How social networks undermine community and promote extremism

I don't know who coined the term "social media", but in its narrower sense of commercial web sites whose main purpose is to link people with "friends" and "followers", they are becoming increasingly contradictory. 

As Tano Santos and Luigi Zingales point out in their article How Big Tech Undermines Democracy

...social-media platforms purposely seek to undo local communities to maximize profits. The reason is that social-media companies profit from our digital relationships, but not from our “physical” relationships, those that take place in parks, coffee shops, book clubs, and the like. As a result, social media platforms see the physical relationships between people as competing with the digital relations they offer.

The advantage of social media, what makes them "social", is that they have the potential to facilitate communication between people who are separated by physical distance, either through geography or through such things as the Covid19 quarantine. But this potential is often not realised because of the very commercial interests cited in the article. This is like the effect of alcoholic liquor on sex; as Shakespeare notes in Macbeth, in stimulates the desire but takes away the performance.

As for how commercial social network platforms promote extremism, Santos and Zingales explain it thus:

The local nature of physical relationships forces us to compromise. When the pool of potential friends is limited, we can’t be too picky; we must accept what we can find. Being stuck with the locals, our only option is to improve the quality of our relationships. In a digital sphere, where we can instantaneously connect with the entire world, why should we invest energy in making the current match work? By searching a bit longer, we can find a better match. The quality of any specific relationship becomes less important when there is a large pool of readily available alternatives. It is quantity over quality. As a result, digital platforms create shallower relationships among like-minded individuals that are easy to make and easy to drop.

The emphasis on quantity over quality is exacerbated by the gamification embedded in the platform’s design, carefully curated to maximize engagement and the platform’s profits. The number of followers and likes is prominently featured. Thus, users end up maximizing the number of relationships, not their quality. As many others have noted, in a boundless virtual community, the best way to get attention is to be extreme, to radicalize your position, and even to attack others. In a physical community where people constantly interact face-to-face, it is difficult to dehumanize adversaries. Not so in virtual communities. Online people are just avatars like the ones we are used to shooting in video games. Online, we don’t live with the consequences of our actions when we offend others because we do not observe the pain we inflict on them. We only live with the benefits: more retweets, likes, and followers. This is why otherwise calm and lovely people transform into aggressive beasts online.

Commercial social media are also curated to exacerbate the silo effect. Like the concrete grain silos used for holding corn for loading on to trains or ships, users of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now confusingly called X, so I'll continue to refer to it as Twitter), Instagram and TikTok are funnelled into silos insulated from those in other silos. 

One of the things that social media were initially good at was linking people to information. Twitter, for example, started off as a microblogging platform. One could not say much in a microblog, but it was very good for linking to longer articles that said more. A blog, after all, was a web log, a log and commentary on web sites visited that one thought might interest others. So many web sites made it easy to post links to them on social media platforms. If you think others will be interested in this, share it on your Twitter feed, or on Facebook or somewhere else. But what do the people who run those platforms do? They adjust their algorithms to ensure that such posts are shown to fewer people. They stimulate the desire, but take away the performance. They destroy the very thing that attracted people to their site in the first place. They don't want people clicking on links to other sites because they fear it will mean fewer eyeballs on ads. But the links are what keep people coming back to their site.

There are, however, some anomalous hangovers from the past, when the social media platforms were more user-oriented than they are now. Sometimes I retweet a link to an article I see on Twitter, and it asks "Do you want to read the article first?" That is a hangover from a time when they were trying to give the impression of being "socially responsible" and at least make it appear that they were trying to discourage users from retweeting clickbait articles that might be fake news. I quite often retweet articles I haven't read, however, because I don't have time to read them now, and want to read them later. 

One effect of this that I have noticed is that fewer and fewer people respond  to things I post on social media, so they aren't social at all. I have something over 1100 "followers" on Twitter, but if I post something only 10-30 people see it. The more important it is to me, the fewer the people who see it. And in most cases the people who do see it never respond. A post may occasionally get a "like" or two, but at least half these "likes" are from bots with fake names, no profile information, and no followers. If Twitter were a real social medium, then there would be social interaction, but there isn't. It is antisocial.

I'll put links to this article on Facebook and Twitter, and it will be interesting to see how many people see it at all, and, of those, how many interact with it in any way, by "liking", sharing, commenting etc. 

Again, Santos and Zingales explain this thus:

...digital [networks] are designed and regulated by the platform owner: They are centralized. The reason is that digital relationships are built and maintained in a space that is controlled by a platform, and this control confers the platform with the ownership of the relationship. We can’t take our X (formerly Twitter) followers with us to a different platform, nor can we access our followers without X’s permission, which can be withdrawn at any time without cause. In contrast, X can advertise to our followers and connect them with other followers. We don’t own our followers—X does.

Not only are most digital networks centralized, but they also have another motive to create and maintain the network: to monetize it. Their economic motives fuel their interest in undermining physical networks. All else being equal, customers are indifferent between a digital relationship and a physical one, but platforms aren’t. They profit from digital relationships but not physical ones. In their effort to subsidize digital relationships and undermine physical ones, these platforms are even willing to pay us to remain glued a little longer to the smartphone and not go to the bar with our friends.

Facebook is much the same. It is forever offering me new "people you may know", but there is very little interaction with people I already know. It doesn't show me what they post, and it doesn't show my stuff to them. Or perhaps it does, but they don't like it, and they don't like me, and if I knew what they really thought and they acted on what they really thought we would unfriend each other. So far from being a "social" medium, it promotes the feeling of:

Everybody hates me, nobody loves me
I'm going to go and eat worms
Big fat juicy ones, little itty bitty ones
See how the big ones squirm.
First you bite their heads off, then you suck the juice out
Then you throw the skins away
Nobody knows how I can thrive
On worms three times a day.

I recently had a look at some of my Facebook "friends" that I hadn't heard from for a long time. Some had died, and their last posts were usually from other people saying that they had died, but Facebook never showed me those, so I didn't even know they had died. But if they had posted some trivia just before they died, Facebook would probably have been more likely to have shown me that. But posts with news of their death weren't monetised enough. 

Other friends had probably just dropped out because they found that having their relationships and friendships manipulated by the platform socially unrewarding. It increased the desire but took away the performance, and eventually they found the lack of performance unrewarding and left.

Back to the danger to democracy...

Once again, Santos and Zingales indicate that

Without information, political participation dwindles, and vested interests have an easy time capturing local administrations because most people don’t vote or don’t vote in an informed way. A captured democracy functions poorly, reducing incentives to participate and the trust in the democratic process. If, as Tocqueville hypothesized, local communities are the gymnasium of democracy, then these trends do not affect just local administrations but also national ones.

State capture is not something peculiar to South Africa, though the Gupta affair was a good example of how vested interests can manipulate social media to undermine democracy. 

But it can also work the other way, as we have recently seen when the Western "mainstream" media were captured to channel Israeli government agitprop after 7 October 2023 (and probably before that as well), social media platforms were used to keep alternative viewpoints alive. Even though social media platforms are manipulated, it is possible to some extent to find workarounds, though that requires a great deal of time and energy.

And back in the late 1980s and early 1990s there were a lot of non-commercial social media platforms like BBS (Bulletin Board Service) networks, Usenet newsgroups and email mailing lists that were not captured by vested interests. BBS networks, in particular, were run as a kind of private-enterprise socialism, email mailing lists still exist. If any of my friends would like to communicate online without the commercial manipulation, contact me through the OffTopic forum here.