As of today, the social media platform BlueSky has grown to about 25 million users, which is still a fraction of the 600 million on X, but the recent spike at the former is attributable to people abandoning the latter. After Elon Musk acquired and rebranded Twitter, fired the accountability team, reinstated Trump, and then devoted both X and personal resources to supporting that campaign, the election was the final straw for many who fled to bluer skies.
Built as a “decentralized” platform, BlueSky takes an approach often advocated by Mike Masnick (who sits on the board) as a way to rescue the good of social media from the bad. But as I have argued for more than a decade, much of the harm caused by social media is too subtle to be designed out of the system. Even the best (or best-intended) social platforms are simply bad for democracy. BlueSky’s decentralized architecture may be more effective at weeding out haters and disinformation campaigns and providing users with greater control over what they see, block, etc., but this changes nothing about the reasons social platforms are fundamentally hazardous.
I am just about 50 pages into David Golumbia’s posthumously published magnum opus, Cyberliberatarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, and one view David and I share is that social media’s organic harms to democratic institutions simply outweigh its benefits as a “social” forum. We discussed this in the podcast we recorded in October 2021 and generally agreed that there is no technological solution for many of the medium’s inherent pitfalls. My short list of those pitfalls includes the following:
Provocative Nonsense Isn’t Just a Joke
It is natural to post and share short-attention-span editorial material like memes. Some of the best educated people I know post this kind of content all the time, and once in a while, I like or share the ones I find funny or on point. But when the subjects of these micro-editorials are political and provocative, they are not wholly distinguishable from “Q drops” as fuel added to a fire. Perhaps the most dismaying example of this is the profusion of memes applauding, or at least winking at, Luigi Mangione for allegedly shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
A subject worthy of its own post (including a report that Mangione made a ghost gun ), the point worth summarizing in this post is that social media has eroded the moral barriers to political violence. Political violence is an inevitable biproduct of the erosion of democratic norms because a party’s destructive conduct (and indeed UH has blood on its hands) invites violence about which many will feel at least ambivalent, if not enthusiastic. Of course, as Dr. King warned, violence only multiplies violence, but as a novel feature of this vicious cycle, social media offers dopamine hits of provocative nonsense that allows even the observers of violence to laugh at, feel self-righteous about, or at least excuse conduct that should be rejected as a principle of functional democracy.
Aggregated Narcissism is the Ignorance of Crowds
Known formally as the Dunning-Kruger effect, microdoses of “information,” combined with the enticement to comment and share, feed that human frailty which allows us to pretend to know more about a particular subject than we do. Then, solidifying and amplifying our ignorance, social media provides “connection” to others who share the same uninformed belief. Thus, while many of us look aghast at the kind of unqualified nutjobs the next administration would tap for leadership of important departments, we must also acknowledge it is not Trump fans alone who have abandoned the notion of expertise concurrent with the growth of digital technology and social media.
Ignorance on topics ranging from vaccinations to NATO is just as deeply rooted in “progressive” politics as the right wing, and social media feeds the beast, partly due to the “IKEA Effect.” Akin to Dunning-Kruger, the IKEA Effect describes the satisfaction derived from completing a DIY project, only instead of assembling a desk without cracking any veneer, social media promotes and rewards the project of doing one’s own research, even to arrive at a conclusion that may be wholly untethered to reality. These psychological effects cannot be “programmed out” of the medium or countered with fact-checking. At best, they can be understood, much as my generation learned to understand the effects of watching too much television.
A Community of Frenemies is not a Community
“Jealousy” and “faction” are two words that appear with great frequency in the founders’ writings advocating adoption of the Constitution and creation of the United States. Whether the subject is election procedure, national defense, taxation, etc., The Federalist and other seminal writings all warn against faction as inherently destructive to common purpose, and out of that debate evolved the tradition of compromise and collaboration as necessary for keeping the Republic. But today, infighting among likely political allies is rampant thanks to social media, and it would be a mistake to believe that the mechanisms at work in the hostile takeover of the GOP are unique to the right-wing.
Although Golumbia presents an excellent case that Silicon Valley ideologies have always been grounded in right-wing, even fascistic, principles—and that bros like Zuckerberg and Musk have intentionally tilted the game in that direction—even “organic” interactions reveal that a prominent individual on the left will be attacked in a hate-storm if she critiques some unfounded position held by “progressives.” Thus, regardless of where people claim to sit on the political spectrum, one result of social media has been to scorn the idea of collaboration itself—a folly which has now become self-fulfilling prophecy because the reelection of an anti-democratic administration justifies the anti-collaborative spirit from which it drew power in the first place.
Disrupting the Purpose of Republicanism
Because social media amplifies and atomizes infighting, even the most dedicated and serious elected officials may find themselves in political jeopardy if they compromise or collaborate on the “wrong” issues. Representative government (republicanism) does not work well under 24-hour surveillance by the electorate—let alone an electorate animated by the Dunning-Kruger effect—or worse, professional trolls hired to attack the apostate the moment she steps out of line.
If one stammers at the upside-down world in which Liz Cheney is a “RINO,” social media made this alternate reality axiomatic by the same means that it became reasonable for so-called progressives to label President Obama a “warmonger.” The ordinary, even boring, job of governance has always operated behind the headlines of hot-topic issues. But due to the obligation to feed social media, nearly all politics are now performative, and the Member of Congress who does not entertain (i.e., does not deliver snappy comments on social media) may have a short and/or ineffective career.
No question that performance is always a part of politics, but social media enables more performative nonsense to flood the zone than was possible in the pre-digital era. Historically, a high-profile hearing, like a Senate confirmation hearing, would mainly be observed by the public through snippets and commentary edited by whichever news network we watched in the evenings. Meanwhile, low-profile hearings didn’t provide much opportunity to feed soundbites to constituents.
But speaking as someone who has watched a lot of back-burner hearings as part of his job, it is obvious that many are held for purely performative reasons because, of course, every Member has a social media person on staff who can make noise with a few provocative clips. That the substance of the hearing may be moot—or that most Americans won’t know it happened—doesn’t matter. The political value of the performance is enabled by social media, and this is a significant, and in my view negative, change to the nature of republicanism.
BlueSky is Nice but Can’t Fix the Problem
Yes, BlueSky is better (for now), and yes, I joined and started following people I believe to be thoughtful in their defenses of American democracy, etc. But the major adverse effects of social media cannot be eliminated either by design or the ethics of managers willing to keep hands off the algorithms. The affordances of the medium occur between the core technology and psychological responses to the experience—a thesis tragically supported by the fact that children can be coaxed into suicide by the material on their phones.
On that note, it will be interesting to see whether BlueSky supports platform accountability through legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), or a proper reading of Section 230, which was never meant to be blanket immunity for all providers hosting user content. Because ever since the so-called techlash of 2016, both the providers and their “digital rights” network have continued to push the narrative that somehow “restoring” the noble intent of the original internet should be the goal. But the original intent of the net’s first evangelists was not so noble (see Golumbia’s life work), and I think we all know Einstein’s definition of insanity.
Photo by: charlieblacker
