Here’s what in my view is most widely misunderstood about social media, and why it’s so dangerous. And yes,…

Here’s what in my view is most widely misunderstood about social media, and why it’s so dangerous. And yes, I’m still on it. You can criticise unsafe driving, while still driving. And this is what’s at stake in the governments v platform battles. /1 https://t.co/Ltm4mnaTll

Social media is dangerous because of one key thing. It pretends that the mythology of societies being ‘the people’ is true. It links everybody together so that their interaction can supposedly lead to an emergent collective society. /2 https://t.co/ZzsKQZOQJe

But as the POW camps in the Korean war showed so brutally and clearly, that’s not how human groups operate. Ever. They are ALWAYS led, by about 5% of any group. /3 https://t.co/tTUuRcJRDC

Once the 5% of American POWs who led the other POWs were removed by the Koreans, what did the rest of the POWs do? Nothing. They sat down and died, basically. Societies are networked, the 5% are the hubs. /4 https://t.co/9GMSyXfmV6

They look like this. Not millions of individual ‘sovereign’ dots representing each person. A tiny handful of hubs, vacuuming up all the rest. What social media does is strip away society’s *existing* hubs. /5 https://t.co/eDHRbjZ5HE

And replace them with itself, at society’s centre, as mega-hubs. That’s why ‘cookers’ are increasingly running the world. Any deranged halfwit who can cobble together likes on these platforms now has immense power. /6

Trump stole the leadership of the free world using not much more than Twitter. People always react to this by saying ‘I couldn’t function without social media’. /7

They need it to get vital information, and to connect with colleagues and friends and sources of knowledge. But that’s a symptom of what social media stripped away from them. /8

People didn’t need to know much of what they now come here to get, before social media existed. It was embedded in the operating system of societies, its institutions, doing the invisible work of keeping the lights on. /9

The fact people so desperately need these platforms IS the social media business model. The platforms are monetising the wreckage they themselves cause elsewhere. /10

Replacing hierarchies of expertise in EVERY part of life with hierarchies of ‘likes’ on social media. Now ‘influencers’ even say what reality itself is. /11

How do we not see this? Without social media the idea of ‘living with’ a pandemic would have been laughed out of existence. But on social media, if you can generate the likes, any nonsense becomes reality. /12

As Arendt and Orwell said, if you want to understand authoritarianism, look at where facts become opinions. That’s right here. On these platforms. /end