[Thread] Invention of Social Media democratized discourse. It was much needed. Legacy media was guarded by old boys club and it was impossible to break into it. Still is. So SM brought in a whiff of fresh air.
In 2012, when SM was just about gaining ground in India I was ecstatic about what it had achieved and what it could achieve. This is what I had written then swarajyamag.com/commentary/new…
In 2021, 9 years later, I think it is time to write a sequel to this piece. SM is still democratizing discourse, it still gives voice to the voiceless but it has also brought with it some consequences that we had not accounted for.
Stuff that has started to bother me apart from obvious FB, Twitter, YouTube becoming tech behemoths and law unto themselves is that SM hasn’t stayed true to its original promise. The original promised was unfettered freedom of speech without censorship. That seems compromised.
Social Media promotes radicalization by incentivizing group think. Strange algorithms push people to only one kind of thought process and ideology. You could spend a lifetime on social media today without even coming across any counter narrative to yours. This is by design.
When you stay in your own bubble, you get retweets and likes and shares by your own set of people and you begin to think this is all there is to any debate. You get addicted to your ‘importance’. You are happy, SM behemoth is happy and world is hunky dory except it isn’t
This hanky panky by tech companies of incentivizing group think was soon noticed by political groups, special interest groups, and other assorted groups. And believe it or not by old legacy media . They began bombarding you with one sided information and rhetoric.
You became a willing recipient to propaganda and rhetoric because you never heard anything else. I would initially compare SM to town square where you could say what you wanted. Little did I know SM would build million town squares for million groups.
On SM this siloed existence was okay until it spilled over to the real world. There you met people will all kinds of opinions and you did not know how to communicate or convince. You have lost that ability. On SM you only troll and get trolled. There is very little conversation
When trolling spills to real world it becomes violent. Months of rhetoric and unverified nonsense spilled on January 6 in Capitol Hill. That was just one visible instance. Much more will follow. I blame SM giants for this. They manipulated opinion slyly .
I will write a follow up piece to my 2012 piece soon. For now I am wondering how to get out of this mess. Censorship is not acceptable nor is manipulation of ideas acceptable. SM especially FB has huge privacy issues also. For now we must just learn to break through groupthink.
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