The sociality of the conflict

It may be that sheer scale endangers the high ideals of having open platforms, and that a historically unprecedented inundation of speech warps the overall experience of communication in ways that we are not suited to handle. “When the human condition was marked by hunger and famine, it made perfect sense to crave condensed calories and salt,” Zeynep Tufekci writes in Wired. “Now we live in a food glut environment, and we have few genetic, cultural, or psychological defenses against this novel threat to our health. Similarly, we have few defenses against these novel and potent threats to the ideals of democratic speech, even as we drown in more speech than ever.” 

A platform is worthless without users posting on it. Facebook, Twitter and others have recently taken significant hits to their stock price on revelations of slowed user growth. Users create the value on which these platforms’ stock prices are based, and users bear the costs of the toxicity on those platforms. 

The crisis social media users contend with stems from an outdated fantasy about how people want to use these platforms, and how people behave more generally: solipsistically self-interested, infinitely rational, and divorced from any larger movement or context. Recognizing the sociality of the conflict is the first step toward making these spaces healthier for good faith discourse. Such a shift would require platforms to surrender their neutral pose. With billions of users at stake, social media companies are loath to make major changes to their foundations, but if they don’t, they risk watching whole structures crumble under their own weight.

Adam Clair, War of words.