New social trends and technologies frequently cause some level of moral panic. Moral panics of the past have been caused by all sorts of things, that now seem rather quaint: novels, bicycles, comics, television, videos, heavy metal, dungeons and dragons etc. But social media feels very different. It really does seem to be causing major societal disruption.

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wffurr a minute ago | parent | next [-]

Social media is more like the printing press than any of those things. It radically changed the economics of distributing information. The printing press brought down the Catholic church and the Kings of Europe. The disruption caused by social media and disintermediated free distribution is just getting started.

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krapp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The current social panic always feels very different. But people literally believe social media is the sole cause of all of modern society's problems, that it's a mind-control platform and a cancer on society. I've seen people say they would welcome a fascist dictatorship if only it meant destroying social media. I've seen people say they want "algorithms" made illegal.

It's obvious from the hyperbole around the discourse alone that this moral panic has reached levels of derangement that far outclass any rational basis for judgement.

Does social media have negative consequences? Sure. Are people assholes on the internet? Always have been. Is social media the greatest and most existentially perilous evil ever conceived by humankind? No.

I think in ten years people will look back at this (on whatever strictly censored and regulated internet replaces this one) with the same bemused confusion as we do the Satanic Panic. And honestly in forty years, if technological civilization still exists, we'll find out how much of that was stoked by the CIA or other interests.

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seltzerboys 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

if you strip social media down to its essential parts it's clear that it can easily cause huge problems for a society. it's basically a never-ending 24/7 stream of information amplified out to anywhere in the world that is:

1. insanely low-effort to post 2. requires NO discernment, proof, credibility, or peer review to post 3. 'viral' in that opinions circulate because other people have interacted with them, not because they are right or meaningful. so bad news, good news, real news and fake news all travel at the same speed, lowering discernment even further 4. echo chambers are baked into the form. people are more likely to interact with content they agree with vs. content that is true or impactful. this creates circles of people agreeing with each other on increasingly niched-down topics.

it is extremely different from newspapers and television.

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krapp 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

If you strip social media down to its essential parts it's simply a multimedia communications and networking paradigm. Nothing ontologically good or evil about it.

You aren't listing problems intrinsic to social media per se, so much as how people choose to use it and how specific platforms choose to operate. The latter of which is a problem when Twitter, Facebook and the like optimize for engagement through controversy, but I think when we focus on social media as a whole we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater in restricting human rights and the ability of people to network and communicate freely without interference by state interlocutors.

	▲	mrmarket 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		well yeah. like hacker news is a social platform with checks and balances in place to prevent mass hysteria and ragebaiting. but if we're honest about the biggest social media platforms of the day, each of the things listed are features of them. and because these tools are actually incentivized against fixing each of the problems listed, they will not fix them. so they're functionally essential parts of the social media platforms that are actually shaping public opinion.

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BoredPositron 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

You: Other people are unhinged hyperbolists. Here, let me characterize them hyperbolically to prove it, therefore I am the calm rational one and by the way, civilization may collapse and the CIA might be behind this.

I mean wtf. Is this your parody account?

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vintermann 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

If thinking CIA manipulates social media and the world is currently in deep trouble is extremism, count me in the 3.1% already, buddy.

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krapp 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

You see, you're doing the thing.

Every bit of hyperbole I mentioned is practically quoted verbatim from some thread or another here, it is what people believe, and you can't even bring yourself to approach me in good faith because I've committed wrongthink by defending the existence of social media even implicitly.

The CIA and other governments are running influence campaigns across social media. The links between the major social media platforms and intelligence agencies are well known and well documented. And civilization is threatened by numerous factors, such as our over-investment in AI and the mass deskilling and destabilization that will create, creeping fascism and increasing political violence in a multipolar world, climate change leading to mass famine, pandemics in a post-scientific age, etc.

But people want to destroy social media (and by extension, want to destroy the freedom of communication it allows) rather than bother to consider that the real problem is the same problem we've always had - government and corporate interests trying to control our lives and manufacture consent through fear and panic.

They ran the same playbook prior to social media but the process was so normalized because they controlled so much of the media and culture that no one really even noticed it. Now people notice but they can't distinguish between the symptom and the disease.

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BoredPositron 20 minutes ago | parent [-]

Case closed.

	▲	krapp 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is what I get for trying to have a serious conversation here. Congratulations on the endorphin hit. You really zinged me. I need to find where the grownups hang out.