Thread by @N_Waters89

In the last few days Youtube culled lots of videos, & Facebook appears to have removed/heavily altered its Graph search.


It’s also become evident that people, especially social media companies, don’t fully appreciate how much of an effect social media has on civil society...

I like to think I know a bit on this: I wrote my MA dissertation on the how Social Media and civil society interacted.


Initially I approached it with a kind of ignorant optimism. The cover of my dissertation probably shows you how I felt by the end.

The “weak” links of social media are what actually makes them so powerful. This function has made social media the most effective way ever created for individual people to disseminate information.


whatis.techtarget.com/definition/wea…

Social media allows a person in Yemen to upload a video of an airstrike on a Cholera treatment facility in the morning, for me to write a report on it by the afternoon.

Even 10 years ago this would have been virtually unimaginable.

This has resulted in people using social media to discuss political issues when maybe they couldn’t before, for various reasons.

This has effectively turned social media into one of the primary public spheres in which civil society interacts.

BUT – social media is an inherently fragile public sphere. Unlike traditional civil society, which tends towards stronger ties, the weak ties of social media are much more easily broken.

Using social media as the public space in which civil society interacts also means that public space is governed by a large company, rather than say, the landlord of the pub where you meet to discuss politics on a Wednesday evening.

It also puts that public space at the whim of a variety of other actors, such as ISPs etc.

Vitally, it also gives governments the ability to shut down that public space almost instantly, something which is much more difficult to do to physical public spheres.

In Saudi Arabia for example, virtually all their international internet traffic comes through a single choke point. We all know that the internet infrastructure in China gives the government a huge amount of power over what information citizens can consume and produce.

And when, for example, Facebook decides that I shouldn’t be able to search for airstrikes in Yemen by date, it severs the weak link between me and the activists trying to show that the “Houthi transport” that was bombed was actually a bus full of children.

My point is this: both the general public, and social media companies, need to understand that they have become a primary public sphere in which civil society interacts. This is an incredible responsibility, and one which I don't think is widely understood.

What can we do about this? I’m not so sure. I just hope that people like Zuckerberg and @jack know that they effectively hold power over a primary public sphere in which civil society interacts, an unbelievably vast responsibility. Somehow I don’t think they understand this.

Whether it’s applying inconsistent measures to orgs such as @popularfrontco, or using an automated system to remove 1000's of videos of conflict, some of which could be vital evidence of war crimes, I don’t think SM companies really understand what they’re actually doing.
END.

P.S If you're interested in this kind of stuff I'd encourage you to follow: @carljackmiller, @JamieJBartlett, @evgenymorozov, @akrasodomski and pretty much anyone who works for the centre for analysis of social media at DEMOS.

DEMOS also have good, free reports on their website