The hopeless moderation and regulation of these platforms, the sociopaths who destroy them. Thanks to…

The hopeless moderation and regulation of these platforms, the sociopaths who destroy them. Thanks to Twitter, amazingly for acting within a day, on a weekend, to take down an account blatantly posting details of peoples’ personal lives here for shits and giggles. Thoughts. /1

Firstly it’s an impossible task, because it uses a social model that can never work, decoupling information and communication from social life. Pre-social media what you said and how you behaved was regulated by a whole range of social institutions. /2

Anybody who harassed and abused people for sport as is so common here pre-social media would have been reported to regulators and police. And in fact the abuse mostly just didn’t happen, because the opportunity to do it simply wasn’t there. That’s what these platforms do. /3

By stripping away the checks and balances of social life, and putting everything in the one unregulated place. And not just regulation, the way people now interact with each other on social media platforms would have been prevented just by basic social life, in earlier times. /4

The platforms enable and hugely magnify outrageously anti-social behaviour. They were always going to, because their philosophy always was fanatically libertarian. They implement a social model, and idea about how social groups, communities and nations operate. /5

That model is simply wrong, empirically. The idea that groups of whatever size are just ‘sovereign’ individuals, interacting. Free market society. No social group of whatever size has ever operated in that way, and nor will it. Humans always form social hierarchies. /6

Based on emulation and status. You can see it on every social media platform, how despite the hype everything is strongly hierarchical, revolving around a handful of influencers. The same in nations that claim libertarian politics of the economy is what runs them. It doesn’t. /7

Our societies are as hierarchical as they’ve ever been, as social as they’ve ever been. Social media tries to replace all of the social checks and balances societies have developed over millennia to regulate behaviour with algorithms, and moderation teams. /8

It’s like trying to mow the MCG with a pair of scissors. Hopelessly inadequate to the task, and also hopelessly conceived. Just as ‘fact-checking’ has a ridiculous model of knowledge as free-floating facts (social institutions regulate facts). Here’s an idea to maybe help. /9

Instead of treating social media behaviour as individual behaviour (which it isn’t, it’s social behaviour as all behaviour is), when you have somebody acting like a sociopath here, penalise *everybody* they associate with. Their social network, identified by follow data. /10

As many already do when blocking, blocking entire networks rather than individuals. That would send a powerful message, fast. Suspend networks of people for this behaviour. Those who got caught up in that would quickly learn never to associate with particular people again. /11

Use social, group sanctions, for behaviour that is intrinsically social. Rather than suspending individual accounts, then immediately replaced with new burner sociopath accounts, repeating all the same sociopathic behaviour. Worth thinking about. /end