Breaking the Social Media Prism by Chris Bail

Author:Chris Bail
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

Platforms with a Purpose

The DiscussIt experiment is one of the few success stories in fighting political polarization on our platforms that I know of. But could a platform like DiscussIt really scale? Even if people were willing to jettison parts of their identities for more productive debates in the short term, would they continue to do so as the platform expanded to include thousands—or even millions—of users over weeks, months, or years? Would the dialogue remain so civil after trolls or extremists arrived? And would the promise of more-productive conversations about politics be compelling enough to make people keep coming back? Or would a platform like ours make an inglorious exit to the graveyard of social media?

To answer these questions, we need to revisit the core argument I’ve made throughout this book about why people use social media in the first place. In chapter 4, I argued that people keep coming back to social media because they help us do something that makes us distinctively human: create, revise, and maintain our identities to gain social status. Social media allow people to present different versions of themselves, monitor how others react to those versions, and revise their identities with unprecedented speed and efficiency. But we humans are notoriously bad at judging what other people think of us—and the fleeting interactions we have with each other on social media make matters even worse. As I described in chapters 5 and 6, the social media prism fuels extremism, mutes moderates, and leaves most of us with profound misgivings about the other side. But we won’t stop using social media any sooner than we will stop caring about our identities and social status. Instead, we need to think more about how the design of our platforms shapes the types of identities we create and the social status we seek.

What is the purpose of Facebook? The company tells us its mission is to “bring the world closer together.”28 But the platform began as a sophomoric tool that Harvard undergraduates used to rate each other’s physical attractiveness. What is the purpose of Twitter? Its motto is to “serve the public conversation,” but it was reportedly built to help groups of friends broadcast SMS-style messages to each other.29 What is the purpose of Instagram? We’re told it is to “capture and share the world’s moments.” But the app was originally called “Burbn” (as in the drink) and was built to help people make plans to hang out with their friends.30 What is the purpose of TikTok? I’m not even going to go there. Hopefully, my point is already clear: Should we really expect platforms that were originally designed for such sophomoric or banal purposes to seamlessly transform themselves to serve the public good? Should we be surprised when they create the kind of leaderless demagoguery from which anyone can invent a kind of status, no matter how superficial or deleterious to democracy? Is it any wonder that people find themselves so rudderless on social media, when there

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