Since Elon Musk became the owner of Twitter last week, there’s been a lot of brouhaha over his plans for it, especially the possibility of various fees, such as one for verification badges. Those are the blue check marks that let people know an account belongs to whom it says it belongs. They have mostly been granted through an opaque process to notable users — celebrities, heads of state, official agencies, journalists.
Some have ridiculed the idea of charging fees, claiming it would undermine free speech and create inequalities. They argue that pressure from advertisers — who have begun to shy away from Twitter since Musk took over — would force him to continue trying to moderate the site to dampen hate speech — something he signaled he might do differently from before.
Critics have said fees could make them leave the site and implored others to do so too. Leave if you like, but Twitter is likely to remain influential in shaping the news, as well as broader culture, even if many users leave, especially since journalists seem highly influenced by the platform.
The idea that advertisers alone will save us from hate speech and the further degradation of digital social media is wishful thinking. A primarily advertiser-financed site is neither free nor healthy. The reliance on advertising by so much of our digital public sphere — Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter — has perniciously fueled tribalization, hate speech and surveillance.
Humans have strong in-group and out-group tendencies — sociology-speak for my team versus your team. At its best, civilisation has subsumed that dynamic into benevolent forms such as athletic competitions and pride in national accomplishment, rather than war, ethnic hatred and xenophobia. If you want to keep a group of people engaged, fueling that group competition is a pretty good method, and that’s what one observes on social media, often not so benevolently. It’s not so much an echo chamber where groups don’t hear from one another as a football stadium where we bond by yelling at the fans from the other side.
This means that whatever the topic, by design and by algorithm, social media often elevates the worst, most divisive content, paired with “aaaw” and affirming-type content that promotes in-group bonding. Those are two sides of the same coin. It’s like a cafeteria that serves highly processed, fatty, sugary, salty food at every meal, exploiting human weakness to lure and ruin.
To target their ads more precisely, platforms relentlessly collect our data and build artificial intelligence-powered models that predict people’s interests and vulnerabilities. This results in an enormous surveillance infrastructure that can be used to find who’s more likely to be persuaded to change their nutritional supplements, but also to hunt down women who may be pregnant and possibly seek abortions.
This is an infrastructure of authoritarianism, created to deliver ads more effectively. It’s a terrible model for the digital public sphere.
Traditional journalism has gone to great lengths to keep advertisers away from the newsroom — there are policies, ethics and procedures to ensure that advertisers can’t influence how reporters do their jobs. It’s debatable how well those policies have succeeded, though at least many newsrooms have tried to address the problem.
Traditional news organisations also seek digital ads and collect data from users to target those ads. But since digital ads provide a diminishing portion of their revenue, big publishers increasingly emphasise subscriptions.
I’ve been no fan of Musk. When I criticised his ill-advised foray into the rescue of 14 boys from a cave in Thailand, he told me on Twitter that the man who played a huge role in organising the actual rescue was a “pedo guy.” He deleted the tweet, apologised and won a defamation suit, but the incident left some shareholders questioning his suitability to lead Tesla.
But we shouldn’t defend an advertiser-financed model as a response to Musk’s antics, whatever they may be. Anyway, Musk may be too impulsive to run the site, and maybe it will implode.
Finally, this should, hopefully, make everyone examine the downsides of having a few people have so much influence over the digital public sphere. As we see, owners can change. Playing the referees goes only so far.
“Just get off social media” sounds as much of a solution to me as telling people to stop watching news about a war on TV — the war is on, and influencing so much regardless of personal decisions to stay free of it. What we need is a mix of regulatory oversight, different business models, industry self-regulation as well as citizen action, however appealing it may be to focus on a single person. – The New York Times
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