The structure of a platform like Twitter makes a lie of just about everything said about it, by all sides.…

The structure of a platform like Twitter makes a lie of just about everything said about it, by all sides. Tweets are ruthlessly hierarchical. Those with many followers get much more attention and visibility than others. This probably isn’t the problem we may think it is. /1

The idea Twitter is some bubbling pot of public opinion, a huge society-wide conversation, is marketing guff that all social media repeats every day. It’s a lie, and will always be a lie. Societies have never been a level playing field of conversation, nor will they ever be. /2

I’ve Tweeted before that social media implements an underlying set of beliefs, mostly out of the US, about the way societies and democracies work. It’s a strongly libertarian set of beliefs, that ‘the people’ drive social change, through their interaction. /3

I’ve also Tweeted a lot about what I think is actually true, and is matched by empirical reality. That about 5% of people in any group, of whatever scale, drive the beliefs and behaviours of the other 95%. Humans are social animals, and social conformity creates societies. /4

Now the same libertarian beliefs immediately make us react to the idea of conformity, as ‘sheep-like’ behaviour. It’s nothing of the kind. If you’re a painter, you will follow other painters you think are geniuses, who guide you. That’s all conformity is. /5

All areas of life, at every scale, have hierarchies of expertise and values. It’s how societies function. About 5% of people are the leaders in any activity or field, the rest emulate them. Not least because none of us has time to try to become expert in everything anyway. /6

It’s a distribution of labour. No matter how much social media tries to pretend it’s inventing an alternative to this, which it calls more ‘democratic’, the same hierarchies re-appear here, and in fact many more of them. It’s a set of tools that magnifies this process hugely. /7

The danger of social media is that it’s like a libertarian Trojan Horse, which takes previously reasonably stable societies, and inserts thousands of new often mutually contradictory hierarchies within them. It erodes existing social stability and expertise. /8

Look at how Trump used it to even sack the Capitol. We use social media, me as well, because it has some fantastic affordances. But mostly it’s a wrecking ball, and we may think it’s helping us solve problems. But it created many of the problems we’re trying to solve. /end