What is social media?

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey gives their own definitions.

Andreas Sandre
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read

The very first question of the latest Capitol Hill hearing on Foreign Influence Operations’ Use of Social Media Platforms came from Senator Richard Burr, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“How would you define social media?,” Burr asked.

“Social media enables you to share what you want to share, when you want to share it, without asking permission from anyone,” Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officier of Facebook, explained. “And that’s how we meet our mission, which is giving people a voice.”

Sandberg continued: “I think what’s more important than just the content people share, it’s the connections they make.” She enumerated a few examples:

  • “Social media enables people to celebrate their birthdays. In the last year, people have raised 300 million dollars on Facebook, on birthday funder for non-profits they care about.”
  • “Safety check: millions of people in the worst circumstances of their lives have let their loved ones know they’re safe.”
  • “And small businesses to grow: all around the country I met with small businesses — from a woman making dresses in a small living room and selling them on Instagram to a local plumber — who are able to find their customers on Facebook, and are able to grow and hire people, and live their american dream.”

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Twitter, went a little deeper.

“I believe it’s very important to understand how the people see it, he said. “We believe people use Twitter as they would a public square. And they often have the same expectations that they would have of any public space.”

He continued: “For our part, we see our platform as hosting and serving conversations — those conversation are in the public. We think there are lots of benefits from those conversations being in the public but there is obviously a lot or risk as well. We see that news and entertainment are actually byproducts of public conversations and we see our role as helping to, not only serve that public conversation that everyone can benefit, even if they don’t have a Twitter account, but also to increase the health of that conversation as well.”

Dorsey explained that the platforms need to better gauge the health of the conversations happening on Twitter.

“We need to understand what healthy participation looks like in the public square and we need to amplify that,” he said. “More importantly we need to question a lot of the fundamentals we started with 12 years ago in the form of incentives. When people use our product every single day, when they open our app up, what are we incentivizing them to do? Not telling them what to do, but what we are incentivizing them to do. This certainly speaks to the buttons we have on our service, all the way to our business model.”

Digital Diplomacy

Technology, digital, and innovation in government and foreign policy

Andreas Sandre

Written by

Comms + policy. Author of #digitaldiplomacy (2015), Twitter for Diplomats (2013). My views here.

Digital Diplomacy

Technology, digital, and innovation in government and foreign policy

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