How to Redeem Social Media
The slow collapse of Twitter has inspired a host of would-be successors. Millions of people are trying out new social-media platforms such as Meta’s Threads in a textbook triumph of enthusiasm over experience. I’m sure that creating free content for a social-media platform run by an unaccountable billionaire will turn out differently this time, we tell ourselves, as though we were all born yesterday.
We know how this story ends. We know that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter begin as delightful places of connection and conversation before fracturing into hyperpolarized subcultures dominated by dubious viral content, where partisans scream at one another from their opposing echo chambers. So it was, and so it shall be.
Unless, that is, social-media companies make the conscious decision to do things differently. This moment of transition is also a moment of opportunity, in which they have the chance to reimagine what social media can be. New platforms such as Threads and Bluesky are still under construction, which means they can still be influenced and society’s options are still open. These sites don’t have to copy what came before and can learn from past mistakes. Older platforms relied on inflammatory engagement to boost their short-term profits, but this choice ultimately undermined the social networks from within, alienating users and advertisers. Today’s platforms can instead attract the next generation of users with new rules and features designed to engender trust rather than erode it, ensuring a site’s long-term viability.
What follows are some of my own suggestions for what that might look like. The list is not exhaustive, and reasonable people will undoubtedly disagree with some of its recommendations. But I hope that we can all agree about the necessity of this conversation, and the need to rethink what we want from social media before embracing it again.
Establish rules of the road.
For years, Facebook permitted Holocaust denial—until it didn’t. For months, Twitter throttled an array of claims about COVID-19—some false, some merely controversial—until it didn’t. Both platforms banned Donald Trump, then reversed course. Meanwhile, Chinese officials who insinuate that COVID-19 began in the United States and work to obfuscate their regime’s horrific repression of Uyghur Muslims mostly go unpunished. The problem is not that social-media companies such as Twitter or Facebook moderate their content. It’s that their process is opaque and seemingly capricious, and the precise basis for decisions is rarely disclosed to the public. Rather than cultivate a healthy online community, this sort of arbitrary administration breeds distrust.
What’s needed instead is a transparent set of detailed criteria governing suspensions, bans, and other punishments that is clearly explained, regularly updated, and consistently applied. Social-media platforms have typically kept the specifics of these determinations private, because they want to avoid opening themselves up to controversy. But making moderation a black box has invited a different form of controversy. Because users could never tell exactly why certain content was taken down or suppressed, the platforms became easy targets for suspicion, paranoia, and accusations of bias. It’s true that no set of public-moderation principles will satisfy all comers. But that’s a feature, not a bug. Users will be able to choose where to spend their time based on whether a platform aligns with their ideals, and platforms will no longer be plagued by users who are constantly aggrieved by their treatment.
[Yair Rosenberg: How to take back control of what you read on the internet]
Embrace impermanence—and privacy.
The difference between real-world conversation and social-media interaction is that the internet version lives forever, which makes it hard for individuals to grow beyond their past selves and dumbest remarks. Young people in particular can be prone to oversharing online, often expressing their age-appropriate ignorance and immaturity. Before the internet, this natural part of adolescence would fade into obscurity as a person entered adulthood. Today, however, that is no longer true, with perverse consequences—and not just for teenagers. In extreme cases, online-offense archaeologists mine people’s profiles for problematic pronouncements they made years ago, regardless of whether these sentiments reflect who the person is now. This creates a culture of constant surveillance and suspicion, and risks imprisoning promising people in the worst versions of themselves, eternally tarred by their earliest errors.
To prevent these problems, platforms should archive old content by default and make it inaccessible to others after a set period, perhaps 30 days, that could be adjusted by the user. Old posts would remain readable to those who made them but unavailable to strangers and search engines. Social media could once again become a conversation, where comments are understood not as an individual’s last word on a subject but rather as part of their ongoing evolution as a person. Although this policy may allow some prominent people to archive less savory parts of their past, that cost is outweighed by the benefits for everyday people who don’t deserve to be reduced to their lowest moments.
End the trends.
For the past week, “The Jews” have been trending on Twitter. This is not because people are admiring their outsize contribution to the American ice-cream industry. It’s because far-right accounts have been sharing anti-Semitic content. The public’s prurient obsession with Jews predates social media, but regularly featuring it on a sidebar is a choice. Twitter’s “Trending” section was intended to capture whatever users were discussing at the moment, but in practice, it often serves as an amplification of the platform’s pathologies, directing users to viral pile-ons and artificially boosted scams.
These problems could be partly ameliorated through human moderation, but that requires manpower and cultural competency, and the decisions would constantly invite controversy. The only way to win this game is not to play, letting users talk about what they like without prodding them toward unrelated conversations or incentivizing trend-chasing content. Online activism would also be released from the bizarre grip of hashtag campaigns, which have enticed organizations with their visibility but not necessarily their payoff.
Ban world leaders—or at least those who ban their own people from social media.
Whether it’s Trump inciting a riot at the Capitol or the Supreme Leader of Iran denying the Holocaust while inciting anti-Semitism, heads of state have often presented the biggest headache for social-media platforms. Because these people’s pronouncements are inherently newsworthy, moderating even their most extreme statements presents a problem, no matter how perilous the potential consequences of their words. As the Trump example demonstrates, case-by-case decisions about political leaders are charged and controversial, and inevitably blow back on the platform. The solution is not to let them on the site in the first place. It’s not as though these politicians lack other options for getting their message out. What’s more, keeping them off social media would also have the salutary effect of encouraging them to work for their actual constituents rather than perform for an amorphous online audience. You can post or be president—but not both.
[Yair Rosenberg: Why Twitter won’t ban its most powerful anti-semite]
A less ambitious alternative: If a country restricts a social-media site for its citizens, its political leaders and diplomats should be banned from the platform. At present, authoritarian regimes in China and Iran block Facebook and Twitter for their population while permitting their own apparatchiks to use the platforms to push propaganda. In practice, this means that dictatorships are able to speak over their own people on social media, facing minimal opposition. Going forward, platforms should instead hold a country’s officials to the same standard those officials impose on the people they repress.
Social media was foisted on our society without any deliberation over its implications. It’s had many positive consequences, elevating previously unheard voices and exposing injustice. But it has also coarsened our collective discourse, dumbed down our discussions of complex issues, and cultivated a culture of conspiracism and constant controversy. Many of these failings are human failings, but the structure of the first wave of social-media sites intensified and rewarded them.
Ultimately, these very failures caused the platforms to degrade, which means that it is in the best interest of the next generation of social-media companies to alleviate them. When these sites first debuted, their proprietors had no idea that they would be wrangling presidents and pandemics. Now they do—and it’s time their infrastructure was rebuilt with the lessons of the past couple of decades in mind.