Social media is running a real-time experiment of what democracy looks like when ‘the people’ run it. Which…

Social media is running a real-time experiment of what democracy looks like when ‘the people’ run it. Which as many South American countries can attest, just leads to marauding gangs running the country. /1 https://t.co/Y0OyGwjdCA

The people isn’t a thing. Groups of people, no matter what size, don’t ever self-organise. They will always follow the lead of some small number of people within that group. Representative democracy was designed to make that small number beholden to actual expertise. /2

Checks and balances, accumulated experience. Departments of health and roads and defence and social security, etc. Not the most popular influencer on social media. The fact we even allow social media in its current form to operate reflects that we don’t understand this. /3

Its whole schtick is ‘power to the people’. It’s a corrosive wrecking ball eating the core of societies, from the inside out. People will defend the great things they get from it (I get those too). It’s not the point. Of course networking is powerful. /4

But networking without checks and balances is again, inevitably, just gang rule. It’s NOT just exchanging information, it’s *organisational*. It *mobilises*. Thousands of competing gangs battling for dominance in what used to be a democratic society. /5

One place I encourage everybody to look is local Facebook groups. Every town has at least one, where increasingly nearly *all* social activity in the town is transacted. Not only does this mean Meta has its tentacles deep into every community, it gets much worse. /6

These groups increasingly run the towns. They mobilise gangs and mobs to obstruct often critical local logistics, they allow fast introduction of often toxic political narratives from far-Right groups on the other side of the world. The groups begin looking entirely different. /7

Harmless, community-spirited sharing of information about local events, help during bushfires, community information and swaps. But they’re rapidly shifting now to something much more sinister, this belief that they in fact run the towns. /8

This is the libertarian philosophy built right into the coding of these platforms. Their owners openly express it, regularly. And we just allow it to operate, dismantling our democracies every single day. /end