If you want a measure of the time bomb social media is in societies, think about where the sort of behaviours…

If you want a measure of the time bomb social media is in societies, think about where the sort of behaviours you see on these platforms would be deemed acceptable anywhere else. Not a reactionary thing, I’ve researched on these platforms and have enjoyed them. But…/1

…the libertarians again have framed public debates so that it’s now almost universally accepted that the unregulated flow of any sort of speech is some sort of non-negotiable. Anything else is immediately seen as ‘authoritarianism’. Rubbish. /2

Speech has always been regulated, like everything else. Whether as media, as laws of libel and slander, as all of the various ways a person’s expertise qualifies or certifies them to speak on certain topics, as acceptable language in public, as bullying and harassment etc. /3

Some of the common behaviours on social media would get a person fired in a workplace, or arrested in other areas of life for ongoing harassment and bullying. Or sued for defamation. But this is the point, which I don’t think is seen enough. /4

Social media is a set of political and social beliefs, translated into code. The idea that societies emerge from the ‘bottom up’, through the free exchange of ideas and conversation. But they don’t, and you can see it on the platforms themselves. /5

All the hierarchies social media pretends it’s sweeping away just reassert themselves, on the platforms. Through followers and likes. Plus many more, often mobilising what were previously disconnected and disparate vile beliefs, giving them a new power and extent. /6

The institutional ways societies have regulated these interactions of belief are bypassed almost entirely. Not to produce some fairyland of equality of all belief, either, but instead replacing empirically tested hierarchies of expertise and wisdom - our institutions - with…/7

…hierarchies of likes and followers. Anti-vaxers share the platform with researchers with decades of experience, and there’s nothing to recognise that difference in the platform itself. Total BS mingles with Nobel laureate opinion, and the platform makes those equivalent. /8

I think societies are actually built from beliefs. And if you don’t regulate belief, like you regulate traffic or sewage, you destroy your society. Regulation is not the evil libertarians want us to believe. It only means negotiated compromises, based on empirical evidence of…/9

…what works and what doesn’t. It’s why you can plug your device into any powerpoint in the country without killing yourself. Societies invented universities centuries ago, to help regulate beliefs. Libertarians supplant them now with hyper-partisan think tanks. /10

Those think tanks in turn are heavy users of social media, to mobilise their hyper-partisan beliefs. And the more sensible people long to social media to try to restore what the same platforms have taken away from them. Some semblance of civil society. They’re not winning. /ends