Hacker News

> Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack.

It's litigated all over and has been for a decade.

Australia for example has set an age limit of 16 to have social media. France 15. Schools or countries are trying various phone bans. There's research into it. There are whistleblowers telling about Facebook's own research they've suppressed as it would show some of their harm.

Perhaps you spend too much time on social media?

I feel like regardless of all else, the fact of algorithmic curation is going to be bad, especially when it's contaminated by corporate and/or political interests.

We have evolved to parse information as if its prevalence is controlled by how much people talk about it, how acceptable opinions are to voice, how others react to them. Algorithmic social media intrinsically destroy that. They change how information spreads, but not how we parse its spread.

It's parasocial at best, and very possibly far worse at worst.

It's increasingly discussed in traditional media too so let's toss out that first line glib dismissal.

More and more people declaring it's net-negative is the first step towards changing anything. Academic "let's evaluate each individual point about it on its own merits" is not how this sort of thing finds political momentum.

(Or we could argue that "social media" in the Facebook-era sense is just one part of a larger entity, "the internet," that we're singling out.)

> I am prepared to accept aspects of social media are bad. Clearly identify why and how and perhaps we can make progress addressing each thing.

Companies intentionally design social media to be as addictive as possible, which should be enough to declare them as bad. Should we also identify each chemical in a vape and address each one individually as well before banning them for children? I think such a ban for social media would probably be overkill, but it should not be controversial to ban phone use in school.

I don't think reasoning needs to be that complex. Addictive things are harmful, social media is design to be addictive (and is increasing). There is a correlation of higher addictiveness with harm. Children in particular are vulnerable for addictive things. So given the above, the expectation for social media which is highly addictive is that it would be highly harmful, unless there are clear reasons that it's not harmful.

There a lot of money in social media, literally hundreds of billions of dollars. I expect the case against it will continue to grow, like the case against cigarettes did.

I will say this, and this is anecdotal, but other events this week have been an excellent case study in how fast misinformation (charitably) and lies (uncharitably) spread across social media, and how much social media does to amp up the anger and tone of people. When I open Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or any of the smaller networks I see people baying for blood. Quite literally. But when I talk to my friends, or look at how people are acting in the street, I don't see that. I don't see the absolute frenzy that I see online.

If social media turns up the anger that much, I don't think it's worth the cost.

All this is good except that to achieve any kind of actual political action in this actual universe in which we live, we must use rhetoric. Asking people to be purely rational is asking them to fail to change anything about the way our culture works.

The problem is this kind of long form "thinks" miss the basics and even uses polarising denialist phrases like "fear mongering"

There is a an obvious incoherence and even misreasoning present in the people most ruined by the new media.

For example, you might want to drive the risk of something to zero. To do that, you need to calmly respond with policy every bad event of that type with more restrictions at some cost. This should be uncontentious to describe yet again and again the pattern is to mistake the desires, the costs and the interventions.

I can't even mention examples of this without risking massive karma attacks. That is the state of things.

I used to think misreasoning was just something agit prop accounts did online but years ago started hearing the broken calculus being spoken by IRL humans.

We need a path forward to make people understand they should almost all disagree but they MUST agree on how they disagree else they don't actually disagree.They are just barking animals waiting for a chance to attack.

There's a concerted assault on social media from the powers that be because social media is essentially decentralised media, much harder for authoritarians to shape and control than centralised media. Social media is why the masses have finally risen up in opposition to what Israel's been doing in Gaza, even though the genocide has been going on for over half a century: decentralised information transmission allowed people to see the reality of what's really going on there.

I recently learned that Tiktok has a thing called "Streak Pets". Imagine taking a dopamine addiction-inducing activity and imagine gamifying that to maximize engagement in that activity. Imagine the brainstorming sessions at Tiktok where they navigate around the glaring issue of the fried brain circuitry of their own users.

Where "engagement" is short for driving eyeballs to ads, optimizing for this ad nauseum, until the platform is raking in the dough and they stop caring about their users in the slightest.

The strongest counterpoint to that is the intense chilling effect that zero anonymity would have on political dissent and discourse that doesn't match the status quo or party line. I feel that would be much more dangerous for our society than occasionally suffering the consequence of some radicalized edge cases.

If you're talking about reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, I really don't think anonymity is the problem here, because the opinions I've seen people express anonymously aren't much different to the opinions I've seen people express with their names attached.

If anything, the ones where people have attached their names tend to be a bit more extreme. Maybe attaching your name to something makes it feel more important to signal what group you're in.

Anonymity has no real impact on this. People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily.

I'd argue if all it took was people saying some mean things anonymously to change your opinion, then your convictions weren't very strong to begin with.

They're unfortunately not much more capable of responsibly connecting with people non-anonymously, I'd say.

See examples like finding someone's employer on LinkedIn to "out" the employee's objectionable behavior, doxxing, or to the extreme, SWATing, etc.

Moreover it’s not even possible for us to engage in _honest debate_ about the impact of social media anymore.

Absolutist positions without nuance are the norm, and the folks who control these platforms control to a very large extent the narrative to push surrounding them, both directly through the platforms themselves and indirectly through lobbying and the obscene pool of capital they have siphoned off.

Are you talking about the Charlie Kirk thing? What does that have to do with online anonymity? They caught the shooter.

I don’t think it has much to do with being named. It’s the assumption that most people have that what they’re reading is being said by someone whose opinion they would actually value if they knew them.

Disclosing names wouldn’t help. People actually knowing the person would help.

Plenty of people are perfectly willing to be publicly despicable online in their social media accounts, using their real names. Pretty easy to find them.

The problem is the leaders of the large social media organizations do not care about the consequences of their platforms enough to change how they operate. They're fine with hosting extremist and offensive content, and allowing extremists to build large followings using their platforms. Heck, they even encourage it!

Why is that? Some irony as well that you're posting anonymously. Are you comfortable giving us your identification right now?

What a bizarre conclusion given the multiple high profile individuals and politicians who overtly and directly called for violent oppression and civil war against their political enemies on the last week.

what happened?

Really? With people being tracked down and fired for expressing their political views, it seems like online anonymity is more important than ever.

Or better yet, we need some kind some zero knowledge doodad which enforces scarcity of anonymous handles such that a given voice is provably a member of your same congressional district, or state, or zip code, or whatever, and is known to not be spinning up new identities all willy nilly like, but can't be identified more precisely than that.

Would you require identification to copy and tape up a bunch of fliers around town?

Anonymity is necessary sometimes in my opinion.

We don’t have a moral or civil society anyway; we can’t even prosecute Trumps numerous illegal actions (even when convicted!). Can’t get the Epstein files. Can’t even point out Charlie Kirk was not a great person (while politicians said nothing about the school shooting the same day), and where it’s legal to kill 40,000 of us a year due to poor medical coverage so we can prop up the stock.

I’m not sure, given the moral dystopia we currently inhabit, what positive benefit would accrue from removing online anonymity?

I have informally reproduced your study and reached the same conclusion.

Yup. Soon as I read:

> I am going to focus on the putative political impacts of social media

I closed the tab.

The author could have made the same points without using words like “polemicizing”, “putative”, and “epistemic”.

A giant step forward into the echo chamber

Asbestos was used in cigarette filters, notably in Kent Micronite cigarettes from 1952 to 1956.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_(cigarette)

Agreed, and I feel like the right answer might be to treat it exactly like cigarettes. For example:

1. Ban in most places except very specific ones. E.g., "would you like to sit in the social media use section today?"

2. Make it extremely expensive to access and use. This would likely do wonders to cut down on use, just as it did for cigarettes.

You're on social media right now. Probably you could better qualify what it is you think is a problem.

Technically, yes, but at least it's not filter bubbling everyone.

acceleration? as in the literal speed at which we translate information through language?

Is the media even “social” anymore? How much of Reddit is simply bots generating catchy takes and then generating commentary on these takes. You can easily be deceived into thinking that a vast number of people believe something, or think the way you do, or think the way you do but were swayed by some thought process.

Repeat the process long enough and with enough variation and tuning and anyone can be made to believe anything.

People have stopped reading the news and rely on social media as their main news source. Thats the scariest thing.

> it's still the best way to circumvent propaganda and give people a voice.

I think it can amplify propaganda but still give people a voice, which is better than no voice I think

Without social media, people would go out and talk face-to-face or even arrange meetings, like before social media.

Its still propaganda just from Russian and Chinese bots.

The idea of social media reducing net propaganda is a wild take.

Strangely I never see political content on YouTube. Maybe the algorithm worked out quickly I'm simply not interested. Whereas twitter/mastodon/bluesky are awash in it, to the point of making those platforms pretty unusable for me.

I guess the difference is that YouTube content creators don't casually drop politics in because it will alienate half their audience and lose revenue. Whereas on those other platforms the people I follow aren't doing it professionally and just share whatever they feel like sharing.

they get paid in political power that's why it's so ragebait driven

"1970-01-01" stepped in it 5 hours ago by saying: >"You reap what you sew.<

"You reap what you sow" is correct. You sew cloth with a needle and thread but sow seeds by throwing them on fertile ground, hoping they will sprout, grow and you will later reap a harvest.

Huh. I'm on a few discords. They're very easy and obvious to use, and I really enjoy them. And because they are generally well divided by channel, it's easy to avoid the bits you don't want.

Race relations were better in the 2000-2010 period, according to Gallup data:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx

Easy to cherry-pick stuff. You can cherry-pick Jim Crow south; I can cherry-pick Chicago in the 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDmAI67nBGU

I think we have to get past black-and-white thinking and see it as a matter of degree. With 340 million people in the USA, realistically, at least a few of them will always be racist. The question is how powerful and influential the racists are. That's a question which social media feeds into.

As someone whose grandparents endured Jim Crow, I largely agree in the sense that social media did not create America’s divides. Many of the divides in American society are very old and are very deep, with no easy fixes.

Unfortunately algorithmic social media is one of the factors adding fuel to the fire, and I believe it’s fair to say that social media has helped increase polarization by recommending content to its viewers purely based on engagement metrics without any regard for the consequences of pushing such content. It is much easier to whip people into a frenzy this way. Additionally, echo chambers make it harder for people to be exposed to other points of view. Combine this with dismal educational outcomes for many Americans (including a lack of critical thinking skills), our two-party system that aggregates diverse political views into just two options, a first-past-the-post election system that forces people to choose “the lesser of two evils,” and growing economic pain, and these factors create conditions that are ripe for strife.

> The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.

And a consequence of this is that some people’s perspective of the scale of the nation’s hostilities is limited to the last 5 years or so.

But we made progress away from that and now we've regressed back towards it recently, aided by social media.

One of the factors that led to the Rwandan genocide was the broadcast of the RLTM radio station

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#Radio_station...

The radio didn't create the divide, and it wasn't the sole factor in the genocide, but it engrained in the population a sense of urgency in eliminating the Tutsi, along with a stream of what was mostly fake news to show that the other side is already commiting the atrocities against Hutus

When the genocide happened, it was fast and widespread: people would start killing their own neighbors at scale. In 100 days, a million people were killed.

The trouble with social media is that they somehow managed to shield themselves from the legal repercussions of heavily promoting content similar to what RTLM broadcast. For example, see the role of Facebook and its algorithmic feed in the genocide in Myanmar

https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...

It's insane that they can get away with it.

The article mentions this. It tries to argue the significance of that platform.

The solution to social division is to force everyone to use news.epolanski.com, the site where you can only post things that epolanski agrees with

People should be able to say things without those things following them around for the rest of their lives.

> As in real life.

No, your proposal is very different to real life. In real life, the things you say will eventually be forgotten. You won't be fired for things you said or did years ago, because people will have moved on.

Having a convenient index of everything anyone has ever shared is very different to real life.

Real life needs full anonymity too. Not everywhere, but it's critical to have some.

For instance a political vote needs to be anonymous. Access to public space typically is (you're not required to identify to walk the street) even if that anonymity can be lifted etc.

Real life is complex, and for good reasons, if we want to take it as a model we should integrate it's full complexity as well.

Looking at any random fullrealname Facebook account will disabuse you of this notion. People will tie vile shit to their identities without a second thought.

Rather than sacrifice the cover that anonymity grants vulnerable people, journalists, and activists, I think we should come at this issue by placing restrictions on how social media platforms direct people to information. The impulse to restrict and censor individuals rather than restrict powerful organizations profiting from algorithmic promotion of the content you deem harmful is deeply troubling.

The first step here is simple: identify social media platforms over some size threshold, and require that any content promotion or algorithmic feed mechanism they use is dead-simple to understand and doesn't target individuals. That avoids the radicalization rabbithole problem. Make the system trivial and auditable. If they fail the audit then they're not allowed to have any recommendation system for a year. Just follows and a linear feed (sorting and filtering are allowed so long as they're exposed to the user).

To reiterate: none of this applies if you're below some user cutoff.

Q: Will this kill innovation in social media? A: What fucking innovation?

Kiwifarms is an obvious object lesson in why anonymity online is necessary, and hardly the only one.

I think the way you define ads and social media would be important. We would end up getting something like the cookie banners again instead of real change.

- information silos still exist

- social incoherence because silos cannot communicate laterally is still there

- the ads will likely go native to become "content" and more revenue will shift to influencers

Just saying it's not quite that easy, but yes, ad monetization is a great force of evil.