is Robert planning to do about this social media problem? Go here to see.