Social Media: Bad Guy or Whipping Boy?


Everyone uses Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube. A good chunk of people call for those companies to “do something” about all that fake news and spewing of objectionable opinions and content. Yet another set curses all social media in general. But what exactly are we asking for? And who is to blame for all this? That’s the topic of this Ben Thompson podcast: content moderation.

Is social media all bad? Take this instance where a couple of users discovered a bug in one of Apple’s devices and mailed in the details to Apple. The company ignored the bug report. Then people started slamming Apple on Twitter and bingo! The bug was fixed within 12 hours. Sometimes raising a stink is the only way to get things done, says Thompson. And yes, that “amplification power” of social media works both ways. But to say it is all bad is ridiculous.

Or how about this time when the #MeToo movement was at its peak and a lot of women posted “All men are pigs” kind of comments on Facebook. Facebook suspended the accounts of some of the over-the-top folks. Users were furious. Poor Facebook tried to explain the policy:
-          Generalized comments on protected groups isn’t allowed;
-          Gender is a protected group;
-          Therefore…

We want Facebook and WhatsApp and YouTube to do this and block that. But when they act, we scream, “Hey! Not in that case”.

Of course, the companies themselves are not all good either. They make money only if they give us what we want, now what we claim to like. They are incentivized to show us stuff we like, even if that happens to be highly objectionable stuff. Does that reflect on the company or us?

Then there’s the philosophical angle to this. Regulating free speech raises red flags for most people. Most of us don’t trust governments to have the power to decide what can/cannot be said. On the other hand, combining the innate optimism of many (connecting the world is a good thing, organizing the information of the world and making it easy to search can only be good) with the absolute power of the monopolies (YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp) has led us to where we are. And the “child kings” of Silicon Valley seem too young to appreciate the risks of that power, muses Thompson.

All of which is why Thompson ends his podcast with the “unsatisfying summary” that there is no magic bullet to solve the problem. On the surface, we seem to be asking for culpability. But culpability for what? Failing to devise a better system and/or to fix bugs in the system? Or for failing to fix human nature?

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