It’s unpopular to criticise social media. (Imagine that, popularity platforms taking offence at unpopular…

It’s unpopular to criticise social media. (Imagine that, popularity platforms taking offence at unpopular things.) The platforms build out a model of society that strips away all social hierarchy and existing connection, and replaces it with an economy of likes. Populism. /1

If you defend them, you’re defending the very thing that most sensible people agree is our actual problem. The destruction of collective societies. It’s seductive to think social media creates that in an alternative way. That they mobilise the like-minded, in groups. /2

But that’s crumbs from the table of the destruction of everything public, by the same interests who own these platforms. How did we ever think these platforms were pro-democracy, when even just being on them enriches anti-social billionaires? /3

The same platforms bad faith actors, both domestic and international, use to mobilise instant flash mobs of resistance to public health action, climate action, transition to EVs? Time and again people will say ‘but this is the only place I now get valuable information.’ /4

That’s true in some ways, for me too. But that’s a symptom of the destruction, the people who previously worked in our public institutions with their expertise to address social problems, are now driven to rearguard social groups here to try to still have a voice. /5

It’s a con, social media has been around as long as these social problems, and has never solved any of them. They’ve got worse. It doesn’t translate into action, just likes. Or symbolic, protest-type action at best. “I Stand With [insert hopeless cause].” /6

Platforms for the expression of personal feeling, over the backdrop of social collapse. The collapse creates the emotion that makes these such seductive stages for the expression of our personal outrages. The genius of the platforms is that this only accelerates the collapse. /7

The squabbles get ever more granular, I watched a local FB group for example mobilise against a perfectly harmless local project, using categories clearly imported from libertarian attack groups in the US. And as time went on, the same mechanism fractured the groups as well. /8

The points of difference multiplied every day it went on, until the group itself imploded with violent division. That’s how any mechanism which uses popularity as a methodology will always end. /end