The Politics Of Social Media

by Paul Grimsley

You don’t endorse somebody’s viewpoint, but a system you have set up gives them a nice badge on their profile that lends them an authority they might not otherwise possess (at least on your platform). What do you do? Twitter is having a rethink.

If you have an incomplete notion of what your standpoint is on how to handle hate speech, and where the line between free speech and hate speech is crossed, then you are going to appear pretty weak when you first start trying to repair the situation.

Most of the big social media companies failed in some way during the rise of the alt-right and other problematic groups. A system was built that allowed for normal behavior, but seemed easily broken when a tidal wave of racist or sexist usage hooked into the power of trending algorithms and began to really drive the national conversation. And the conversation was not necessarily to be seen as a discussion either, more a case of trolls repeatedly slamming people’s buttons until they blew up and looked irrational and lost the argument. But that oversimplifies it.

Algorithims and machine learning are entirely dependent on the data sets they are built atop, and in the case of social media that means the interactions and actions of its users — this brings about a kind of cascade failure, where a certain type of message starts to trend, and because its trending, it gets seen more and gets clicked on more, which builds a new set of data that further promotes that kind material. You get stuck in a feedback loop where dissenting opinions are swamped in favor of what is trending. On Facebook, it intentionally foregrounds these opinions, you have to constantly tell it you want most recent rather than top stories — it gets frustrating.

Private companies and their relationship to free speech gets more complicated when said company has positioned itself as the medium through which communications are made. Adding a filter to the conversation then turns them into a censor, and social media platforms usually aim to facilitate freedom of expression — a place you can hang with like-minded people. You start to censor one group and people start to question your impartiality and your usefulness as a forum for being social.

Online communities before Myspace and Facebook were much more niche, and the places where the alt-right was incubated are still like that it seems. The level of connection and potential reach that an individual has through social media is probably greater than at any time in history, so the problem has to get fixed.

Twitter has had a lot more interest in it and pressure applied to it since it became the main place the President uses to talk to his base. Reddit went through problems earlier following Gamergate. Facebook and Google are getting hit because of their role in the Russian interference with the US Election and a growing list of political machinations throughout Europe.

How do you handle it? Some people say that the President himself has said things on Twitter that would get other users banned. Rose MacGowan, engaging in talk of the supposedly pervasive rape culture in Hollywood was taken down. There appeared to be a double standard. Twitter seemed ill-equipped to handle the problem.

Facebook’s solution to fake media has seemed equally ineffective.

When you become a platform which political figures stand on to get their message out there, you are involved in politics. When political groups meet within the notional space you have created you are in politics.

Social media companies have expressed the desire to be everything to everyone, so they really can’t dodge the responsibility of handling this, or they are going to start seeing more and more people dismantling their personal platforms and finding other places to set up shop.

These platforms are a bit more than just a soapbox, they facilitate the communication — they are the loud hailer; they are the broadcast network. Even hardware producers have been drawn into politics — as with Apple during the FBI requesting a backdoor into IOS. You send your tendrils into everything and become the backbone of the world’s communication infrastructure, you are going to have the worlds problems, and either you handle them or they’ll handle you.