I've given up on the idea that political engagement on social media can make society better. It seems to be a one-way ratchet toward political extremism, because it encourages people to immerse themselves in communities that respond with adulation whenever someone sinks deeper into their ideological wing and respond with cold silence whenever someone hesitates or questions the wing's narrative.
In case this isn't already obvious, I don't think it's a coincidence that we are in the midst of a global crisis of populist uprisings, most of which leave their countries worse off than they were before.
This is not only going to have the direct effect of intensifying the above, it's going to be mined for data used to crank up political ad targeting to partisans on Facebook. It should be fought, violently. It is poison enacting the slow death of democracy.
A good form of effective action would be to create and popularize to the top of the list a petition like 'Dismantle Facebook' or 'Fire Mark Zuckerberg'.
> It seems to be a one-way ratchet toward political extremism, because it encourages people to immerse themselves in communities that respond with adulation whenever someone sinks deeper into their ideological wing
It's more nefarious than that. Social media lets you curate not only your message, but who sees and gets to react to your message. Anger is–by far–the most viral emotion. (Second place, if I remember correctly, is awe.) Previously, deploying anger in politics was constrained by the opposition objecting. But if they see your message long after your base has reacted, that's no longer a problem.
In a world with Facebook, if you want to get people to show up to a rally, you piss them off. How? Take exaggerated pot shots at a totem of your enemy.
The irony is all sides are hiring–and friendly with–similar people at similar lobbying and activist engagement shops. But on the ground level, hyper-targeted AE is (a) an effective way to re-position policy priorities (particularly at the state and local levels) and (b) more cost and time effective than traditional door-to-door knocking.
To be fair, all (minimally relevant) social media has been designed with goals to optimise that have nothing to do with the betterment of society - the variables to max out are retention of users, engagement/addiction, etc. A network with positive effects might be feasible, we've literally never tried.
> A network with positive effects might be feasible, we've literally never tried.
I'd argue that Hacker News and Stack Exchange are two clear examples of relevant social networks with overwhelmingly positive effects (neither is without flaws of course). Github might very reasonably make the list as well.
I think the line is functional networks vs general networks. Not all functional networks are net positive, LinkedIn for example went negative in my opinion after initially being a positive. However I think functional networks tend to rapidly fail (competition) or erode if they go negative (eg Experts Exchange), rather than persist (with LinkedIn being one of the few exceptions).
HN does very little to ensure max engagement or retention. To the extent HN self promotes Y Combinator, it's quite modest compared to the number of stories passing through the front page. The type of content that might drive a huge spike in engagement via comments (overt senationalism, anger-baiting articles, political flaming), is frequently kept off the site because it's fundamentally anti what HN is about. And of course you can use HN mostly anonymously.
It's funny, I would not really have counted HN or Reddit as social networks (much less SE or github) even though they clearly have a social aspect.
What makes a social network a social network?
I think in my mind a social network is a site where the information you can see is a feed either created or curated by a group of people you know. twitter and other asymmetrical networks fit in because you know famous people even if they don't know you. that would leave sites like reddit or HN in the outer edge of the definition, since you're seeing content curated by like minded strangers (spotify or pornhub would also qualify there), and sites like stackexchange out since the feed is either non existent or of low importance.
I'd boil it down to something that offers 2 way communication instead of read-only (I'm not including clicking on a link [GET request] to get to a different page as part of 2 way communication, although technically it is). If it has a commenting system, voting system, or any other way for a user to be able to change/alter the information that is displayed on the site/platform to other users, I'd call that a social network.
News sites used to be more like news papers. You could only read the article. Then they just about all added Disqus/commenting systems, which turned them into more social networks.
A typical weather type app is not a social network. It only shows the weather.
> A good form of effective action would be to create and popularize to the top of the list a petition like 'Dismantle Facebook' or 'Fire Mark Zuckerberg'.
Thanks to the FB algorithm, this kind of 'troll' petition wouldn't appear on anyone's feed. And ultimately, the type of person motivated to use this for its actual use cases (building supporters for causes, or just looking for people to scam), their opinon of Zuckerberg wouldn't change one iota.
In case this isn't already obvious, I don't think it's a coincidence that we are in the midst of a global crisis of populist uprisings, most of which leave their countries worse off than they were before.
This is not only going to have the direct effect of intensifying the above, it's going to be mined for data used to crank up political ad targeting to partisans on Facebook. It should be fought, violently. It is poison enacting the slow death of democracy.
A good form of effective action would be to create and popularize to the top of the list a petition like 'Dismantle Facebook' or 'Fire Mark Zuckerberg'.