The Many Ways to Fix Social Media
By: John Thomas
Tags: Technology, Social Media, Tech, Media, Politics

Leaders and laymen alike have explored solutions big and small. Here are some of their ideas.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

It is no secret that Silicon Valley, and social media companies in particular, have come under increased scrutiny as of late. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that users’ data isn’t safe, the Mueller Report unveiled the threat to democracy and indeed the very idea of true social media can be in the hands of bad actors, and over the last few years there has been a cascade of criticism from scholars, former tech luminaries, and even Senators aimed at Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, questioning the viability of the very foundation the social media economy is built on.

In the midst of this “techlash,” there is no shortage of voices intent on fixing social media, many having put forth ideas on how to regulate or alter the industry’s biggest companies. Some ideas are small, merely aiming to tweak the way we tweet; others have grand visions of overhauling the entire social media ecosystem. But the solutions they propose depend on what these reformers consider to be the problem in the first place — a point that lacks consensus.

Generally, the five major problems critics see with social media is that 1) social media is too addictive and hurts users cognitively, 2) social media is a threat to democracy, truth, and naturally prone to polarization, 3) social media is a threat to free speech, 4) social media companies are too big and are stifling competition in the tech industry, and 5) social media is riddled with privacy concerns. Let’s take a look then at some of the solutions to these problems tech reformers are proposing, catalogued under these five categories.

Social media is too addictive and hurts users cognitively.

In the United Kingdom, various MP’s have suggested that social media addiction should be classified as a disease. Indeed, surveys show that worldwide, the average user spends roughly 2 hours 20 minutes per day swiping, liking, sharing, or mindlessly scrolling on various social media platforms. As a result, there is a growing body of research associating heavy social media use to anxiety, depression, and perceived isolation.

To combat social media addiction and the negative cognitive consequences that flow from it, Senator Josh Hawley (R. MO.) proposed legislation earlier this summer that would ban social media companies from utilizing some of their more addictive features such as “infinite scroll” and “auto-refill.”

Additionally, former Google employee Tristan Harris has already experienced some success in his crusade against tech’s largest companies. After leaving Google, Harris founded the organization The Center for Humane Technology and has been working to make sure the time users spend looking at their screens is “time well spent.” As a way forward, Harris and co-conspirator Joe Edelmen view ethical software design as one of the keys to solving “the digital attention crisis.”

Finally, one writer, Samuel D. James, thinks stigmatizing social media use would be one way to shield younger users from using the platforms excessively. James rejects Hawley’s idea that federal intervention would be appropriate and argues instead that,

“Restricting social media to legal adults…would not eliminate its addictive qualities or even fully prevent children from using the services, but requiring a credit card number or some other age-verification tool would create a ‘mature audiences only’ stigma that highlights social media’s addictiveness and tendencies toward vice.”

2. Social Media is a threat to democracy, truth, and is prone to polarization.

The release of the Mueller Report last spring revealed what many already knew: that Russian “specialists” had created thousands of fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, posted 80,000 various pieces of content with those accounts and reached as many as 100 million people through their disinformation campaign. What’s more, is that experts predict more disinformation will be disseminated from domestic groups in 2020 than from foreign actors.

In the face of this grave challenge, Paul Barrett at the NYU Sterns Center for Business and Human Rights has issued a comprehensive list of recommended actions social media companies should take to protect users from disinformation in 2020. Among Barretts, nine recommendations include using AI and actual humans to detect and remove deepfake videos from the platforms, and supporting legislation like the Honest Ads Act which would align rules for political advertising online with those already established for television, radio, and other media.

However, researchers at MIT would argue that before we can manage the threat social media poses to democracy, its effects need to be measured. In Science magazine, professor Sinan Aral proposed his plan for how to study the data from 2016 to determine if the Russian’s disinformation campaign, or any disinformation for that matter, actually swayed the results of the election.

Richard Stengel, the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, in his forthcoming book, Information Wars describes his work on the frontlines in the battle against Russian disinformation and lays out a plan for combating it that includes, among other things, the importance of news rating systems like NewsGuard, and media literacy education. Writes Stengel, “Students need to be taught how news organizations work, and how to identify the provenance of information.”

That is nothing to say about the importance of social media literacy, which one could argue is woeful. For example, many users are unaware of how sharing the links to unread articles aids in the spread of disinformation and even shapes the trajectory of news agencies’ coverage. One study showed that as many as 60% of shared links don’t get clicked. To guard against that dangerous trend one writer proposed that Twitter and others force readers to read articles in order to be able to share them.

And as to the polarizing effects of social media and the algorithms that prioritize divisive content over truth, one writer advocates a plan in which “tech employees…tweak their algorithms to generate comparative articles.” The idea is that for each article written from a conservative point of view, algorithms would serve up an article from a liberal perspective to keep things balanced.

3. Social media is a threat to free speech.

One of the greatest challenges for social media companies in protecting users from disinformation is making sure they don’t limit free speech in their attempt to do so. To be sure this is a threat to democracy as well but in a different form, as New York law school professor Naine Strossen explains in this video. Opines Strossen, social media companies “have abused their powers to not serve we the people but to serve their own corporate interests in ways that stifle our speech…” Strossen supports treating social media companies as common carriers much the way phone companies are so that they are required to carry messages people post, whether they agree with those messages or not.

Conservative voices have been the most frequent to claim that social media companies are biased against them and have wondered if their posts are being “shadowbanned.” Most recently, four Republican Senators sent a letter to Facebook on behalf of the pro-life group Live Action, who claimed that Facebook labelled ads the group had run on the site “false news.” The most troubling thing, in this case, was that Facebook allegedly employed two abortion providers to “fact check” the video. As a result, they determined the video proclaimed false information, resulting in the group losing its ability to run ads on the platform.

Supposedly Facebook itself is working on a way to solve this issue and others like it with what some have dubbed a Facebook Supreme Court-like entity that would be outside the constraints of the social network and would have “transparent and binding” power to determine what content could be on the site. It was reported close to a year ago that the company would have such an entity up and running within the year, but as of yet, the emergence of such a group has yet to materialize.

4. Social media companies are too big and are stifling competition in the tech industry.

This is the problem with Big Tech that is being addressed most fervently at the moment. Within the last two weeks, 50 attorney’s general have begun investigations of Google for anticompetitive actions. On Monday, Attorney General of Texas Ken Paxton stated that Google, “dominates all aspects of advertising on the internet and searching on the internet.” This investigation is in addition to federal investigations of Big Tech firms that were announced earlier this summer.

The call to break up Big Tech companies may be warranted based on numerous measurements and was issued first and most vociferously by former Facebook president Sean Hughes in a provocative New York Times op-ed last May. As politics and governing bodies move on Big Tech antitrust litigation, it will be interesting to see how things progress and just how Facebook, Google and others seek to justify their control of various markets. Hint: expect to hear them cry “China” early and often.

5. Social media is riddled with privacy concerns.

Facebook’s and others’ privacy problems are nothing new and it seems as though they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. That is perhaps the inherent problem given the business model of packaging users’ data and selling it to advertisers that social media companies are addicted to. Some argue that under this ad-based strategy there is no way to ensure privacy. Instead, former tech pioneers like Jaron Lanier and Ethan Zuckerman propose a wholesale change to the entire social media ecosystem.

Zuckerman, the man who brought us pop-up adds, has suggested socialized or government-supported social media as a way to get rid of some of the negative effects of a digital world dominated by a few oversized companies, though he admits that such an idea is highly unlikely in the U.S.

Finally, in 2018 Lanier, who some consider the father of AI, published Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, in which he excoriates the current business model and claims that the only way for social media to get out of its current malaise is to switch to a subscription-based business model. Writes Lanier, “…companies like Netflix and HBO convinced people to pay a monthly fee, and the result is what is often called ‘peak TV.’ Why couldn’t there also be an era of paid ‘peak social’ media and ‘peak search?’” ostensibly where users pay to block ads and keep their data from be tracked, bundled, and sold to the highest bidder.

There are undoubtedly more voices crying out in the digital wilderness, offering better ways to do social media. This overview doesn’t mention Tim Wu and his book The Attention Merchants or Shoshana Zuboff and her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Their arguments and others’ against the unfettered power of Big Tech and the damage it does to society and individuals are important and will certainly impact the future of social media one way or another. The tide is beginning to turn against Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others. Time will tell which of these changes, and with what effect, will be utilized to make social media a safer, more equitable place.

John Thomas is a freelance writer. His writing has appeared at The Public Discourse, The American Conservative, and The Federalist. He writes regularly at medium.com/soli-deo-gloria.