Can We Clean Up Social Media?
By: Joe Duncan
Tags: Technology, Politics, Mental Health, Society, Culture

Can We Clean Up Social Media?

Can we make social media a force for good instead of so much bad?

There’s an old story about the boiling frog, a parable that tells of a frog being placed into a pot with water, and the heat is slowly increased to cook the frog alive. I don’t know who on earth would be so cruel, but it’s an old-timey tale that raises a very cautious point: that when change happens slowly it’s possible for you to not notice the small, incremental changes — until it’s too late.

The idea is, if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it’ll just jump out. If you put a frog into a pot of tepid, room-temperature water, you could slowly turn up the heat bit by bit until the frog was being cooked alive. While the parable probably wouldn’t hold up in real life, it’s quite apt at describing what social media companies and users have done to us collectively over the past couple of decades.

It all seemed like fun and games with cute little buttons that helped you show your friends that you “liked” things, with company advertisements, with metrics that rewarded our responses. But in the years since these things have been first developed, social media has taken a very sinister turn and I think just about everyone knows it, though few of us are willing to admit it. I am willing to admit it, social media, as it stands today, is a cesspool of toxic, borderline abusive behaviors that extremely few people would engage in if these conversations were taking place in person. Anyone who spends a long enough time on Facebook or Twitter will end up on the bottom of a bullying dogpile that’s nothing shy of alarming and, for some people, devastating.

It’s gotten so extreme, that suicide and homicides have been live-streamed before the world for all of us to see. Children are killing themselves on the internet as a response to online bullying. Self-esteems are plummeting, especially for young women who constantly compare themselves to the models they see on Instagram and other sites. When a 14-year-old girl from Miami Gardens committed suicide on Facebook Live in 2017, I thought that would be the end of it. I thought that’s where the line would be drawn and social media companies would finally take some responsibility. But alas, I’ve been proven wrong.

The incentives have only gotten worse, more perverse, and have prioritized sensationalist content at the expense of our healthy public discourse. Boring stories don’t get clicks, likes, shocked react emojis, and don’t elicit other responses in quite the same way extreme ones do.

For those not yet in the know, there are a lot of problems with how social media and the internet at large has been structured in terms of what it values. It tends to value things based on the responses of the users who are on the platform, but is the gut-level response to something truly a metric of quality? I think not and I’m not alone. Beyond this, the whole point of Google, Facebook, and other large social media behemoths’ business models are to direct your behavior as a user and try to guide you into a sale to a third-party merchant.

In fact, you aren’t even a customer of a social media site, which is why users aren’t prioritized or even addressed. Your attention and your behavioral data are what’s being sold to advertisers. There’s no customer service line you can call, no managers that you can speak to, no recourse whatsoever when things go wrong and it harms you. Doing this almost requires finding the most reflexive and impulsive people in our culture by magnifying the most provocative content, amplifying it through the distribution channels which they have editorial privy too.

Ever post a ton of cool stuff and feel like crap after no one “liked” it? Well, that might be because nobody saw the stuff you posted. This is called shadow-banning. Your posts likely took a back seat to stuff that would help platforms obtain more and more information as it pertains to what can be sold from the users who are your friends or followers.

The truly dangerous thing of our age is that the internet has united formerly disjointed toxic and harmful people and has simultaneously given them political power. I think that almost everyone in the United States can agree upon this basic premise, this metapolitical statement, that no matter what your background or political affiliation, online bullying is a real problem and has probably affected your life if you use the internet.

Someone has polled you, trolled you, and probably Rick-rolled you, all for laughs and a few kicks. The problem is, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt until joking around turns into malicious subversion and outright sadism, the kind that can tip the scales of an election and end up locking children up in concentration camps, ripping them from their mothers’ arms, until LGBTQ rights are under assault, until women’s rights are under assault, until the nation is coming apart at the seams and there’s no leadership in sight as a pandemic rages on killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Never underestimate the power of toxic people in large groups.

All of these problems we face today are all underscored by our social media habits and the companies that allow such nonsense to be considered permissible. These companies really need to reign it in, and I think we’d all do wise to switch to platforms that don’t engage in this kind of behavior until they can get their shit together. Medium is a great example of a place that doesn’t prioritize radical and radicalizing content for the sake of advertising revenue.

Social scientist Jonathan Haidt, a bit of sensationalist himself, ironically, recently posited a rather good idea that I’m inclined to stand behind: the need to provide government-issued identification in order to set up a social media account. Real-life doesn’t have trolls that hide behind masks of anonymity and it’s the anonymity that provides a seeming layer of security for those who’d engage in nefarious tactics. It may seem intrusive, but for the good of the global dialogue, I’m inclined towards a world where we had to submit a government-issued ID to create accounts and they began clamping down on multiple account usage.

Bullying, especially violent and vitriolic language and forms of expression, should be curbed and there would be no way of doing so as long as bullies could create additional accounts in just a few minutes and pick up right where they left off. Right now, the internet at large is a very unhealthy place because of social media.

Any attempts at healthy, wholesome conversations are quickly derailed by deranged, often aggressive bad actors who want nothing more than to watch the world burn and people they view as different from them to suffer. They have to be dealt with and disallowed from using the platforms until they can be civil. The internet creates a sort of mental firewall that makes people infinitely more confident than they would be saying something to a person in real life.

Men will slander and threaten women, women will gang up on and bully men in large groups, men will upload their ex’s nudes for the world to see, people will post the most racist and evil nonsense possible in hopes of intimidating minorities, and let’s not forget that nations are using social media as a tool to undermine democracy itself. It’s only gotten worse since 2016 because the companies didn’t rigorously clamp down on such unsavory behavior when it happened, nipping it in the bud. Social media is quickly becoming the new smoking, something we use for social points at the rapid and radical destruction of our own health. I’ve written about this here.

One idea that the big players of the social media game have been kicking around that we really ought to consider is the removal of the “like” buttons and other reaction metrics, at least visibly. Perhaps it would be best if we had “like” buttons but hid the amount of total “likes” given, that way, companies could still have a real-time metric to consider what gets prioritized in feeds, but users can’t see the likes and thus can’t tailor the content to specifically get more likes and show off through subversive, bad behavior like dunking on helpless teenagers, destroying their self-esteem.

Real-life dialogue doesn’t take place with a bunch of people pressing “like”, especially not after the initial reaction where likes can accumulate over time. It incentivizes cheap digs and shameless dunking on people. It’s destroying our communication entirely and by pretty much every available metric, our society as well. The costs of getting this wrong are higher than most people think. Allow me to refresh your memory.

Trump isn’t just a fluke president, he’s the first president elected by internet trolls and social media bad actors, by memes of hate and vengeance, by aggression channeled into cyberspace from distant and isolated parties who couldn’t maintain a social life with their insufferable behaviors and attitudes, dangerous people who’ve now found other dangerous people who will help them commiserate, strategize, organize, and inflict pain.

Make no mistake: Trump is a weapon, he’s a weapon of the hateful, the spiteful, the losers who hate themselves and want the rest of the world to suffer as they suffer from their own self-inflicted torments. He’s the weapon of those aforementioned toxic and violent individuals who want nothing more than to see the world burn. These people will weaponize every bad behavior, bug, glitch, and feature possible to turn it toward the achievement of their own political aims which usually involve the harm of some other people.

In personal relationships, we call these people “abusers” but since it’s remote, or, as I call it, “sadism-by-proxy”, we mistakenly think it’s just a series of defective bugs in the system of the internet; but it is no bug, it’s a feature and they’re profiting off of it while influencing it and fueling it with filter bubbles and a laissez-faire approach to destructive parties that is morally atrocious and absolutely unforgivable. Let’s put pressure on these companies to get this right — our collective mental health is at stake.

In the interim, here’s how to partially unplug: